Opinion: The most revealing insight of Michael Cohen’s testimony
By Karen Tumulty Karen Tumulty Columnist covering national politics Email Bio Follow Columnist February 27 at 6:38 PM Of all the things that President Trump’s former personal lawyer revealed in his remarkable day of congressional testimony Wednesday, the one that shed the greatest light was this: Trump never expected — or even really wanted — to win the 2016 election.
This, of course, is not the first time someone has reported that Trump himself was surprised by his victory. It was a major part of the narrative in Michael Wolff’s best-selling “Fire and Fury,” explaining Trump’s lack of preparation when he assumed the most powerful office in the world. Now, however, he has little left to lose. So when he laid out Trump’s motivations, it carried a ring of truth, and not only because the self-described “fixer” was in a position to see and understand the many levels of calculation that went into the endeavor that put Trump in the White House. In Cohen’s telling, Trump’s expectation that he would lose became the predicate for many of his otherwise inexplicable actions during the campaign.
If the whole exercise of running for president was a pretense, just another reality show, then the lying and manipulation required to pull it off might have seemed, as Cohen claimed, “trivial.” So Cohen made hush payments to women with whom Trump allegedly had affairs, lodged threats of legal action to keep Trump’s presumably embarrassing academic record a secret and fibbed about the possibly nonexistent bone spurs that kept his client from being drafted to fight in Vietnam.
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