With Haley endorsing Trump it’s now up to Trump and his surrogates to follow up and convince her voters to do the same. Marge Green has a strategy to get that done:
I’m sure that will persuade them.
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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
Tomorrow belongs to them
CNN’s Abby Phillip ran through Donald Trump’s plans for his next administration. He may be a basket case, but he has a cadre of extremists ready to step up to help him implement his plans and theirs.
Let’s talk about projection. What we see blossoming more boldly than ever among the authoritarianati is entitlement. Unspoken, mostly, but present. When the conservative elite speak derisively of the social safety net, they insist that entitlements must be cut. Just not theirs, naturally.
An ‘us’ problem
What we see displayed by Supreme Court Justices Thomas (with his undeclared gifts) and Alito (with his insurrectionist flags) is the sense that they are untouchable, writes Dahlia Lithwick. And their behaviors are not anything Chief Justice Roberts seems inclined to address by imposing a strict code of ethics. The justices stand imperial:
We have a judicial enterprise that rules over us with absolutely no one ruling over them. Nobody should be all that surprised that Sen. Dick Durbin has announced that the Senate Judiciary Committee will not launch a probe into Alito’s recent conduct. The Senate has also been trying to unearth the financing for Thomas’s quarter million dollar salt-of-the-earth RV amid other ethics violations, and Leonard Leo has declined to comply with subpoenas related to it. Yes, the Senate should be acting to resolve this problem, but that seems to have largely stalled at “asking them to recuse.”
So just to review, this isn’t really a Sam Alito problem, or a Clarence Thomas problem, or a John Roberts problem—but it also isn’t even a Senate-Dems-who-can’t-muster-the-energy-to-close-the-deal problem.
No, I have come to conclude is that this is an us problem. Because rather than hurling ourselves headlong into the “Alito Must Recuse” brick wall of “yeah, no,” we need to dedicate the upcoming election cycle, and the attendant election news cycle to a discussion of the courts. Not just Sam Alito or Clarence Thomas who happen to go to work every day at the court, and not just Dobbs and gun control, which happens to have come out of the very same court, but the connection between those two tales: what it means to have a Supreme Court that is functionally immune from political pressure, from internal norms of behavior, from judicial ethics and disclosure constraints, and from congressional oversight and why that is deeply dangerous.
As I said: imperial.
Margaret Brennan recently confronted Sen. J.D. Vance (R) of Ohio with his suggesting the government emulate Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban’s crackdown on alleged “left-wing domination” of universities. They must be given a choice, Vance had said, “between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching.”
That isn’t a choice. It’s an ultimatum. An ultimatum Vance feels his fringe is entitled to enforce. He answered with word salad about universities being “part of a social contract in this country” and, since taxpayers help finance college educations, taxpayers should exercise more control over how that (loan?) money is spent.
(I look forward to Vance working with Sen. Elizabeth Warren on seeing to it that corporations receiving government contracts and subsidies uphold their end of the social contract.)
What we see among the Supremes, among federal legislators like Vance, and among state Republican legislators angling to impose permanent minority rule is an attitude that they can do what they please with impunity. Where could they have gotten that idea?
That sense of inevitability is spreading. See the story of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman vs. actress Scarlett Johansson. After Johansson declined to allow OpenAI to use her voice for its new digital assistant, Altman released it nonetheless with a voice remarkably like hers. She threatened to sue:
On the day that OpenAI released ChatGPT’s assistant, Altman posted a cheeky, one-word statement on X: “Her”—a reference to the 2013 film of the same name, in which Johansson is the voice of an AI assistant that a man falls in love with. Altman’s post is reasonably damning, implying that Altman was aware, even proud, of the similarities between Sky’s voice and Johansson’s.
The Atlantic‘s Charlie Warzel writes:
On its own, this seems to be yet another example of a tech company blowing past ethical concerns and operating with impunity. But the situation is also a tidy microcosm of the raw deal at the center of generative AI, a technology that is built off data scraped from the internet, generally without the consent of creators or copyright owners. Multiple artists and publishers, including The New York Times, have sued AI companies for this reason, but the tech firms remain unchastened, prevaricating when asked point-blank about the provenance of their training data. At the core of these deflections is an implication: The hypothetical superintelligence they are building is too big, too world-changing, too important for prosaic concerns such as copyright and attribution. The Johansson scandal is merely a reminder of AI’s manifest-destiny philosophy: This is happening, whether you like it or not.
