We All Have All The Information We Need To Decide Who To Not Vote For In November

In a "sermon" a couple of years ago, God Has Nothing to Do With Trump Being President, John Pavlovitz reached out directly to evangelicals to remind them that spiritualizing the Trump presidency is "sinful, blasphemous, lousy evangelism and just plain asinine. The hypocrisy on display is historic: after spending the past 8 years straining to find infinitesimal specks in Barack Obama’s eye that they could condemn as deal breakers-- Evangelicals are now perfectly fine with Trump’s rotted forest of Redwoods. In fact, in the most dizzying display of theological spin doctoring, it is now precisely his ever-growing trail of personal toxic discharge that supposedly proves evidence of God’s hand in it all. So Trump’s multiple marriages, his porn star affairs, his mountain of sexual assault claims, his verbal obscenities, his disregard for rule of law, his compulsive lying, his clear racism, his unrelenting attacks on marginalized communities (things these Christians would have figuratively and almost literally crucified Obama for) are now unmistakable signs that God is using this President. This is nonsense of Biblical proportions; to try and draw some line between Jesus of Nazareth and Donald of New York, is about as farcical as you can get without actually spontaneously combusting from the cognitive dissonance... We really should stop pretending God is responsible for this fast food dumpster fire, when it’s clear whose hand is in it all. This reality is the rotten fruit of misogyny, racism, Nationalism, fear, xenophobia, and bigotry-- all released by people who want God to consent to it all so they don’t have to deal with their own culpability or face their own repentance."

Fast forward to... tomorrow. Michael Cohen's book will be officially out and available... a longer and more detailed and less religiously-oriented version of Pavlovitz's 2018 sermon: Disloyal: A Memoir. I have a feeling this may be the most talked about-- if not read-- book out of the dozens of Trump exposés by people once close to him that have come out in the last 4 years. Cohen makes the case that Trump is a criminal, a mentally ill sex psycho and an obsessed racist.

Washington Post reporters Ashley Parker and Rosalind Helderman got their hands on an advance copy and wrote up a preview over the weekend, noting that Cohen "Trump’s longtime lawyer and personal fixer... alleges in a new book that Trump made 'overt and covert attempts to get Russia to interfere in the 2016 election.' ... Cohen lays out an alarming portrait of the constellation of characters orbiting around Trump, likening the arrangement to the mafia and calling himself 'one of Trump’s bad guys.' He describes the president, meanwhile, as 'a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.' The memoir also describes episodes of Trump’s alleged racism and his 'hatred and contempt' of his predecessor, Barack Obama, the nation’s only African American president." I hate the way Parker and Helderman use the world "alleged" to describe characteristics that have been proven beyond any reasonable double over and over and over for decades and decades and decades.

On Russia, Cohen writes that the cause behind Trump’s admiration of Russian President Vladimir Putin is simpler than many of his critics assume. Above all, he writes, Trump loves money-- and he wrongly identified Putin as “the richest man in the world by a multiple.”

Trump loved Putin, Cohen wrote, because the Russian leader had the ability “to take over an entire nation and run it like it was his personal company-- like the Trump Organization, in fact.”

Cohen also reveals new alleged details about the convoluted effort behind a National Enquirer report smearing Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). Cohen says that Trump signed off on the baseless report to damage Cruz, one of his rivals in the 2016 Republican primary.

“It’s not real, right?” Trump allegedly asked after being shown a photograph, which the magazine would claim depicted Cruz’s father with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

“Looks real to me!” Cohen responded, according to the book, prompting Trump to laugh as he demanded that the story be run on the tabloid’s front page.

“To say it would be a low blow would be an insult to low blows; can you think of another politician, ever, who would stoop this low?” Cohen writes.

...According to Cohen, Trump’s sycophantic praise of the Russian leader during the 2016 campaign began as a way to suck up and ensure access to the oligarch’s money after he lost the election. But he claims Trump came to understand that Putin’s hatred of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, dating to her support for the 2011 protest movement in Russia, could also help Trump amass more power in the United States.

“What appeared to be collusion was really a confluence of shared interests in harming Hillary Clinton in any way possible, up to and including interfering in the American election-- a subject that caused Trump precisely zero unease,” Cohen writes.

