Cohen Reveals What Trump Didn’t Know About Trump
“Women will hate me,” Trump said with typical wrongness
May 14: Trump’s fucking lies about fucking … AI election-fucking … Biden’s fucking China … Kamala Harris says “fucking” …
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If there’s a prevailing theme about yesterday’s trial testimony by Michael Cohen, the former fixer for pre-President Donald Trump, it’s that it is that to which the prosecution’s case all comes down. (That sentence is available as a handsome print suitable for framing as a gift for grammarian sticklers.)
And the fact that a conviction may hinge solely on Cohen’s credibility means there’s an ugly reality that non-fans of Trump ought to brace for: The possibility that Trump will be acquitted. Because it’s reasonable to doubt the veracity of a liar who’s literally lied so much he had to go to jail for it. In this country, rich people have to lie a lot to go to jail for it.
So, y’know, prepare yourself for the possibility of the phrase: “Not guilty.” And Trump gloating (without acknowledging that it would prove he was lying about the trial being rigged).
And here’s another point I want to make because some of you Newsfuckers pay for my gasbaggery, so I should at least try to give you insights you won’t get elsewhere.
For weeks, the Washington Post reported, Cohen has been described in sworn testimony as a thorny, aggressive “jerk.” And yet, when he took the stand for the first time yesterday, he was cool as a cucumber, albeit a cucumber with a criminal record for perjury. And therein lies the rub.
In his shockingly demure demeanor, Cohen was on his best behavior. In other words, he was putting on an act. Lying.
A smart Trump lawyer — o Lord, be there such a creature in all thy glorious land? — could use Cohen’s very professionalism and moderation yesterday to show just how fundamentally dishonest Cohen is. That’s not an unreasonable argument. Which, along with that whole perjury business, means it’s reasonable to doubt Cohen’s veracity.
Of course, no one becomes a paid subscriber to The Fucking News just for my depressing insights. I have an obligation, dear Newsfucker, to provide a complementary glimmer of hope or at least an uplifting dose of mordancy as we whistle our way to the gallows before it disappears beneath the rising tides. So…some hope for you Trump-haters out there: Jurors don’t have to assume Cohen is lying.
Even convicted liars say true things. And if jurors find it reasonable to believe the specific things Cohen says, regardless of whether he’s a liar generally, then jurors can conclude there’s no reasonable doubt about Trump’s guilt.
And prosecutors already seem to have laid out a case that doesn’t need Cohen’s testimony, just simple logic. If Trump were really paying Cohen for legal fees and really cared only about deceiving his wife, then why did it have to be before the election. And so on, like, how the payments were structured. Like exactly what legal fees was Cohen entitled to? What actual “law” shit did Cohen do for that money? Where are the invoices for billable hours? Etc.
And what Cohen said was credible! At that time, the fall of 2016 and/or America, Trump was “polling very poorly with women,” Cohen testified, unlyingly. And then there was the Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump bragged that women would let you grab their genitalia and do nothing about it if you were a celebrity.
That, Cohen said, is why Trump was desperate to buy Stormy Daniels‘s silence: To deceive voters. Here’s what Cohen testified came out of Trump’s mouth, contemplating the possibility that Daniels would talk:
“This is a disaster. Total disaster. Women are going to hate me. This is really a disaster. Women will hate me. Guys may think it’s cool, but this is going to be a disaster for the campaign.”
Guys may think it’s cool. Wildly enough, given that some of us remember that whole Bill Clinton thing — in which the entire Republican Party rose up in moral umbrage in defense of the institution of marriage (nvm Newt Gingrich) — Trump was right. In vast amounts, guys did and do think it was cool.
What Trump didn’t foresee, didn’t understand about himself yet — like a delicate orange butterfly emerging from its cocoon of familial trauma and seeing its own horrific reflection for the first time in a puddle of pee that he absolutely did not pay for — a huge amount of women thought it was cool, too.
