ALL THOSE VOTES FOR DEMOCRATS IN 2018, WILL BE REQUIRED IN 2020

…Michael Cohen, came out of the Oversight Committee Hearing looking quite trustworthy

Are the Republicans staking the future of their party on the falsehoods of Donald J. Trump?

I was so surprised when I watched the way the Republicans acted during the recent Michael Cohen public oversight hearing.

As someone mentioned about what the 2018 midterms meant to what happened to the Republicans in office back then, after how they acted in the Cohen oversight hearing, the 2020 election with that attitude is going to be devastating for the GOP.

What I mean by this is that the whole hearing was a Republican attack on Cohen as “Liar. Liar. Pants on Fire!”  Instead of putting together a defense of their president, they showed that they, going forward, will spend their time impugning the reputations of all of the president’s accusers.  It is as if the whole Republican Party has signed-on as part of Trump’s legal team.

Michael Cohen started the hearing with the worst of reputations and he was expected to attack the president.  But instead, Cohen came across looking more trustworthy than both the president, and especially those accusers in the room who were asking the questions.

One op-ed writer wrote the following, “The House of Representatives has always been the shallower end of the legislative pool.  But the performance of Republicans at the Cohen hearing was in a class of its own. Their game plan seemed to consist of shouting vilification after vilification. Most of them apparently got their law degrees from the ‘Roy Cohn School of Law’.  (Cohn, Trump's former & favorite lawyer, was known as the "Gangster's Lawyer".)

Normally, defending a sitting president would involve witnessing to his character. Something along the lines of: “Trump has too much integrity to direct Roger Stone to deal with WikiLeaks.” Or: “That isn’t possible. Trump is too good a man to pay hush money to a porn star.” Or: “It is inconceivable that Trump would have had foreknowledge of a meeting at Trump Tower with shady Russians to get dirt on Hillary Clinton.  His conscience wouldn’t allow him to go so low."

But, any of these lines spoken aloud at the Cohen hearing would have gotten great peals of laughter.

Of course, Donald Trump is capable of all these dis-reputable things. The real question is: Was he foolish enough to actually do them and get caught?”

The reality is that the Republicans at the oversight hearing seem to be staking the future and the reputation of their party on all the on-going falsehoods of Donald J. Trump…?

If that is the case, it does explain why the senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, is walking around in a fog because he knows that there are so many senate seats up for grabs in 2020.  In addition, that it is possible that the nation could once again have a single party running the country…..and it wouldn’t be the GOP.

It is beginning to look like Michael Cohen could in fact become the “John Dean truth teller of the Trump presidency”.  Michael Cohen does know 'where all the bodies are buried,' much like Nixon's former lawyer.  And after working as Trump’s “fixer” for the last decade, he has already given the prosecutors at the Southern District of New York (SDNY) and perhaps the Robert Mueller investigation, a long list of other individuals who will be under oath to help find and confirm those buried bodies.  One only needs to look at how many individuals close to Trump have already pleaded guilty to breaking the law.  Some of them weren’t involved with Trump directly.  But with Michael Cohen, that’s a direct connection to inside “Trump’s World”.

There is a good reason why Trump was so upset when the Feds originally raided Michael Cohen’s home and office.

Trump’s business is more and more looking like old episodes of the “The Sopranos.”  This total narcissist has now slipped his leash, and as president he is roaming wherever he wishes across this wide, wide world.  At some point it has to stop.

For Donald J. Trump, we have a mind uncluttered by its ignorance, a lack of a creed or a conviction.  All it recognizes, like any good mob boss, is loyalty.  Trump insists on loyalty, and to his person, it is his main, perhaps exclusive, measure of his support. 

Some Americans may be drawn toward Trump because of his views on immigration or on trade.  But it is totally ridiculous to think that Trump holds their loyalty because of an immigration or trade policy.  His appeal is his persona, this is his total appeal.   Trump has built that persona over many decades.  How else could a person in his position tell those thousands of lies and still hold on to so many supporters?

In addition, Trump never talks to persuade, but only to incite or to demean.

However, it does appear that some Republicans are beginning to learn the lesson that Trump’s narcissism is not completely unleashed.  It appears that it’s going run into Robert Mueller III and the “Rule of law”.

It will also run into the awaiting arms of the Southern District of New York prosecutors, and it has just run into the oversight of a Democratic House of Representatives.

This totally demonstrates why the vote for all those House Democrats in the 2018 midterms was an absolute necessity.

It could also become even more of a necessity in 2020.

Copyright G. Ater 2019