They are the elite. They are in charge. They make decisions for you.
This is the unvarnished logic of OpenAI. It is cold, rationalist, and paternalistic. That such a small group of people should be anointed to build a civilization-changing technology is inherently unfair, they note. And yet they will carry on because they have both a vision for the future and the means to try to bring it to fruition. Wu’s proposition, which he offers with a resigned shrug in the video, is telling: You can try to fight this, but you can’t stop it. Your best bet is to get on board.
[…]
When your technology aims to rewrite the rules of society, it stands that society’s current rules need not apply.
Tomorrow belongs to them. So, whether we’re talking about the Supreme Court’s entitled MAGA faction, or MAGA Republicans, or Silicon Valley’s tech bros, here’s their offer: Accept their future. It’s coming anyway. Resistance is futile.
What they’re entitled to is a whupping. Delivering it, as Lithwick suggests, “is an us problem.”
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Think twice
“No one insults the intelligence of Trump voters more than Donald Trump,” said MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell Wednseday night. Nobody, that is, except Marjorie Taylor Green and MAGA TV.
Jimmy Kimmel assembled a MAGA TV gag reel:
The Independent reported on MTG’s “wild claim”:
Marjorie Taylor Greene has made the wild claim that the Justice Department had authorised the use of “deadly force” during an FBI search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence as a plan to “assassinate” the former president. The FBI have denied the accusation, saying that “standard protocol” was followed.
That raid on the former president’s Florida residence on 8 August 2022 ended with the FBI seizing hundreds of documents. On Tuesday, newly-unsealed court filings showed that four additional classified documents were discovered in Mr Trump’s bedroom in the months following the bureau’s search at Mar-a-Lago.
Mr Trump faces 40 felony counts for allegedly mishandling top secret documents taken to his estate after he left office. He denies all the charges against him.
In a fiery response, Mr Trump accused the Biden administration of soliciting the use of “deadly force” during the raid – which he called “unconstitutional” on Truth Social. He also sent his Maga followers a fundraising email with the subject line: “They were authorized to shoot me!”
Right. The FBI sent a team of agents to Mar-a-Lago, in broad daylight, to execute a kill order on Donald Trump who was at the time with his Secret Service detail 1,000 miles away in New Jersey.
“I nearly escaped death,” Trump added.
“Nearly escaped death?” asked Stephen Colbert to audience laughter.
Yes, the claim is laughable. Yes, MAGA TV’s very business model is stoking daily outrage. And yes, it’s a liberal guilty pleasure to mock Trump cultists, as O’Donnell does, for the “layers of stupidity” it takes to reply to that Trump fundraising email with their money. But it’s unhelpful. There was nothing funny about them storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Trump is preparing the ground for them to do it again. MAGA TV is dedicated the deadly project.
Anti-Trump attorney George Conway advised Greg Sargent recently that Team Biden needs to “keep making fun of Trump” during the debates until he loses it. “If the Biden campaign plays its cards right … we could have a Captain Queeg or a Colonel Jessup moment with Donald Trump” that could break through to the sensible elements of the American public that otherwise pay little attention to politics.
So mock Trump to his face. Mock the propagandists on Fox and OANN and Newsmax. And Marjorie Taylor Greene. But do not mock Trump followers. Calling them stupid is counter-productive and anchors them more strongly to the grievances Trump uses to exlpoit them. They will identify with him until they don’t. Hasten that. And welcome them when they turn against him. It’s not as satisfying as saying “I told you so,” but it’s more strategic.
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There is no longer any doubt
I guess someone at the beach must have called Mrs Alito the c-word too. The NY Times reports:
Last summer, two years after an upside-down American flag was flown outside the Virginia home of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., another provocative symbol was displayed at his vacation house in New Jersey, according to interviews and photographs.
This time, it was the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which, like the inverted U.S. flag, was carried by rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Also known as the Pine Tree flag, it dates back to the Revolutionary War, but largely fell into obscurity until recent years and is now a symbol of support for former President Donald J. Trump, for a religious strand of the “Stop the Steal” campaign and for a push to remake American government in Christian terms.
