His former attorney Michael Cohen’s guilty plea deal is bad news for President Donald Trump, but hardly the end of the world. You wouldn’t know that if you were only paying attention to mainstream media, though.
Cohen pleaded guilty on Thursday to making false statements to Congress in 2017. The statements related to a 2016 plan by then-candidate Trump to build a Trump Tower property in Moscow. The plan was eventually shelved, but Cohen initially said it had been axed several months before it actually was.
The plea does not implicate Trump in any crime, nor does it reveal any collusion with Russia to rig the 2016 election - the crime that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was originally tasked with finding. Therefore, Trump’s job is not in any immediate danger.
That’s not what the mainstream media outlets would have you believe, however. The networks and the anti-Trump #Resistance greeted the news with glee.
“Michael Cohen was a consigliere, a capo for Trump,” said MSNBC contributor Donny Deutsch, presumably dropping in the mafia job titles for effect. In another appearance, Deutsch again compared Trump’s organization to a mob family.
Neal Katyal, former top lawyer in the Obama administration who went on to represent Democrat challenges to Trump’s travel ban, couldn’t hide his joy.
“I think it’s huge,” Katyal told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. “The facts aren’t all in, but I think we very well could look back on this day, November 29th, 2018, as the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency.”
Hostesses of ABC’s The View, hopped up on #Resistance fervor, were likewise ecstatic.
“Today is a good day for Donald Trump to resign,” Joy Behar cheered. “I really believe that. 20 years for me, that would be my gift. Donald, do it for me.”
Lawyer Michael Avenatti, once heralded as a potential Democratic candidate for the presidency but stained by recent sexual assault allegations, also jumped on board the ‘Trump is finished’ bandwagon. He retweeted one of his earlier predictions that Trump would not see out his first term, adding that the tweet was “beginning to age very well.”
Or is it? Avenatti’s original tweet dates from April, when Cohen was first indicted and Avenatti was basking in the spotlight his representation of porn star Stormy Daniels. Trump wasn’t ‘finished’ then, nor is he now.
The latest declarations that ‘Trump is finished’ are as stale now as they were then. Every twist and turn in the Mueller investigation, every gaffe, and every crisis no matter how minor has been heralded breathlessly as the beginning of the end for Trump.
No amount of “bombshell” revelations, “turning points,”“rumblings of impeachment” or “walls closing in” have come close to evicting Trump out of the White House, nor have they even made a dent in his popularity among his supporter base. In fact, a poll conducted by the left-leaning Public Policy Polling found that the majority of Trump’s voters would support him even if Mueller’s investigation dropped hard, undeniable evidence that he conspired with Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 election.
The news about Cohen fits the pattern of all previous “revelations” about Trump and Russia: lots of talk of this being the “beginning of the end” from TV pundits paid to say it, and lots more accusations of “fake news” from Trump’s side. Nothing will change without hard evidence of crime or collusion - something that is and has always been absent from the mainstream media’s doomsday prophecies.
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