It was a publicity stunt.
Michael Cohen has many observations through his tell-all: Trump and his team expected he would lose in 2016. Trump welches on everyone and is bad at deals. Trump has no friends. Trump is a racist whose hatred (envy?) of Obama sent his rage to the stratosphere.
A contrite Michael Cohen, serving time for a crime that Trump directed, wants us to know most especially that Trump will not leave office unless forced. Trump is too much of a child, and does not want to face consequences.
I enjoy unreliable narrators. The past couple of years I have tended to a little Nabokov, books about Nabokov, books about other books about Nabokov, 1990s books from the big Critical Theory backlash on sex & culture, and pulpy political memoirs/exposés.
Disloyal by Michael Cohen combines an unreliable narrator with a pulpy memoir. It’s chewy stuff. He has good analysis of how the Trump orbit makes people into the worse version of themselves. The lure of power, no matter how tacky and cruel and dumb, becomes intoxicating and a person just wants more, more, more.
“That is what it feels like to lose control of your mind — you actually give up your common sense, sense of decency, sensitivity, even your grip on reality. […] I was in a cult of personality. And I loved it.”
Cohen’s spouse, and eventually his two children, know that Trump is corrosive from the start. And the contrast of Cohen’s sensible family at home, compared to the delusions in the Trump club, runs throughout the book. A few quick chewy bits, then I want to get to the real point:
Cohen downplays the connections to Russia (which I think are lower than reported, but not as low as Cohen conveys), but the financial reliance of Trump on Russia and Putin remain strong. Trump has a crush on Putin and sees a daddy figure to earn approval from.
Putin hates Hillary Clinton, and Trump saw a campaign as an opportunity to attack Clinton and thus curry Putin’s favor. He perceived Putin as the richest man in the world, and if Trump noticeably antagonized Clinton maybe Putin would be more inclined to funnel him money.
After a 2014 meeting that Trump had with evangelicals (often amoral grifters themselves) in Trump Tower where they laid hands on him and prayed (mirrored later on in a post-election Oval Office photo-op), Cohen reports Trump saying:
“Can you believe that bullshit? Can you believe people believe that bullshit?”
Cohen makes a compelling case that Trump is a snob and holds great contempt for the people who form his base. But since they’re the only ones who show up, he’s compelled to play to them, and often derides them post-rally. Cohen writes:
“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, […] The truth was that he couldn’t care less.”
But the most compelling part – the molasses nightmare part – is to view through Cohen’s eyes the Trump Presidential campaign. Its launch as a sloppy, hammy, gaudy publicity stunt for his brand and The Apprentice game show with no plan to win the election. Yet the media gave Trump free airtime. Airtime worth, conservatively, billions of dollars.
Even on Election Night 2016, the Trump family and campaign staff did not think he would win. Many did not want to win, including Trump. Being President represented a big hassle. Yet, there he was. Winner of the Electoral College, having spent little money and few staff on his campaign team.
24-hour news networks (CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, etc.) have too much airtime to fill with too little news, and too few reporters. So they are in the habit of 2-3 minutes of genuine information followed by 10-12 minutes of redundant commentary from people who usually affirm the points already made in the 2-3 minute reportage.
Spending hours and months and years airing Trump rallies with their fawning crowds and loathsome, galling moments was easy for networks to do. It made Trump supporters happy. It made others angry. Adrenaline and emotional engagement up, viewers locked in. Ratings rose and held steady so long as the story was Trump. Cheap content and a great revenue source.
With his rallies and his Twitter tantrums, Trump became the lazy mainstream media’s National Assignment Editor. It was such a flood of coverage that Trump, with the help of weird lucky bounces in the Electoral College, became President even though he didn’t want to.
Mainstream media simplifies issues to: our side and the other side. Establishment Republicans versus Establishment Democrats. Rather than present a reasonable middle, or simply report facts, they narrow their focus to marketing to one of these two groups and entice them to stay for more confirmation of their viewer’s feelings. Matt Taibbi’s book Hate, Inc. is essential context for how things ended up this way.
Everyone is cynical about the media. We sense that a big part of it is junk. Yet, we watch.
Third or alternate or fuller narratives rarely intrude. Neither party truly makes changes for people who aren’t wealthy. Both pander to Wall Street more than people. Trump claimed to want to drain the swamp, but filled his high-turnover administration with so many crooks and D-list figures he pumped the swamp full of sewage.
I voted for Biden because he’s not cruel. I don’t expect greatness from him, but I expect him to at least slow our tumbling toward ruin, maybe even make things better here and there although our people sorely need more.
BUT BACK TO COHEN’S BOOK, here’s a money quote:
“Trump saw politics as an opportunity to make money”
So does the media looking at Trump.
Aaron Sorkin’s series The Newsroom was largely mediocre, often groan-inducing, sometimes on the nose. It’s important to know that it aired before the Trump Administration, so its cynicism about lazy news networks comes across as a rosy depiction of a time before a big whiny baby’s Twitter rant led to 30 minutes of airtime coverage.
One scene from The Newsroom that sticks in my mind. No, not from the premiere where a middle-aged guy growls a condescending rant to a young female college student (oh, Sorkin…). But a scene when there’s a scandal at the centrist cable network. A reporter is fired for distorting an important interview, more heads need to roll. The boss of the network, the lead anchor, and the anchor’s producer are deflated and resigned to resigning.
Jane Fonda plays the owner of the network (after marriage to CNN owner Ted Turner, fun!) and breezes in after a society function. She plays this scene marvelously. Masterfully. The network head laments: “We don’t have the trust of the public anymore!”
Fonda’s character commands: “Get it back!” Cut to black. End of episode.
We should insist that mainstream media stop pandering to our emotions and earn our trust back.
