A personal and mental incarceration
Natasha Bertrand and Russell Berman on Cohen’s paying the price for loyalty to Trump:
The sentencing marked the culmination of a months-long saga that began in April with a dramatic FBI raid on Cohen’s home and office and ended with Trump’s most loyal lieutenant and fixer—who once said he would take a bullet for his boss—turning against the president and implicating him directly in criminal misconduct. In Manhattan federal court on Wednesday, Cohen apologized to his family and to “the people of the United States.”
As well he might, since he did his bit to get Trump elected president. Maybe without his bit Trump wouldn’t have been elected? It was very close. Some 50 thousand votes or so in 3 states? So close.
“Today is the day that I am getting my freedom back,” he said in a prepared statement. “I have been living in a personal and mental incarceration ever since the day that I accepted the offer to work for a real-estate mogul whose business acumen I deeply admired.” He said that his “blind loyalty” to Trump led him “to take a path of darkness instead of light.”
Much of Trump’s “business acumen” was fraud, theft, and exploitation. That’s personal and mental incarceration for you.
Cohen still poses a significant threat to the president in the investigation into a potential conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. He has taken Mueller deep inside the Trump Organization, describing how he helped Trump pursue a real-estate deal in Russia well into the election campaign, and provided the first in-court evidence that Trump may have been compromised by Russia while President Vladimir Putin was waging a direct attack on the United States. Cohen has committed to continuing his cooperation with Mueller, even after being sentenced in the Southern District, according to the special counsel’s filing.
Have a nice day, Donnie.
The wannabe mob boss Trump and his fixer Cohen are not exactly Vito Corleone and Tom Hagen, are they?
I suspect all of Donald’s business acumen was nothing more than hiring people and telling them to use their own business acumen to sort out the details and enact Donald’s edicts. He doesn’t have the skill to do anything himself, it’s the people around him.
Holms, I have to wonder if he even did his own hiring, as lousy as he proves to be at hiring people in his administration. He fires, but I’ll bet other people hire for him, as well as tossing coins for him, pick up golf balls for him, and build hotels for him.
AoS,
With the Trump Administration, you’ve got Sonny at the top, and then it’s Fredos all the way down.
Except with none of Sonny’s thuggish charisma.
Screechy Monkey, I am reminded more and more of a wonderfully silly movie, Mafia, a parody of the major mob movies; mostly The Godfather, but with plenty of Casino, Goodfellas, etc. references (and lots of non-mob movies, too, including a brilliant Forrest Gump scene ending with a little girl shouting “Run, Florist, run”). The aged Don, played by Lloyd Bridges, is based on Brando’s Vito Corleone, but Bridges’ Vincenzo Cortino is the incompetent head of an incompetent mob family; he has two sons, one ruthless-but-inept and the other just inept, and Christina Applegate’s character is Ivanka to a tee – superficially attractive but greedy, empty-headed and selfish. There is not a single member of the mob capable of doing what they’re supposed to be doing, and the whole resembles Trump and his administration so much that if not for the fact that it dates from 1998 one could easily believe that Cheeto and family were the ones being mocked.
AoS, I remember that film. It starred Jay Mohr also, right? I saw it in theatres and thought it was hilarious, then I rented it a year or two later and couldn’t finish it. Not sure if I was just in a different mood, or the experience of watching in a theatre with a crowd vs. at home, or what.
#7, that’s the one. It also had a lot of the actors who appear in regular gangster movies; Vincent Pastori, Joe Viterelli, and so-on.
I think that a lot of comedy movies of this kind are best watched in company (oddly, people laugh more at comedy when in company than alone), but they also don’t work so well on a second viewing. Maybe it’s because the jokes are so silly (the ‘Casino’ scene with the cattle prod, for instance, or the ‘sleeps with the fishes’ routine) that, just as with ‘jump scares’ in horrors, once you know they’re coming they lose their effect.
The only benefit I found from watching it a second time was in picking up on the more subtle gags that I’d missed the first time through laughing.