Three photographs obtained by The New York Times, along with accounts from a half-dozen neighbors and passers-by, show that the Appeal to Heaven flag was aloft at the Alito home on Long Beach Island in July and September of 2023. A Google street view image from late August also shows the flag.
The photographs, each taken independently, are from four different dates. It is not clear whether the flag was displayed continuously during those months or how long it was flown overall.
Justice Alito declined to respond to questions about the beach house flag, including what it was intended to convey and how it comported with his obligations as a justice. The court also declined to respond.
What is the “Appeal to Heave” flag? It’s a revolutionary war flag that has been appropriated by the radical right in recent years:
In the 2010s, the flag became appropriated as a religious and political symbol by some conservative, nationalist, and Christian nationalist activists within the United States…In 2021, some Trump supporters carried the flag during the January 6 United States Capitol attack.
By the way, in 2023, Mike Johnson, newly elected Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, hung the flag outside his Congressional office.
No more rainbow colors, damn it! Red, white and blue ONLY for Freedom Summer.
By the way, Florida Freedom extends to your dietary choices as well.
So far this year, lawmakers in Florida and Alabama have made it a criminal act to manufacture and sell lab-grown meat in their states. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) went first, signing a bill earlier this month and warning cellular agriculture companies: “Take your fake lab-grown meat elsewhere … we’re not doing that in the state of Florida.”
It isn’t actually available but damn it, red states are banning it anyway. Apparently, the mere idea of saving the planet and making it possible to not have to actually kill animals for animal protein is oppressive.
I feel so free, don’t you?
“He only cares about holding on to power. I care about you.”
If you haven’t seen Trump’s “Reich” video, that’s it. He didn’t make it but he did share it. Nazis just love the guy. Republicans say it’s no biggie:
Here’s Biden’s response:
Dan Pfeiffer looks at the strategy behind the Biden campaign’s approach in his newsletter:
What’s interesting to me is how and why the Biden Campaign is waging the fight this time and what it says about their strategy.
Keep Trump on the Defensive and in the News
Since officially kicking off the campaign earlier this year, the Biden Campaign has aggressively pursued every Trump misstatement and misdeed. Their BidenHQ account tweets day and night to lift up everything Trump does — from falling asleep in court to suggesting he wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
It is in their strategic interest to focus the electorate on Trump and remind them who he is and what kind of President he was. This is also why Biden is so eager to debate Trump. This election is currently functioning as a referendum on Biden, and they very much need it to become a choice between two candidates.
I have made this point many times in this newsletter, but most voters never see or think about Trump. The only way to learn about the news is to actively seek it out, so it’s in the Biden Campaign’s interest to pour gasoline on the controversies that break out of the political news bubble and go viral on social media.
People Know Less than You Think
It feels like Trump has been in our lives for seven millennia and that everyone knows everything there is to know about him, but some recent polling from Blueprint Research shows that’s not actually the case. As Russell Berman wrote in The Atlantic:
In polling conducted by Blueprint, a Democratic data firm, fewer than half of registered voters under 30 said they had heard some of Trump’s most incendiary quotes, such as when he said there were “very fine people on both sides” demonstrating in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, or when he told members of the Proud Boys, the far-right militia group, to “stand back and stand by” during a 2020 debate. Just 42 percent of respondents were aware that, during his 2016 campaign, Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
There is a clear upside in highlighting Trump’s comments and contextualizing them against his other misdeeds and cruel words. This is particularly important for Biden who decided to run for President specifically because of what happened in Charlottesville.
Fitting It into the Broader Narrative
Democrats are destined to repeat the mistakes of 2016 and swing at every pitch if we don’t stitch together a broader narrative about Trump. On Monday, he’s a moron; on Tuesday, a criminal; on Wednesday, a feeble old man; and on Thursday, he’s a dangerously powerful dictator. The way Biden responded to the Trump video was a fascinating window into what he views as the best attack against Trump — “He only cares about holding on to power. I care about you.”
He then references this interesting piece:
A short excerpt follows. (You can use the gift link by clicking on that tweet above to read the whole thing and it’s worth it.)
