Michael Cohen learned that membership in Trump's inner circle has a harsh cost | Sidney Blumenthal

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

73% : Empty flattery of Trump is worth the speakership.
70% : Trump has been especially obsessed with Frank Sinatra, ring-a-ding-ding.
69% : With him on the ticket, Burgum would be outside campaign finance restrictions and could open the spigot of his fortune for Trump.
67% : "I felt that Donald Trump was my mentor," he testified.
67% : There was the former teenage model and ingenue from Greenwich, Connecticut, Hope Hicks, whose association with the Trump Organization began by promoting Ivanka Trump as a fashion icon, and was elevated to Trump's campaign press secretary and a White House counselor.
64% : Trump was contemplating what would happen after Melania made good on the latest post-nup.
63% : When Weinstein was convicted of sexual assault and rape, Trump stated it sent a "very strong message" and was a "great victory" for women.
63% : Trump sent him a message during his trial: "Stay strong, I have your back.
62% : There were the Fox News anchors, Jeanine Pirro, who exchanged smiles and nods with Trump, and Laura Ingraham, reprimanded by court officers for staring through forbidden binoculars as though she were on safari.
59% : If Trump is the Republican goldencalf, Burgum is his potential cash cow.
57% : Scene 1: Trump invites Stormy to his hotel suite at a Lake Tahoe golf tournament.
54% : Trump has long tried to present himself in the image of a cool swinger in Sinatra's Rat Pack: "I'm king of the hill, top of the heap."
54% : "I've not been in many courtrooms in my life," he went on.
53% : Trump was strictly for cameos.
53% : Trump occupied a lower rung in the entertainment industry, faking his way through a reality gameshow.
52% : Trump told her the next day that Michael Cohen, his personal lawyer, had paid the money.
50% : Trump assembled around him a miniature court and hierarchy that populated a desolation row.
49% : Like the witnesses, whoever they have been, the trial has dramatized the web of the only kind of relationship Trump knows: master and servant.
49% : These Republicans are more than a sideshow: they're walking witnesses to the degree to which Trump has transformed the Republican party into his accomplice.
48% : They did not cross paths much, though in 2009 Trump turned up at a Miramax premiere in New York of Nine, starring Daniel Day-Lewis as an Italian film-maker with a complicated love life.
48% : If Trump is elected, the non-entity would be a heartbeat away from the presidency.
47% : Supposedly, like they were pals, according to Trump: "Frank Sinatra told me a long time ago, 'Never eat before you perform.'
46% : Roy Cohn had taught Trump how to create a Michael Cohen.
46% : When it comes to Trump, the mercenary motive always prevails.
45% : Cohen: Trump's.
45% : "We needed to put a spin on this," Cohen said, "and the spin that [Trump] wanted put on it was that this is locker room talk - something that Melania had recommended, or at least he told me that that's what Melania had thought it was."To maintain a degree of control in the marriage, Melania dances a tango.
45% : Her tale of slaughter in a recently published memoir was an exhibition of performative sadism to catch the eye of Trump.
45% : His advantage is not that he is bland and can never outshine Trump.
44% : According to Daniels, Trump promised her a spot on his TV show, then she "blacked out", finding herself vacantly staring at the ceiling.
43% : On the day that Stormy testified, in a bit of counter-programming, the chair of the Florida state Republican party announced that Barron Trump, Melania and Donald's son, 18 years old, would be a delegate to the Republican national convention.
42% : Trump's was a dismal variation on the theme of Harvey Weinstein.
41% : Trump posed for a photo with his arms around his wife and Weinstein's.
41% : Michael Cohen owed everything to Trump.
40% : As the prosecution has built its case, each and every person called to the stand has described their own strange master-servant relationship with Trump.
40% : The personal injury lawyer from Long Island claimed he read The Art of the Deal twice before Trump hired him.
39% : Trump didn't wear a condom.
39% : When Trump sought to hire Sinatra to play at his Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, he tried to renegotiate the contract to pay him less than he originally promised, telling him his fee was "a little rich".
39% : In January, he landed the biggest "rat" of them all for an endorsement: Sammy "The Bull" Gravano - a former hitman for the mob who confessed to involvement in the murders of 19 men and a stoolie who sent away his boss, the "Dapper Don" John Gotti, for life - stepped forward to stamp Trump "a legitimate guy"."Thank you to Sammy the Bull," Trump tweeted.
39% : "Standing behind the metal barrier in front of the courthouse, careful not to enter, Johnson waved to Trump.
38% : Two days later, the Florida Republican party issued a statement rescinding the original one, now stating that Barron Trump "regretfully declines to participate due to prior commitments".
38% : Cohen was a made man; Trump had made him.
37% : When the Access Hollywood tape was disclosed a month before the election of 2016 on 7 October - "grab' em by the pussy" - Trump "wanted to make sure that there was a denial of any kind of relationship", Hicks testified.
36% : Trump has turned elsewhere for character witnesses.
36% : As slavish as McDaniel was to Trump, her sin was that it was not down to the last cent.
35% : One of those tasks was paying off Stormy Daniels at Trump's orders, he testified, and Cohen served two years in prison for tax evasion and campaign-finance violations, among other crimes, for his service to Trump.
