Cohen is simultaneously believable about which he speaks yet is still delusional about his role and his own character. What he said is simultaneously revealing by virtue of the fact that someone is actually, finally, giving voice to those words in an official setting yet obvious in that nothing he says is at all surprising to anyone who has paid even a bit of attention. Overall, his statement speaks to how villains believe themselves to be the heroes of their own stories. His statement will not change Trump supporters’ views, because they are lost causes who are even more deluded than Cohen is.
Trump was and is unfit. He was and is a lying, crooked, racist imbecile. This is not news nor should it be news to anyone.
Neither this testimony nor any magic from Robert Mueller is going save us from that because so many people want it or, at the very least don’t care. Trump once famously said that he could shoot someone in the middle of the street with impunity. I don’t know about that, but I am confident that he could be found to have committed the highest of crimes or misdemeanors and the United States Congress would do nothing to stop him or punish him. That is simply where we are as a country right now.
The only way through it is to elect someone who is not him and to begin the long and hard work of fixing all that has been broken. Unfortunately a whole lot of people are going to actively or passively prevent that from happening for many different reasons.
At least the ones who actually love Trump will be straightforward about it. A lot of other people who claim they hate Trump will nonetheless help his cause because they hate other things and other people more. They hate Democrats or they hate progressive policies or they hate the media or what have you and, while giving lip service to their disdain for Trump and all he represents, they get something out of him that they fear they would not get from someone else. They want to let corporations poison the water, let banks put poor people in debtors’ prisons and ensure that the judiciary is in their pocket as they do it, and Trump is in the best position to do make that happen. These people, too, believe themselves to be the heroes of their own stories.
The Cohen statement is a good read. But if it takes his words for you to believe that Donald Trump is unfit and deserving of removal from office — that, in Cohen’s words, Trump is a “racist, a conman and a cheat,” — I’m not sure what planet you’ve been living on, because it’s been manifest for years and years.
