During an extended soliloquy at his Wednesday congressional hearing, Michael Cohen blamed both President Trump and himself for helping draw modern U.S. politics into a circus of name-calling, lies and incivility.
Asked by Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN) why he decided to turn against his former boss, Cohen told the House Oversight Committee that one motivator was “watching the daily destruction of our civility to one another.”
Cohen pointed to a sign that committee Republicans put up with his photograph and the words “liar, liar pants on fire” as an example of the “really unbecoming” behavior Congress now routinely engaged in.
“It’s that sort of behavior that I’m responsible for,” Cohen said. “I’m responsible for your silliness because I did the same thing that you’re doing now for ten years.”
Michael Cohen expresses his concerns about Trump as President pic.twitter.com/p0LsQFintN
— Talking Points Memo (@TPM) February 27, 2019
Asked to expound on his concerns about Trumpworld’s threats to him and his family’s safety, Cohen said his personal experience with the President made him well aware of what Trump is capable of doing.
“When Mr. Trump turned around early in the campaign and said I can shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, I want to be very clear,” Cohen said. “He’s not joking. He’s telling you the truth. You don’t know him. I do. I’ve sat next to this man for ten years, and I watched his back. I’m the one who started the campaign, and I’m the one who continued in 2015 to promote him.”
“When he goes on Twitter and he starts bringing in my in-laws, my parents, my wife, what does he think is going to happen?” Cohen continued. “He’s causing — he’s sending out the same message that he can do whatever he wants. This is his country. He’s becoming an autocrat and hopefully something bad will happen to me or my children or my wife so that I will not be here and testify. That’s what his hope was, was to intimidate me, and again, I thanked everybody who joined and said that this is just not right.”
Cooper then asked if Cohen had ever seen Trump “personally threaten people with physical harm.”
“No, he would use others,” Cohen replied.
“He would hire other people to do that?” Cooper prodded.
“I’m not so that he had to hire them,” Cohen said. “They were already working there. Everybody’s job at the Trump Organization is to protect Mr. Trump. Every day most of us knew we were coming in and we were going to lie for him on something, and that became the norm, and that’s exactly what’s happening right now in this country, and it’s exactly what’s happening here in government.”
At the beginning of this hearing, I thought that most of this was going to be about “he said this, how can you prove this, you’re a liar yourself.” But this moment actually brings Cohen into some clarity. Sure, most of his testimony is in exchange for leniency in his sentence. But in this statement he has correctly brought the GOP into the light of being de facto members of the Trump Organization-- doing his dirty work, smearing enemies, name-calling, threatening those who testify. I will have to take a lot of other things with some caution, but in this instance he did hit the nail on the head.
Trump made it worse through his crudeness and narcissistic personality disorder, but the truth is that the GOP was so desperate in 2016 for any unifying figure that they couldn’t afford to not bear-hug Trump and his wave of populist xenophobia. Things are even worse for the GOP now, and he’s the leader of their party.
But it’s giving Trump too much credit to lay the blame at his feet. The Republican Party has been intellectually bankrupt since at least the '80s, and it has been obvious since the verdict came in that “trickle-down” doesn’t work. Their ideological alignment with the rapacious self-interest of corporations and the wealthy led them down a path where they became easily exploited and later replaced with paid agents for organized money. Those agents are sophists and obstructionists by trade, and their playbook is limited to screaming about deficits and taxes, shutting down any attempt to study or solve problems, round-the-clock campaigning, and aligning themselves with any popular opinion wingnut (e.g. Limbaugh, Hannity).
It’s the moral rot that led the GOP to Trump, not the other way around.