Seiji Carpenter, vice president at David Binder Research, noticed this fear in early April while conducting focus groups of people who had voted for Biden in 2020 but became disillusioned and were considering switching sides. “We were talking to Latino men and Asian American-Pacific Islander women in battleground states,” Carpenter recalls, “and they went straight to the issue of, what if Trump won’t give up power?”
Carpenter has a decade of experience running focus groups for Democrats, but he’d never encountered this fear in earlier cycles. “It’s not something we’d been testing for,” he says. “But what we’ve seen so far indicates a real concern there.”
Republican strategists have encountered the same thing. “It’s showing up in our focus groups,” says Sarah Longwell, the chief executive officer of Longwell Partners and publisher of the conservative website the Bulwark. “It happened just the other day.”Longwell shared a video of a group of undecided swing-state voters who had been asked if they were worried that Trump might violate the constitutional amendment limiting him to one more term if he wins in November.
“Does anybody think he may not abide by the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution and leave office after the 2028 election? Anyone worried about that?” the moderator asked.In response, seven of the eight participants raised a hand. A Pennsylvania man worried that Trump might go further and try to institute a dynasty. “I wouldn’t put it past him, now that he owns the RNC,” the man said, “to say, ‘Don Jr. is going to do the next term, and he’ll get two. And then Barron will get two.’ And we’ll just have some fake monarchy.”
As far-fetched as it may sound, the prospect of Trump overriding or simply ignoring the constitutional provision that limits a president to serving two terms seems to be pushing some undecided voters toward Biden, despite significant reservations about the incumbent’s age, turmoil in the Middle East and high inflation. Now strategists in both parties are probing to see how widely this sentiment has spread, particularly among the undecided voters likely to sway the election.
He’s said repeatedly that he thinks he should have more than two terms. Just last weekend at the NRA convention he talked about it again:
“You know, FDR 16 years — almost 16 years — he was four terms. I don’t know, are we going to be considered three-term? Or two-term?”
“Three!” shouted some convention attendees,
Green notes:
The fear that Trump might do something unprecedented to undermine democracy is a new variable in an otherwise familiar race between two unpopular candidates who’ve faced off before. Several political professionals who talk to voters for a living say they’ve detected a fundamental shift in the way people view Trump’s motivations and intentions as compared with other politicians.
“Typically, when we raise concerns about a candidate’s agenda, people are skeptical and want to do their own research first or think it’s an attack,” says Carpenter, the focus group director. “With Trump, that’s not true. Voters believe that he would try to remove term limits, and they’re nervous about what’s possible.”
This would explain why the Biden campaign is hitting the “Trump only cares about power” message. It rings true.
And that’s because it is true.
House Republicans have ruled that only comments condemning Trump’s criminal trials are allowed to be spoken in the congress. They just struck Rep. Jim McGovern’s words from the record:
Nothing he said was untrue. It’s all factual. But the Republicans are so deep into the cult of Donald Trump that they now panic at the mere idea of someone saying them on the record.
Are there any limits to what they’ll do for him now?
It’s only noon but I’m already drinking. I think I’ll just keep going. Maybe until November:
Nearly three in five Americans wrongly believe the US is in an economic recession, and the majority blame the Biden administration, according to a Harris poll conducted exclusively for the Guardian. The survey found persistent pessimism about the economy as election day draws closer.
The poll highlighted many misconceptions people have about the economy, including:
-55% believe the economy is shrinking, and 56% think the US is experiencing a recession, though the broadest measure of the economy, gross domestic product (GDP), has been growing.
-49% believe the S&P 500 stock market index is down for the year, though the index went up about 24% in 2023 and is up more than 12% this year.
-49% believe that unemployment is at a 50-year high, though the unemployment rate has been under 4%, a near 50-year low.
Many Americans put the blame on Biden for the state of the economy, with 58% of those polled saying the economy is worsening due to mismanagement from the presidential administration.
72% say that inflation is increasing but it’s actually fallen sharply and is now between 3 and 4% a year which is normal. They actually want deflation which would signal something very bad.
Despite previously suggesting the Fed could start lowering rates this year, Fed officials have recently indicated interest rates will remain elevated in the near future. While inflation has eased considerably since its peak in 2022, officials continue to say inflation remains high because it remains above the Fed’s target of 2% a year.
