It’s almost funny — not that anything is really funny about the Donald Trump hush money, book-fixing trial — that the defense’s final argument begins and ends with the fact that Michael Cohen is a liar.
Because it’s indisputably true.
Michael Cohen is a liar. He’s also a sleazebag. Worse still, he’s a lying sleazebag who actually went to prison for lying. You’d be hard pressed, in normal circumstances, to find anyone less credible.
But these are hardly normal times. Because if we can agree that Cohen is a convicted, lying sleazebag, we also must agree that’s exactly why Donald Trump employed Cohen as his fixer for all those years.
It’s not much of a defense of Trump to insist that Cohen is a liar. It’s actually an indictment of Trump. Yes, another one.
It will be up to the jury to decide whether Trump was guilty of fixing the books when reimbursing Cohen for paying off Stormy Daniels. It will be up to the jury to decide whether or not Trump was paying back Cohen, many times over, for paying off Daniels or whether he thought it was an outsized reimbursement for Cohen’s crack legal work.
But you don’t have to be on the jury to know what it means that Cohen was Trump’s longtime designated bully boy and hatchet man.
In his closing, Trump lawyer Todd Blanche went all sports metaphor on us, calling Cohen the MVP of liars, the GOAT — the Greatest of All Time — of liars, and then bringing down the metaphorical hammer, calling him the GLOAT, or Greatest Liar of All Time.
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The GLOAT reference is not a bad line. But it is a bad joke.
Blanche did all this while representing the real GLOAT, the former president who, during his four years in office, lied more than 30,000 times, according to the carefully documented running score conducted by The Washington Post. I don’t know if Cohen could begin to match that.
Blanche did this while representing the person who continues to tell the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was rigged — the lie that MAGA World has adopted as gospel. Even Cohen says he knows better.
Blanche did this while representing the person that a jury had found liable for defaming — you know, lying about — the writer E. Jean Carroll, whom Trump was also adjudicated to have sexually assaulted. This, it seems, is way out of Cohen’s league.
And God help us, Blanche made his grandiloquent statement on Cohen’s skills in prevarication just days after Trump had made the outrageous gut-punch of a lie that Joe Biden and the FBI were ready to assassinate him during the 2022 Mar-a-Lago search for Trump’s hidden cache of classified documents.
In a fundraising letter, Trump charged: “You know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable … Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.”
The same day, he wrote on his social media site that “Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE.”
As most of us have learned by now, the use-of-force language in an FBI search warrant is standard for any such operation. It is such an over-the-top lie — neither Trump nor his family was even at Mar-a-Lago during the search — that no one could possibly be dumb enough to believe it, except for, uh, Lauren Boebert. Or Byron Donalds. Or Paul Gosar. Or some deluded Trump acolyte who might take it upon himself to avenge this so-called UnConstitutional Raid.
Or maybe, and this has to be the Trump team’s best hope about Trump’s lies, at least one juror, which would be enough to force a hung jury.
Whatever else this trial has accomplished, it has made the irrefutable case — one you’d think was made long ago — that Trump is not just a liar, but also a sleazebag. And not just because he said — in what everyone knew to be a lie — he would take the stand in his defense but, of course, didn’t. And not just because he apparently slept with a porn star while Melania was home tending to their baby son. And not just because he routinely tells vicious lies about any judge or prosecutor who stands in his way.
This trial reminded us that Trump’s 2016 campaign was born in sleazy cooperation with the National Enquirer — the prosecutors call it a conspiracy, and maybe it was — to quash negative stories about Trump and to invent preposterously damning stories about his opponents.
It was the National Enquirer, you’ll remember, that wrote the Trump-pleasing lies about the crazy idea that Ted Cruz’s father was somehow involved in a real assassination plot — the one that killed John F. Kennedy.
And speaking of (possible) lies, Blanche had to spend time during his closing argument repeating Trump’s assertion that he never slept with Daniels. Who really thinks he didn’t? But, in any case, it isn’t important to the outcome of the trial.
What’s important is whether Trump tried to cover up the Stormy Daniels story, which would have broken just days after the Access Hollywood tape and just days before the election. Covering up stories, after all, was clearly part of Trump’s campaign strategy.
What is most important — and what Blanche tried desperately to diminish — was that the Daniels payoff grew out of the catch-and-kill cooperation that began with a 2015 meeting among Cohen, Trump and National Enquirer publisher David Pecker. In his testimony, Pecker told the whole sordid story about his friend Trump.
Blanche tried to argue that Trump’s deal with the Enquirer was business as usual, the way that the press works. It isn’t, of course. It’s not even the way the National Enquirer works. The paper is known for its sleazy stories, but not for actively conspiring to help a candidate win the White House.
The Enquirer may be well known for paying hard cash for dirt and innuendo, but not for paying to quash stories that would have been blockbusters, or as Pecker called them, “gold.”
In Blanche’s view, though, it didn’t matter if there was “a conspiracy to win an election,” he said, because every campaign “is a conspiracy” to win an election.
Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass would later jump on that, saying what Trump had done, with Cohen’s help, with the National Enquirer’s help, was a “subversion of democracy.”
That’s the case. It isn’t about Cohen’s lies. It’s about Trump’s investment, with Cohen’s aid, in what was clearly election deception and whether that deception — hush money payments, in and of themselves, are not illegal — amounts to a crime.
But the case matching the two liars, Cohen and Trump, basically comes down to this. Cohen says he paid Stormy Daniels $130,000 out of his pocket and demanded that Trump pay him back.
Trump argues that he was simply reimbursing Cohen for legal fees and that the reimbursement, which Cohen says would have been for about 10 hours of legal work, amounted to $420,000.
Really? Well, you can tell it to the judge.
And, yes, now to the jury, which, after weeks of testimony, finally gets to decide what is a lie and what isn’t.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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