Trump's Newest Trial Balloon Is REALLY Embarrassing-- And Could Actually Get Him Impeached

You'll have to ask Nancy Ohanian if they came out of the sewer or leave via the sewer

Rudy Giuliani is kind of a lawyer... but that isn't the job he has in the Trump defense team. Trump hired him as a publicist-- someone to get his boss ink and lots of chatter on TV and in social media. So yesterday, for example, Rudy was on Fox and Friends early in the morning saying that he'd been "looking in the federal code trying to find collusion as a crime. Collusion is not a crime," he insisted. The Fox peanut gallery goons on the coach agreed. So is the trial balloon for the new defense, "Yeah, I colluded with Putin to steal the election, but show me where that's a crime?" From Fox, Giuliani scurried-- through the sewer system-- to CNN... where he was even funnier-- on a colloquial and Shakespearean sense of "funny." First off, the 32 minute ramble referred to a "very nasty" link between Mueller and Señor T and Mueller. Trump has been bitching about a 2011 dispute around Mueller quitting and getting his money back from one of the crooked Trumpanzee golf resorts-- this one in Sterling, Virginia.

But yesterday's target was former Trump fixer (a Trump "lawyer," the way Giuliani is a Trump "lawyer") Michael Cohen. "You’ve got a really bad guy here," he asserted. "He was shaking people down for money, he was lying about what was on a tape and manipulating, doctoring tapes... I didn’t know any of that. George Washington didn’t know Benedict Arnold was a traitor."

Warming up to the inner Guiliani, he called Cohen a "scumbag" and noted that Trump "turned out to have a close friend betray him, like Iago betrayed Othello, like Brutus put the last knife into Caesar. It happens in life, that you get double-crossed.




Obviously Giuliani was admitting on CNN that two days before the infamous Trump Tower meeting with every Russian spy in the New York City metropolitan area to get "dirt" on Hillary, there was a so-called "planning meeting" to prepare for that meeting. OK, Rudy said that planning meeting included Trumpanzee Jr., Kushner-in-law (I wonder if he knows perjury is a serious crime), Manafort, Rick Gates and "others." And, lookie-lookie, the date of that meeting, June 7, was the very day that Trumpazee, Sr. teased the upcoming speech that never happened, where he promised an arenaful of drooling fans that he would reveal explosive new information on the Clintons in a few days. Someone must have screamed at poor befuddled Rudy for fucking-up the narrative and exposing the lies because he immiatekly ran back to Fox to say he didn't say what he said and meant to say that there was no planning session and then named all the colluders who weren't colluding. Except Rick Gates has been spilling the beans to Mueller for months so I'm sure at least the prosecutors were laughing their asses off as Rudy ran back and forth between Fox and CNN trying to clean up his own mess.

As writer and theater director Isaac Butler pointed out, Giuliani’s Shakespearean allusions don’t quite work.

Brutus and Iago both betray close friends, but they are not otherwise alike. Brutus was motivated by idealism, believing that Caesar was a would-be dictator who would destroy the Roman Republic. Iago, by contrast, was motivated by pure envy and spite. Giuliani’s own speculations about Cohen’s motives (that the lawyer was stung by not getting a White House job and jealous of the president’s children) does follow a pattern close to Iago.

But in any case, these analogies do little credit to Trump. If Cohen is Brutus or Iago then Trump is Caesar or Othello. Which means Trump is either an aspiring tyrant or he’s so foolish that he can easily be manipulated into self-destruction by an underling.

John Oliver is kind of Shakespearan, right?