I remember vividly when I first recognized the Lovecraftian contours of true, real Trumpism. It was July of 2015. At the Family Leadership Summit — a Christian nationalist event that wasn’t identified as such by media at the time because objectivity — Trump said that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) was “not a war hero.” He added:
“He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
Politico’s lede was “Donald Trump might finally have crossed the line.” Instead, of course, Trump’s polling numbers didn’t suffer at all. I’d tell you they actually went up, but I can’t be arsed to confirm whether that’s true. Point is, there was no line.
I understood then that, as Adam Serwer would so neatly encapsulate it, “The cruelty was the point.” But it wasn’t just cruelty. It was rejection of norms; the embrace of what They — The Powers That Be, the Deep State, the gatekeepers and definers of norms — deemed horrific.
The reason MAGA love Trump is because he tells them they don’t have to give a shit about rules.
Which is why, although he didn’t know it, they would’ve cheered his predatory, transactional philandering. And Trump could’ve saved himself both the money he paid Cohen and the criminal charges.
But Trump had grown up in a city that had recognized his bullshit qua bullshit for decades. He couldn’t imagine there were enough people in this country who would buy it anyway, even if, in return, he gave them license to be horrible.
The ultimate, or at least penultimate irony would be if Trump’s jurors decide it would be reasonable to doubt Cohen, but vote to convict Trump anyway, because he taught us all we don’t have to give a shit about rules.
Justice Department to Seek “Enhanced” Penalties for Election-Fucking AI
The Justice Department yesterday announced an aggressive effort to protect election workers and volunteers from threats and violence, saying that they will seek “enhanced sentences” against those who disguise their identities with AI, deepfakes, Photoshop or MacPaint™.
Such threats have grown dramatically in the fertile environment created by Attorney General Merrick Garland’s failure to arrest and prosecute D4FRFP1 Donald Trump the moment Garland was sworn in and Trump was sworn out.
At their news conference yesterday, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said, “As these crimes mutate with technology, they may be easier to hide and cheaper to perpetrate — but they are still crimes … Violent threats using AI are still violent threats. So, in these cases where threat actors use advanced technology like artificial intelligence to make crimes more dangerous and more impactful, the Department of Justice will seek enhanced sentences."
According to Axios, a Brennan Center for Justice poll found that 38% of election officials “experienced threats, harassment, or abuse,” fueling “an exodus” of experienced workers. And, according to me, creating a vacuum that can be filled by inexperienced MAGA bozos who will do what they want.
Since it started in June 2021, the DOJ’s Election Threats Task Force has prosecuted 17 cases, winning 13 of them, which works out to an overall rate of not fucking enough.
Biden Slaps Tariffs on China’s Solar Cells and EV Stuff
The Biden Administration announced this morning new tariffs and increases on old ones targeting China’s attempt to flood the planet with low-priced solar and EV tech, which is exactly what we need to save the planet from actual flooding.
Pres. Joe Biden has long blamed China for unfairly boosting its manufacturers with government subsidies, which the U.S. also does but has the good taste to call them tax incentives. But U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai has concluded that China is also stealing intellectual property and forcing U.S. companies to reveal their tech secrets, both of which undermine fundamental legal principles that are essential for U.S. oligarchs to keep stealing from the rest of us.
Tariffs on Chinese solar cells and semiconductors will rise from 25% to 50%.
Chinese EVs are not available in the U.S. Yet. And some, including Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), have called for banning them entirely. But the new tariffs will double the price of Chinese EVs and increase tariffs on lithium-ion EV batteries from 7.5% to 25%.
Other tariffs include:
Some types of steel and aluminum
Ship-to-shore cranes
Some types of medical equipment
This is one of those messy ones with all kinds of paradoxes. The tariffs will protect American jobs. But also make some things costlier, which means more inflation, which might lead to layoffs. The tariffs will make environmental tech more expensive, which might protect American jobs, but destroy the planet, which could lead to job cuts.