After a tumultuous ride of inflation and high interest rates, voters are uncertain about what’s next. Consumer confidence fell to a six-month low in May.
So even though economic data, like GDP, implies strength in the economy, there’s a stubborn gap between the reality represented in that data – what economists use to gauge the economy’s health – and the emotional reality that underlies how Americans feel about the economy. In the poll, 55% think the economy is only getting worse.
Some have called the phenomenon a “vibecession”, a term first coined by the economics writer Kyla Scanlon to describe the widespread pessimism about the economy that defies statistics that show the economy is actually doing OK.
People said they didn’t believe that the economy is improving although many polls show that when asked about their own finances they say they are doing well. It’s just that everyone else is suffering. I wonder where they got that idea?
And then there’s this:
Something both Republicans and Democrats agree on: they don’t know who to trust when it comes to learning about the economy. In both September and May, a majority of respondents – more than 60% – indicated skepticism over economic news.
The economy continues to present a major challenge to Joe Biden in his re-election bid. Though he has tried to tout “Bidenomics”, or his domestic economy record, including his $1.2tn bipartisan infrastructure bill from 2022, 70% of Republicans and 39% of Democrats seem to think he’s making the economy worse.
40% of Democrats have no idea what they’re talking about either. Oy vey…
There’s a tiny glimmer of good news though:
Republican voters were slightly more optimistic about the lasting impacts of “Bidenomics” than they were in the September Harris poll. Four in 10 Republicans, an 11 percentage-point increase from September, indicated they believe Bidenomics will have a positive lasting impact, while 81% of Democrats said the same. And three-quarters of everyone polled said they support at least one of the key pillars of Bidenomics, which include investments in infrastructure, hi-tech electronics manufacturing, clean-energy facilities and more union jobs.
But don’t get too excited:
“What Americans are saying in this data is: ‘Economists may say things are getting better, but we’re not feeling it where I live,’” said John Gerzema, CEO of the Harris Poll. “Unwinding four years of uncertainty takes time. Leaders have to understand this and bring the public along.”
Actually:
Has anyone talked to all the people who have insisted for years that if only Democrats would adopt more populist economic policies once all the jobs and goods delivered prosperity, voters would surge to the party. Did they not know about vibes???
Frankly, I understand the bad vibes but I don’t think it has anything to do with the economy. In 2020 there was great hope that Biden would win and that this MAGA freakshow would end and we’d go “back to normal.” But Trump refused to go away there has been no accountability for his criminal behavior. His cult following has been ginned up into a frenzy of hate and anger and everyone else is in despair or has checked out for their own sense of well being and the result is that there is an ugly, ugly mood in this country caused by Donald Trump. I think the only vocabulary many people have to express their dissatisfaction is to gripe about the economy, Americans’ common political language.
I have no idea what to do about this.
Cheers.
What Immunity?
People were dying by the tens of thousands during this period.
Even the Sopranos weren’t this dumb
On the last day of testimony in Trump’s NY hush money case, a dozen or so grasping Trump sycophants dressed in the official elite MAGA uniforms of a red tie and blue suit (the troops wear the red hats) all gathered in the Manhattan court house to show their solidarity with their Dear Leader. The group included the Texas Lieutenant Governor of Texas Dan Patrick who weirdly excoriated “the ruling class” of which he and Donald Trump are very much members. SNL alum Joe Piscopo showed up as did former White House physician and current oddball congressman Ronny Jackson. Donald Trump Jr was there for the first time as well, apparently inspired to attend as a MAGA follower rather than a family member in support of his father. It’s become a daily self-abnegation ritual for those yearning to be on the inside of Trumpworld and that apparently includes his own son.
If it weren’t for the boring blue suits and red ties, the daily tableau would be more reminiscent of a criminal gang than a political party. The groveling for the attention and approbation of “the Boss”, the willingness to do absolutely anything for him (under threat of ex-communication or worse), the macho posturing and preening for each other and the public all looks like mobbed up behavior. In fact, one member of the group was an ex-con named Chuck Zito, founder of the New York Nomads chapter of the Hell’s Angels, which was linked to the Gambino mafia crime family. He obviously felt quite at home. He showed up two days in a row.
