Lights, camera, Cohen. Democrats got the reality show they wanted out of President Trump’s fixer-turned-enemy, with their star witness parroting the party’s talking…
Lights, camera, Cohen. Democrats got the reality show they wanted out of President Trump’s fixer-turned-enemy, with their star witness parroting the party’s talking points.
Racist, liar, con man, cheat and a threat to democracy — Michael Cohen accused Trump of all that and more as he came to bury the man he ferociously defended for a decade. Turncoats don’t turn any more dramatically than this, and never on a bigger stage.
There was also a turn-back-the-clock quality to the spectacle. Sitting over Cohen’s right shoulder was Lanny Davis, Hillary Clinton’s longtime pal and now a Cohen lawyer.
Don’t tell Davis and Clinton that she lost the 2016 election. They think it’s not over yet.
Underneath the theatrics, that was the fantasy fueling Wednesday’s hearing, which was allegedly arranged by Davis. He aimed for Cohen to demolish Trump’s legitimacy and set the stage for impeachment hearings before the next election.
He’ll have to do much better than Wednesday to remove a sitting president. Dems are still playing exclusively to Trump haters, a significant force in America but not yet a decisive one.
More to the political point, adding a plan to endlessly torment Trump to a platform of higher taxes, open borders and free stuff doesn’t sound like a formula that will win over the blue-collar workers and middle-class voters who elected him. Congress has a 20 percent approval rating, and there’s no reason to think Wednesday helped.
Meanwhile, the president was in Vietnam, trying to prevent nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula. Some in the GOP protested the timing of the hearing, saying it put politics on the front burner and national security on the back.
