When Michael Cohen's testimony in Donald Trump's criminal hush money/falsified business records trial concluded on Monday, May 20, the prosecution rested its case.
Cohen, during his days of testimony, detailed his role in hush money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Trump's former personal attorney and fixer corroborated earlier testimony by Daniels, who told the court that Trump had an extramarital sexual encounter with her in 2006 and that hush money payments were made via Cohen a decade later.
In a lengthy op-ed published by The Guardian on May 21, Sidney Blumenthal — a former adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton and author of three books on President Abraham Lincoln — stresses that one of the big takeaways from Cohen's days of testimony is that trying to please Trump comes at a harsh price.
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"The courtroom drama has more than legal implications," Blumenthal argues. "While the testimony and evidence may nail Trump on 34 felony charges of business fraud, the trial has painted a vast canvas of human bondage. As the prosecution has built its case, each and every person called to the stand has described their own strange master-servant relationship with Trump."
Blumenthal continues, "There was David Pecker, publisher of the National Enquirer and other tabloids, who oversaw the 'catch-and-kill' hush-money operation to suppress information about Trump’s dalliances and to crank out smears of his opponents…. There was the former teenage model and ingenue from Greenwich, Connecticut, Hope Hicks…. Four days before the election in 2016, Trump directed her to deny the story of the payoff to Stormy Daniels, Hicks has said."
The former Clintons adviser describes the testimony of Cohen, Daniels, Hicks and other witnesses as "accounts of the Trump syndrome of domination and submission."
That "submission," Blumenthal argues, has continued in 2024 as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and others ventured to a Lower Manhattan courthouse during the trial to express their solidarity with Trump.
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According to Blumenthal, these Republicans— unlike Cohen — fail to realize how steep a price one must pay for being a "Trump lackey."
"The Trump lackey, through a tortured ordeal, at last came to a harsh realization of how grotesquely Trump had manipulated, exploited and betrayed him, and now he stood lashed in the witness box by Trump's lawyer for being Trump's lawyer, the liar that Trump depended on," Blumenthal writes. "Outside the courtroom, Trump's self-abasing retinue lines up to serve him like the old Michael Cohen."
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Sidney Blumenthal's full Guardian op-ed is available at this link.
