Trump’s worst nightmare arrives on a Tuesday

Tuesday, August 22, 2018, is the day the wheels finally came off the wildly careering vehicle that is the Trump administration. We don’t know yet if the ensuing crash will prove fatal for the occupant politically. A cat has nine lives. Trump already has lost more than that and still sits in the White House. How many lives, I wonder, does a hyena have?

Tuesday, in a federal court, Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, plead guilty to eight federal felonies. Cohen was Trump’s long-time “fixer”—Mafia bosses have fixers but what kind of political leader has one?—Cohen confessed that shortly before the 2016 election and at the explicit direction of then-candidate Trump, he paid for the silence of two women who say they had sexual affairs with Trump. A president who has a fixer, keeps mistresses, and pays hundreds of thousands of dollars to shut them up, makes the corruption in the administrations of Nixon and Bill Clinton combined seem trivial.

The most momentous assertion in Cohen’s confession was not about Trump’s sexual escapades but the president’s intent in paying to silence the women. The payments, Cohen testified, were made with “the principal purpose of influencing the election.”

That statement implicates Donald Trump as a conspirator in a very serious crime, violation of campaign finance law. Worse, the lawbreaking was done to pervert the workings of democracy and give Trump an unfair advantage over Hillary Clinton. The idea was to keep voters in the dark about conduct by Trump that might lead Americans to have doubts about his character so serious that they might cost him the election.

Cohen’s admission about Trump’s complicity in what amounts to a form of election fixing—the very act Trump constantly accused the Democrats of engaging in—made Tuesday a very bad day for the president and his band of enablers. But there was more bad news for Trump and the Republicans. Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort was convicted of eight federal felonies related to tax evasion and unreported foreign bank accounts.

In recent years, Manafort has been up to his neck in dubious business deals with the Russians, sometimes in direct opposition to U.S. policy. Manafort may not have been a key link in collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, but he is one element in the web connecting the Trump campaign and the Russians. Describing the whole web would take a book, but it is already crystal clear that Trump and his minions made a great effort to obtain dirt on Hillary Clinton from the Russians. Trump himself pleaded with the Russians to release the data, which they did through intermediaries and which had been illegally obtained by expert Russian military intelligence hackers. In time, the whole picture will be more visible, but we already know that Russian meddling in the election was for exactly the same purpose as the hush money arranged by Cohen: influencing the election in favor of Donald Trump.

In another bit of bad news for the president, Duncan Hunter became the second GOP member of Congress currently under indictment. Hunter was the second member of the House to endorse Trump. The other, Chris Collins, was already under indictment.

The pattern that emerges is of a Donald Trump convinced he would lose and willing to use whatever means necessary to prevent it or become what is for him the worst thing in the world: a loser. That’s how you end up with Russian military intelligence de facto working for Trump’s election and illegal hush money paid “for the primary purpose of influencing the election.” Not surprisingly, other GOP con men, like those now under indictment, recognized a kindred spirit in Trump and jumped in to endorse him early. Birds of a feather flock together. These birds are carrion eaters who make a living the same way as a hyena.

The ultimate conclusion that emerges from all this is that Donald Trump’s presidency is illegitimate. As a small “d” democrat, I think Trump was illegitimate from the start. Trump lost the popular vote by a clear margin. His victory is a product of an anti-democratic and anachronistic institution, the Electoral College. Although the U.S. Constitution has stood the test of time remarkably well, as a human creation it is not perfect. Today, some elements, such as the Second Amendment and the Electoral College, have become absurd. But Americans treat even these absurd clauses as sacrosanct, much like hard-core Islamists view the Koran, which starts with the words: “This Book is not to be doubted.”

What I am arguing is that when a candidate loses the popular vote and wins only through the Electoral College, that candidate is, ipso facto, illegitimate. But Donald Trump was not content with passively taking advantage of the institutionalized break he got by dint of the Electoral College. He actively tilted the playing field by silencing people and obtaining electorally useful information from a foreign adversary.

As the wheels come off the Trump car, the Republican Congress quakes in its boots and does nothing. They made their pact with the Devil long ago and now must stick to it or perish at the hands of an angry mob known as the base. Crypto-racists, zealous fighters in the top down class war, Republicans have gotten a lot from Trump. Now in retribution, they may get a drubbing at the polls from that majority of voters who are not a part of the base mob.