At various points in the last two years, many of us have had the feeling that the tide was finally turning against Donald Trump, only to realize a day or a week later that he had weathered a self-inflicted wound or external catastrophe that would have ended any previous presidency. However, I do think the one-two punch of Michael Cohen’s guilty plea and Paul Manafort’s conviction yesterday has done real damage to this presidency, both in and of itself and in its promise of still more to come.
Although neither event directly involves collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to secure the presidency for Donald Trump, both are the result of the special counsel’s investigation of such allegations. It is highly likely that prosecutors have acted against both Manafort and Cohen not simply because they discovered crimes incidental to collusion, but because they see pursuit of these crimes as key ways to move forward the collusion investigation. In the case of Manafort, conviction on eight of eighteen charges means that the government has now secured real leverage against him in the larger investigation. Likewise with Cohen, his guilty pleas mean that the government has created an enormous incentive for him to cooperate on the collusion front — cooperation that Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, has already indicated will be forthcoming (though it remains unclear if an official cooperation agreement has yet been struck by the two sides).
In a broader sense, the way that yesterday’s events move forward the collusion investigation demonstrate how the broader collision between the steady grinding forward of our legal system and the president’s ongoing attempts to defame and discredit the investigation will likely play out in the coming months. The special counsel's team is following a methodical legal strategy aimed at proving its case as to what happened between Trump and Russia. Yesterday, we got a high-impact view of this strategy in action. Whatever Donald Trump’s attempts to discredit the investigation, Americans still by and large believe in the reality of guilty pleas and guilty verdicts; in this sense, the events of yesterday are like an antidote to Trump’s daily river of propaganda. Indeed, according to Politico, officials close to the president are expressing worry that these developments will “lend new credence to the Mueller probe.” But beyond public opinion and the battle of perceptions, yesterday also reminds us that we do still live in a country of laws where wrongdoers are sometimes punished for their bad deeds. To me, this makes the possibility of charges against more administration officials, up to and including Trump, likelier than ever.
But it gets even worse for the president when we focus specifically on the Cohen plea, which includes claims that the president directed him to make illegal payments to two women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump. This is a separate issue from Russian collusion, and it is incredibly serious for the president. As many people are pointing out, Trump is now essentially an unindicted co-conspirator to Cohen’s actions, the same ignominious status that Richard Nixon achieved during the Watergate investigation. Trump, in other words, is one short step from being accused of a crime himself.
The illegal payoffs (illegal because they constituted illicit campaign contributions by Cohen) gain greater significance beyond their basic criminality when we consider how very close the 2016 election was, and the very probable impact news of Trump’s affairs with these two women would have had on the number of votes he received. Only 30,000 votes spread across three states decided the last election; it certainly seems possible that stories of these affairs could have turned it in Hillary Clinton’s favor. Even if this question is unresolvable, it points up the seriousness of such illegal campaign contributions: it was not just the amount of money — which was a drop in the bucket compared to overall expenditures by and on behalf of the Trump campaign in 2016 — but the way illegal activity was conducted to avoid serious, even fatal, damage to the campaign. Such allegations threaten the very legitimacy of this presidency.
Overall, the damage to the president from yesterday’s legal developments is so significant because it suggests far greater harm still to come. It’s important, though, to step back and reckon the consequences not just for the president, but for the GOP as a whole, because of this basic fact: by providing unquestioning cover both for the president’s efforts to derail the Russia investigation and for his corruption more generally, the GOP has made itself complicit in those efforts. Now, as the reality of the Mueller investigation makes a quantum leap forward, and as the president’s corrupt acts on his way to the Oval Office are further exposed, the GOP will be increasingly tainted by that wrongdoing. The overall Republican response so far only verifies this theory, since the strategy, in talking points and in practice, has simply been to double down on calls to end the Mueller probe and to try to discount the significance of yesterday’s events. The GOP has so closely tied itself to Trump’s narrative that it has no choice but to continue on, lashed to the mast of this deranged presidency as it crashes forward into stormier seas.
The GOP’s implication in Trump’s corruption isn’t helped by the charges announced yesterday against Representative Duncan Hunter of California; according to The New York Times, these include “allegations that he spent tens of thousands of dollars in campaign funds on family trips to Hawaii and Italy, private school tuition for his children and even a $600 airline ticket for a pet rabbit.” What makes this worse for the Trump-GOP death embrace is that Hunter was the second congressman to endorse Donald Trump for president; the first, Chris Collins of New York, was also recently indicted on insider trading charges. However the collusion investigation plays out, the idea that Trump and the GOP are mutually enabling massive corruption is beginning to achieve irresistible narrative force. This is obviously bad news for the Republicans in the midterms and beyond.
Finally, I’m still not sure what to make of reports that Republican officials are worried that these new developments give the Democrats more ammunition to seek impeachment of the president, but I do find them noteworthy. Until now, the GOP’s line has been that impeachment is a great issue for them in the midterms, as it serves to rile up their base to come out and vote in order to protect Trump. At the same time, many Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, have downplayed impeachment as a possibility, seeming to agree with the Republicans’ assessment that it’s a net winner for Republicans as a campaign issue. At just a basic level, though, it feels like the momentum is shifting when Republican officials actually worry aloud about impeachment as a real possibility, rather than an abstraction they can use to gin up votes. Pelosi’s response to yesterday’s news — she released a statement that “Cohen’s admission of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in hush money ‘at the direction of the candidate’ to influence the 2016 election shows the president’s claims of ignorance to be far from accurate, and places him in even greater legal jeopardy” — seems to strike a politically savvy position. When the legal system is bearing down on the president, letting the implications of his complicity and criminality work their way into public consciousness arguably does more to damage the president and help the Democrats than inserting impeachment talk into the mix.