Cohen’s book, however, does not reveal much in the way of new details surrounding the investigations by former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and others into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

...Cohen asserts that another reason that Trump consistently praised Putin was to fulfill his long-held desire to slap his name on a proposed Trump Tower project in Moscow.

Cohen says the Trump Tower plans called for a 120-story building in Red Square, including 30 floors devoted to a five-star hotel with an Ivanka Trump-branded spa and Trump restaurants, and 230 high-end condominiums for Russian oligarchs and leaders.

The plan, Cohen adds, was to give the penthouse apartment to the Russian president for free, in part “as a way to suck up to Putin.”

“The whole idea of patriotism and treason became irrelevant in his mind,” Cohen writes. “Trump was using the campaign to make money for himself: of course he was.”

Trump would later publicly insist that he had no business dealings with Russia. But Cohen writes extensively of his own efforts beginning in the fall of 2015-- several months after Trump had declared his candidacy-- to make the Moscow project a reality.

The project fell to Cohen, he writes, because Trump’s children all disliked Felix Sater, the colorful Russian American developer who served as the Trump Organization’s liaison with Russians interested in the project.

Nevertheless, Cohen says the whole family was aware of the project, even as candidate Trump publicly said he had no ties to Russia. Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, who is now a senior White House adviser, even selected the proposed tower’s high-end finishes, Cohen writes.

Ivanka and her lawyers have previously described her involvement in the Russia project as minimal, noting that she never visited the prospective site.

Cohen also describes in detail the partnership between Trump and David Pecker, the chief executive of National Enquirer parent company American Media and a longtime Trump friend, which included Pecker allegedly sharing the Cruz attack with Trump ahead of publication.

While many of Trump’s critics would obsess over the possibility of Russian interference, Cohen writes, it was a purposeful “disinformation campaign” run by American citizens such as Pecker that was “by far the more insidious and dangerous development of the last cycle-- and the most threatening for 2020.”

Cohen notes that the grocery-store tabloid targeted each of Trump’s 2016 primary opponents in turn. He includes a document in the book, for instance, purporting to lay out the magazine’s plan to take down Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). [I hope it was all about Rubio's period as a gay prostitute.]

The National Enquirer came through for Trump again later in 2016, agreeing to pay former Playboy playmate Karen McDougal, who claimed she had an affair with Trump, for her life story and then never running the story. Trump agreed to repay Pecker for the $150,000 fee but never did, Cohen writes.

In the case of Daniels, Cohen writes that after Trump agreed to pay her $130,000 for her silence, he strategized with Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg on how she could be paid without attracting notice.

Weisselberg suggested finding a Trump friend to put up the money, in the guise of paying for a membership to a Trump golf course or the club Mar-a-Lago, according to the book. When Cohen countered that perhaps Weisselberg should lay out the money himself, “Weisselberg went white as a sheet-- like he’d seen a ghost,” he writes.

Ultimately, Cohen made the hush payment himself, taking out a personal home equity loan to come up with the cash, all the while assuming Trump would probably fail to repay him as agreed.

“Stuck with the tab for Trump’s sex romp in a hotel room in Utah a decade ago,” Cohen writes. “This was the job I loved?”

Ultimately, however, Trump did repay Cohen-- agreeing to reimburse him in $35,000 monthly installments after he had entered the White House as president, hiding the payments as fees for legal services and naming Cohen his personal attorney. Cohen asserts that Trump would get a tax break and legal services along with the money-- meaning he would actually come out financially ahead for paying off the adult-film star.

The Trump Organization did not immediately respond for comment Saturday.

In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the Trump Moscow project, as well as to violating campaign finance laws by paying Daniels to remain silent. Cohen told the court that he had been directed to make the payment to Daniels-- and later reimbursed for the money-- by Trump. He also pleaded guilty to tax evasion and lying to a financial institution, crimes that were unrelated to his work for Trump.

He was sentenced to three years in prison, which he had been serving at a federal facility in Otisville, N.Y., until he was allowed to leave prison and serve his sentence at home because of the coronavirus pandemic. Before he entered prison, he delivered dramatic public testimony to Congress, in which he apologized for his past lies and called Trump a “racist,” “a con man” and “a cheat.” Republicans mocked his self-professed turn to honesty, noting that he had previously defended Trump with similar gusto.