Trump himself has often drawn comparisons of himself to mob bosses, proudly declaring that he’s been indicted more than the “the late, great Alphonse Capone” all over the campaign trail. He often makes a point at his rallies that Capone “was seriously tough” as if to say he’s even tougher. Tim O’Brien, one of his biographers, has said that Trump openly admires figures such as as New York boss John Gotti and he’s actually using some of his tactics in his court cases:
The thing he respected about Gotti was that he … sat there in court and he looked at the jurors and he looked at the judge with a big F-U on his face.
He’s selling that mug shot F-U on t-shirts which the MAGA faithful have turned into their version of the Che Guevara shirt from the 1960s.
Underlying all this is something serious, however. The threats to judges, prosecutors, witnesses and jurors is very real and the courts where Trump is being tried are all having to put in place protections, including a gag order, to keep the former president from threatening all those people. He was sanctioned 10 times for violating that in the NY case until he came up with the novel tactic of having his red-tied capos do the threatening for him. He even got the Speaker of the House to go before the cameras and personally put the judge’s daughter in the cross hairs.
Tuesday marked the end of the presentation of evidence in the Trump hush money trial. All that’s left is the summations, scheduled for next Tuesday and then the deliberations will begin. Trump had boasted repeatedly that he was going to testify but of course he didn’t. He hasn’t explained why just yet but I’m sure he’ll come up with an absurd excuse eventually. In reality even he knew it would have been a terrible idea because it would have required him to studiously prepare and he can’t do that. So he did the next best thing.
Last week he no doubt saw a lawyer by the name of Robert Costello testify before a hastily called hearing before the House Sub-committee on the “Weaponization of the Federal Government” to slam Michael Cohen who was in the midst of a days long examination in Trump’s trial. He claimed that he was Cohen’s attorney for two months and that “virtually every statement he made about me was another lie.”
At the time, most people didn’t believe Costello would be called by the defense because the lawyers knew he would be a terrible witness but after his bravura performance, it’s fair to guess that Trump pushed them to call him. It would be the next best thing to having Trump on the stand himself. Unfortunately for Trump, just like the goombahs in the red-ties, Costello was preening for the boss and Trump couldn’t tell the difference. As with his good friend Giuliani, he’s just an out of his depth tough guy way past his sell-by date. His performance on the stand this week was a disaster.
He insulted the judge and caused a scene, almost getting cited for contempt. He was rude to the prosecutor, ordering her to speak into the microphone as if he was in charge of the court room. The judge even cleared the courtroom briefly to admonish him.
Trump probably thought he did great though, really showed them who was boss but the consensus is that he did very serious damage to the defense with his testimony. Trump’s lawyers had done a pretty good job of dirtying up prosecution witness Michael Cohen over the course of a grueling cross- examination and the prosecution had rested on a bit of a sour note. And then along came Costello to turn the whole thing upside down by making Cohen seem like a nice honest fellow by comparison.
Emails between Costello and Cohen were read aloud to leave the indelible memory in the minds of the jurors that Trump and Giuliani were conspiring with Costello to make sure Cohen didn’t cooperate with the government. There is even an email from Costello to Cohen saying, “Rudy said this communication channel must be maintained…sleep well tonight, you have friends in high places,” and one from Costello to his law partner saying, “Our issue is to get Cohen on the right page without giving the appearance that we are following instructions from Giuliani or the President,” (which they clearly were.) When Cohen didn’t sign on with him right away he told his law partner Cohen was “slow-playing us and the President…What should I say to this asshole? He’s playing with the most powerful man on the planet.” Didn’t he know who he was messing with?
Cohen had testified that he never retained Costello because he didn’t trust him. It turns out he was right. By the end of the cross examination, the prosecution had turned the defense argument that Cohen was just seeking revenge against Trump because he didn’t get a job in the White House to Costello seeking revenge against Cohen for refusing to hire him to defend him and make him valuable to Donald Trump.
Trump the mob boss has always been careful not to put anything in writing and to speak in code to underlings so he never gets caught giving direct orders. Unfortunately, his soldiers aren’t quite as careful. This one got him in real trouble by making it very clear that Donald Trump had leaned on Michael Cohen to keep his mouth shut. Why would an innocent man do such a thing?