35% : In the meantime, he simply has to perform like a Mike Pence dummy, until the moment inevitably arrives when Trump tries to coerce him to become a co-conspirator.
34% : Running for re-election with indictments shadowing him this year, Trump began trolling for unofficial character witnesses.
34% : Trump has installed his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as co-chair of the Republican National Committee, to replace Ronna Romney McDaniel, who had resisted shoveling every last penny of RNC funds into Trump's legal defense fund.
33% : On 21 January 2021, when Trump took off from Washington at Andrews air force base, after inciting the January 6 attack on the Capitol and being impeached a second time, he had the loudspeakers blaring out one of Sinatra's theme songs, My Way, as if Sinatra was granting him a pardon.
33% : The offstage but oft-mentioned character who never appears as a live witness is Trump's third wife, Melania, of the separate bedrooms, who was pregnant while Trump was inviting Stormy and a bevy of adult film stars into his Tahoe hotel suite.
33% : Roy Cohn owed nothing to Trump.
30% : Scene 3: Stormy comes out of the bathroom to find Trump lying on the bed in a T-shirt and boxer shorts.
29% : Illustrating their rotten characters proves Trump must be innocent.
29% : In scene 1, Stormy made fun of Trump decked out in Hefner's signature silk pajamas, his laughable affectation without the artifice of Hef's highfalutin Playboy philosophy.
29% : In 1990, Trump appeared with a model on a Playboy cover, which he flaunted at a campaign stop in North Carolina in 2016.
29% : Cohen testified that he asked Trump,"How's things going to go upstairs?" referring to Melania's anger, and Trump responded with the coldest revelation to come out of the trial: "'Don't worry,' he goes.
28% : While the testimony and evidence may nail Trump on 34 felony charges of business fraud, the trial has painted a vast canvas of human bondage.
28% : In scene 2, according to Daniels, Trump kept circling, shark-like, to learn if Daniels might be infected with venereal disease.
28% : Trump was named in his federal indictment from the southern district of New York as Unindicted Co-Conspirator 1.
24% : Trump came to him as a supplicant to rescue him from a racial discrimination suit, which Cohn resolved through his trademark intimidation, delay and bluffing.
24% : He did whatever Trump asked of him, from lying about whatever needed to be lied about to threatening inquisitive reporters to trying to negotiate a Trump Moscow Tower.
23% : Trump called him a "rat", a term of art applied to an FBI informant snitching on organized crime.
22% : Trump's whining about the "rigged" Emmys was a rehearsal for his "Stop the Steal" coup.
21% : She ordered the campaign staff: "Deny, deny, deny."Four days before the election in 2016, Trump directed her to deny the story of the payoff to Stormy Daniels, Hicks has said.
21% : This was after numerous women accused Trump of sexual assault but before he was adjudicated a rapist in the E Jean Carroll defamation case.
21% : Trump is frantic for cash.
20% : Trump was a familiar type of blustering wannabe, with a thick wad of bills to be given a ringside table and to be avoided, until he became obnoxious and Sinatra had to tell him to "go fuck himself".
20% : The gesture was a small price to pay after convincing Trump to help him fend off Marjorie Taylor Greene from carting him away in a tumbril.
18% : In the midst of the current trial, on 11 May, Trump held a rally in New Jersey, where he hawked a patently false story about Sinatra to connect with the Jersey crowd.
18% : After Johnson fended off the attempt to remove him, he must play a game to defend Trump in order to play Trump in order to defend himself from Trump's feral acolytes.
18% : If Trump needs Vance to win Ohio, he has already lost.
18% : Burgum, a political nobody, appears as a godsend to Trump.
16% : Sinatra sent Trump a message to "go fuck himself".
16% : Senator JD Vance, of Ohio, who in one of his several past incarnations denounced Trump as "America's Hitler", has since turned into a Trump trooper.
15% : The stories of the two principal witnesses, Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen, like those of everyone else who has ever dealt with Trump, are divergent accounts of the Trump syndrome of domination and submission.
15% : When Trump proposed a feature for Playboy, "The Girls of Trump", it was rejected.
13% : Trump infamously boasted that he could get away with shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, but Noem's bragging about killing her dog on the farm unexpectedly became her retelling a murder-suicide.
11% : In the courtroom, while Stormy testified, Trump loudly muttered, "Bullshit!"
11% : His shtick is patched together from a variety of sources - borrowing, for example, from the method of Don Rickles, the insult comedian, to whom Trump unsuccessfully tried to sell a condo in one of his properties, to the method of Bob Grant, a now forgotten racist demagogue with a daily program on CBS Radio in New York, on whose show Trump appeared.
11% : In 2017, Stephen Colbert, as the host of the Emmy awards show, mocked Trump.
10% : But Hef exploited Trump for his gilt-edged louche image more than Trump succeeded in exploiting Hefner.
8% : Tommy Tuberville, the village idiot of the Senate, who held up military promotions for months, blunderingly gave the entire game away, and conceivably could get Trump into further hot water, by stating that he and the others came on Trump's behalf to "overcome the gag order".
2% : The Trump lackey, through a tortured ordeal, at last came to a harsh realization of how grotesquely Trump had manipulated, exploited and betrayed him, and now he stood lashed in the witness box by Trump's lawyer for being Trump's lawyer, the liar that Trump depended on.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.