Beyond Russia’s role in the 2016 elections and the Daniels payment, Cohen seeds the rest of his book with snippets of gossip from his time in Trump’s orbit-- some of it new, some of it well-known and much of it familiar.

He describes Trump insulting and dismissing some of his children, including Donald Trump Jr., his eldest son, and Tiffany, his youngest daughter.

Cohen writes that during the 2016 campaign, Trump was dismissive of minorities, describing them as “not my people.” “I will never get the Hispanic vote,” Cohen recounts Trump claiming. “Like the blacks, they’re too stupid to vote for Trump.”

Cohen describes Trump’s obsessive hatred of Obama, including claiming that the only reason the former president got into Columbia University and Harvard Law School was because of “fucking affirmative action.” He also recounts Trump’s “low opinion of all black folks.” claiming that Trump once said while ranting about Obama, “Tell me one country run by a black person that isn’t a shithole. They are all complete fucking toilets.”

After South African President Nelson Mandela died in 2013, Trump said he did not think Mandela “was a real leader-- not the kind he respected,” Cohen writes.

Instead, Cohen writes that Trump praised the country’s apartheid-era White rule, saying: “Mandela fucked the whole country up. Now it’s a shithole. Fuck Mandela. He was no leader.”

Cohen writes that before winning the presidency, Trump held a meeting at Trump Tower with prominent evangelical leaders, where they laid their hands on him in prayer. Afterward, Trump allegedly said: “Can you believe that bullshit? Can you believe people believe that bullshit?”

“The cosmic joke was that Trump convinced a vast swathe of working-class white folks in the Midwest that he cared about their well-being,” Cohen writes. “The truth was that he couldn’t care less.”

Cohen also depicts Trump as being crude toward women, including inadvertently commenting on Cohen’s then-15-year-old daughter as she finished up a tennis lesson: “Look at that piece of ass,” Trump said, according to Cohen. “I would love some of that.”

Cohen details a tawdry 2013 visit to a Las Vegas club, the Act, with Trump and Aras and Emin Agalarov-- a Russian father-and-son oligarch duo. Cohen asserts that the group watched a debauched strip show that included one performer who simulated urinating on another performer, who pretended to drink it.

Trump’s reaction to the show, Cohen writes, was “disbelief and delight.”

Cohen’s book ends with something of a plea-- though one that requires the reader to trust Cohen’s account of his time in the Trump orbit.

“You now have all the information you need to decide for yourself in November,” Cohen concludes.

STAT: Get Someone To Read The First Amendment To Señor Trumpanzee

As we saw Sunday evening, the new poll from NBC and the Wall Street Journal found that 62% of voters believe Trump lies about the Mueller investigation, up significantly from last summer when voters were asked the same question. As the poll was being released by the two news outlets, Trump was howling about how unfairly he's being treated. Never having read the Constitution he'd superficially pledged to uphold, the doofus was whining about how what he decides is "unfair news coverage," by Saturday Night Live should be "tested in courts." The screw-pot seems to have actually cracked up. And yet... when we polled Twitter over the weekend, just 12% of respondents predicted Trump would be in a mental institution by 2021.

People often confuse his severe mental health issues-- not to mention lack of intelligence-- with his cunning and self-obsession. And then there's his colossal ignorance. I know he's heard of the First Amendment, but I wonder if he knows what it means. It's fairly simple but he has an extremely short attention span and hates to read. I doubt any judge, even one of the ignoramuses he appoints, would doubt a Saturday Night Live sketch is protected speech.

On the other hand, media doesn't have a license to break laws and it certainly appears that a major newspaper did exactly that during the wo16 election cycle, carefully and consciously trying to rig the election for one candidate while damaging his opponents. Sunday the New York Times' Jim Rutenburg broke a fascinating piece on huge media conglomerate that was then a firm Trump ally: More Powerful Than a Russian Troll Army: The National Enquirer. “The most powerful print publication in America," wrote Rutenberg, "might just be the National Enquirer. It functioned as a dirty-tricks shop for Donald J. Trump in 2016, which would have been the stuff of farce-- the ultimate tabloid backs the ultimate tabloid candidate-- if it hadn’t accomplished its goal.”