Politically, of course, it helps Biden compete with D4FRFP Donald Trump, by showing Biden, too, is tough on China. Of course, the best way Biden can simultaneously win over voters who want him to be more like Trump and convince other voters he’s nothing like Trump, is just to brag about how America under Biden is producing more oil than any country ever has. Win-win!
(As Politico annoyingly points out with its “facts,” Trump and Biden actually are different on tariffs. Trump wants not only to jack up Chinese tariffs even more, but to slap a generic tariff on everything coming in from any country, a guaranteed inflation-supercharger.)
Harris Gets on Board the “Fucking” Train
Vice President Kamala Harris issued a rare and subtle but unmistakeable endorsement-by-implication yesterday of The Fucking News, the upstart, hard-scrabble, independent news outlet that will die without the financial support of more of its loyal Newsfuckers.
Harris was participating in an event at the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies (APAICS, not to be confused with AIPAC) Legislative Leadership Summit yesterday.
She was discussing breaking barriers and said some pretty cool shit. “Breaking barriers does not mean you start on one side of the barrier and you end up on the other side,” she said. “There’s breaking involved. And when you break things, you get cut and you may bleed.”
Harris said young people especially shouldn’t let some people’s “limited ability to see who can do what” blind them to what they truly can do. That’s when she issued a subtle endorsement — obvious to those in the know — of The Fucking News. Here’s a screenshot from the actual, official White House website transcript, with not a single, cutesy little #@ symbol in sight:
Fox, of course, whipped out its smelling salts — because it’s not like they’re intimately familiar with a White House vulgarian — “reporting” that “Vice President Kamala Harris used profanity during a speech Monday.” [Editor’s note: Fox misreported that Harris’s remarks were a “speech” solely to preserve Fox’s unbroken record of getting at least one thing wrong every single goddam time, if only to provide a legal defense of rank incompetence the next time they’re sued for a billion dollars.]
It is apparently, based on my Google search, the first time the word “fuck” or “fucking” has appeared on WhiteHouse.gov:
Making it yet another first for Harris, TFN’s very first, honorary Official Newsfucker.
Campaign Watch
KENNEDY Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. yesterday claimed he’s submitted enough petition signatures to get his name on the ballot in Texas as a 2024 Independent presidential candidate.
Kennedy, who used to be a well thought of environmental lawyer, is now believed to have qualified for 14 states: California, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Michigan, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, and Utah.
Kennedy, who used to be a Kennedy, was initially thought — by people who are paid to think even though they often think wrongly — to be a greater political threat to Pres. Joe Biden, simply because Kennedy used to be a Democrat, used to champion Democratic causes, and used to be a Kennedy.
More recently, as a skeptic of vaccines and reason, Kennedy increasingly is seen as pulling from D4FRFP Donald Trump voters searching for a different brand of toxic irrationality.
At this point, your moderator would like to alert you that you may now make brain-worm jokes in the comfort of your own privacy, but I can’t do it here — much as it pains me — because that shit’s (a) ableist, and also (b) distracts from the point that there are substantive things about Kennedy and his platform that we can focus on. Jesus fuck I’m self-righteous!
TCB
NICOLE SANDLER You can check out Monday’s edition of the weekly “The Fucking News” segment on The Nicole Sandler Show here. And you die-hard Newsfuckers can find vintage TFN segments, too!
THE FINE PRINT Come find me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky, Mastodon, or Spoutible, where I post about original reporting and occasionally snark for the masses. (LMK if you want me to follow back, as otherwise I mostly use social media to get my stories out there and hunt for overlooked news).
Go get ‘em, kids…!
Disgraced, quadicted, fraudster, rapist, former President.
So many good chuckles this morning! Thanks!
Fox News "reporters" clutching their pearls🤣
As if they weren't some of the vilest people on the planet.