The Enquirer’s power was fueled by its covers. For the better part of the campaign season, Enquirer front pages blared sensational headlines about Mr. Trump’s rivals from eye-level racks at supermarket checkout lanes across America. This stroke-of-genius distribution apparatus was dreamed up by the man who made The Enquirer the nation’s biggest gossip rag: its previous owner, Generoso Pope Jr.

The Enquirer’s racks, under the current chief, David J. Pecker, were given over to the Trump campaign. This was a political gift even more valuable than the $150,000 that The Enquirer paid in a “catch-and-kill” deal with the former Playboy model Karen McDougal for her story of an affair with Mr. Trump.

Wondering what The Enquirer’s covers were worth to the Trump campaign, I called Regis Maher, a co-founder of Do It Outdoors, the national mobile and digital billboard company. He said a campaign with that level of national prominence would cost $2.5 million to $3 million a month.

“It’s such a powerful placement,” Mr. Maher said. “Everybody’s gotta go to the grocery store.”

With the news last week that The Enquirer had admitted to federal prosecutors that it made the catch-and-kill payment to influence the election, it’s worth stepping back and appreciating the unlikely role played by the supermarket tabloid and its parent company, American Media Inc., in electing the 45th president of the United States.

Now that federal prosecutors have cleared away some of the fog that shrouded the 2016 campaign, it’s easy to see that The Enquirer was more than just a publication that puffed up Mr. Trump while going after his rivals.

It was the real-world embodiment of the fantasy online world of trolls, Russian and domestic, who polluted the political discourse. From its perches at Publix and Safeway, it was often doing the same job as Alex Jones, of the conspiracy site Infowars, and the more strident Trump campaign surrogates on Twitter and Facebook.

The Enquirer spread false stories about Hillary Clinton-- illnesses concealed, child prostitution, bribery, treason. Each cover trumpeting these tales was arguably more powerful than a tweet from an account with millions of followers.

It’s a shame it went this route, because The Enquirer was built to cover Mr. Trump’s wild ride. If it had only stuck with its original mission-- digging up dirt on the rich and famous, without a care for the rules of traditional journalism-- it would have had the tabloid story of a lifetime.

Instead, it refused to unlock its vault of Trump tips and stories as it promoted him as America’s savior. Actually, make that the world’s. As one Enquirer report in early 2016 had it-- from “a source close to Donald’’-- even President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia wanted him to win the White House.

“It was like a double whammy,” Jennifer Palmieri, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign communications director, told me. “They could have been covering all of Trump’s misdeeds. But, instead, not only were they not reporting on that, they were a pipeline from dark-net conspiracy theories to grocery-store lines.”

With its online cohorts, American Media Inc. helped build a distortion machine that so polluted election news cycles that, for its more receptive audiences, Mrs. Clinton not only deserved to lose the White House, she deserved time in the big house.

Before making her its main target, the machine chewed up Senator Ted Cruz. It ran unsubstantiated allegations of extramarital affairs against him at a time when he was proving himself Mr. Trump’s most stubborn Republican challenger.

The only person quoted by name in the affairs piece was Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime adviser to Mr. Trump, who was quoted as saying, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” (Mr. Stone, who communicated with top campaign officials through the election, is under investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.)

One passage in the Cruz story caught my eye. Citing a report in Radar Online-- a gossip outlet also owned by A.M.I.-- The Enquirer claimed that “an individual purporting to be a representative of the hacker group Anonymous posted a disturbing Twitter video that threatens to expose ‘very dirty secrets,’ including information about Ted ‘visiting prostitutes.’”

Here’s an odd thing. Radar attributed the provenance of this supposed Anonymous video to an obscure Twitter handle with only a few thousand followers that has since gone dormant. A review of the account’s activity found tweets and retweets of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant messages relating to Europe, as well as a critique of the United States policy on Libya linked to a video from RT, the Russian state-financed cable network.

It makes you wonder if the inquiring mind of Mr. Mueller would like to know more about The Enquirer than he has let on. (Federal prosecutors in New York have led the investigation of A.M.I.)

Once Mr. Cruz was out of the way, two people familiar with A.M.I.’s operation told me, the company pulled up files on the Clintons that it had collected over decades-- some two dozen cardboard boxes filled with promising material.

A.M.I. began a painstaking effort to sort through the old clips and tips concerning “pay-for-play” deals, rumors of affairs and Vince Foster conspiracy theories. But as the campaign wore on, The Enquirer’s covers favored stories similar to those coursing through Infowars, Russian trolldom and, increasingly, your uncle’s Facebook feed.

According to one headline, Hillary was “Corrupt! Racist! Criminal!” In another, she was “Eating Herself To Death!”

The Enquirer also reported-- make that “reported”-- that she had suffered “three strokes,” had “liver damage from booze,” and was prone to “violent rages.”

A couple of weeks before Election Day, as Russian bots pushed a narrative into Facebook of a “Clinton body count,” an Enquirer cover line screamed: “Hillary Hitman Tells All.”

The false narratives built to a frenzy that included an appearance by the A.M.I. chief content officer Dylan Howard on Infowars and a cover promising that Mrs. Clinton and her aide Huma Abedin were “Going to Jail” for “Treason! Influence Peddling! Bribery!”

Inside were the unsubstantiated claims that Mrs. Clinton had “covered up a child sex scandal”-- which echoed the “Pizzagate” conspiracy-- and that her relationship with Ms. Abedin had “lesbian undercurrents.”

For those who were seeing the same bilge online, The Enquirer’s headlines and stories may have increased their doubts about the Democratic nominee. For those seeing such stuff for the first time, right next to the gum and candy, the false coverage may have been revelatory.

Placement on nationwide checkout lines was perhaps Mr. Pecker’s greatest gift to Mr. Trump, and it’s something that he inherited from Mr. Pope.

Watching his circulation plateau as his readers moved to the suburbs in the 1960s, Mr. Pope struck a deal with major grocery chains: He would build new racks to put magazines at eye level near the cash registers, arguing that more sales for him meant more profit for them, too.

“It gave us complete exposure, saturation, whatever you want to call it,” his son Paul David Pope told me on Friday.

As the younger Mr. Pope’s history of the family business, The Deeds of My Fathers, shows, The Enquirer was known to pull off an occasional “catch-and-kill” deal in the old days, including one involving Senator Edward M. Kennedy in a bid for access to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. But the tabloid usually raised hackles not because the stories it published were false, but because of its methods. This was a publication so hungry for celebrity dope that it sneaked a reporter-- disguised as a priest-- into Bing Crosby’s funeral.

“I am sure my father’s intention with his media empire was not to be used after his passing as an outlet for fake news,” the younger Mr. Pope said.

I asked a friend of mine, a renowned attorney if the Enquirer is protected by the First Amendment or if they could be held accountable for, in effect, spending millions of dollars, towards Trump's presidential run. He thought about it for a couple of days and said it's very complicated. "A simple, and simplistic, answer is that what The Enquirer did with Cohen is exactly the same as what Cohen did with The Enquirer, for which he was found guilty of felony. Under that analysis, the First Amendment is irrelevant.

A more nuanced analysis would have to consider these issues:

• Under Citizens United, you can do anything you want to influence an election, as long as you don’t coordinate with the candidate or the campaign. Cohen clearly coordinated with the campaign. It’s not clear whether The Enquirer did, unless you want to impute Cohen’s connections to The Enquirer.
• In my opinion, the Enquirer doesn’t have a freedom of speech argument, because it was suppressing speech. That being said, The Enquirer not only has a freedom of speech argument, but also a freedom of the press argument. Cohen is not “the press,” so it’s possible that Cohen doing it could be illegal, but The Enquirer doing it might not. (Same thing with Assange, by the way.)
• On this subject, it’s clear that endorsements are not illegal contributions to a campaign. It’s not really clear where you draw the line on that. (In Florida, there is a statute drawing the line.) I think that it would be hard to equate a mistress payoff to an endorsement, but I’m sure Giuliani would try.
• FECA governs “anything of value made [or spent] by any person for the purpose of influencing any election for Federal office.” The underlying argument, which Giuliani has made ad nauseum, is that if the motivation was to keep Melania from bludgeoning Trump to death in his sleep (on those rare occasions when they were in the same room at night), then that’s not an election expenditure. I think that it’s obvious that The Enquirer was trying to influence the election, but a jury might or might not agree.