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Donald Trump Went to Vietnam, and Michael Cohen Made It Hell On a humiliating twenty-four hours...
Donald Trump Went to Vietnam, and Michael Cohen Made It Hell
On a humiliating twenty-four hours for the President.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/donald-trump-went-to-vietnam-and-michael-cohen-made-it-hell
During his testimony to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, on Wednesday, Michael Cohen raised his bushy eyebrows and nodded emphatically as he read out the damning particulars of yet another alleged lie that Donald Trump has told the American people. The President, Cohen said in his opening statement, had admitted to him that his decades-old story about why he did not serve in the Vietnam War was false, revealing that he had never had bone-spur surgery, as he claimed in order to receive a medical deferment. The disclosure from Trump came during the 2016 campaign, when Cohen’s job was to shut down the bad press coverage of Trump’s dubious explanation for why he had not served in Vietnam. “You think I’m stupid?” Cohen recalled Trump telling him. “I wasn’t going to Vietnam.”
Amid Cohen’s many sensational claims of criminal wrongdoing by the President, it was perhaps understandable that this one Trump lie of many did not dominate the headlines. In seven hours of testimony, Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer testified that the President had paid hush money to cover up an affair with a porn star and produced signed checks to prove it; that he had known in advance about the WikiLeaks dump of hacked Democratic e-mails during the 2016 campaign; that he had engaged in a wide array of questionable and possibly illegal business practices; and that he had lied to the public about doing business in Russia throughout his race for the Presidency. With so much alleged wrongdoing to contemplate, Cohen’s claim that Trump was both a Vietnam draft-dodger and an inveterate liar about it was almost a throwaway.
Yet Cohen disclosed this on a day when Trump was actually in Vietnam, having travelled there to broker a breakthrough deal on nuclear disarmament with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un. “I find it ironic,” Cohen said in his testimony, addressing the former boss he once promised to take a bullet for, “that you are in Vietnam right now.” Ironic is one word for it; incredible is another. Earlier that morning, Trump had offered a rich example of his you-can’t-make-this-up Presidency. Sitting in his Hanoi hotel room before going to one of the most important negotiating sessions of his Presidency, Trump took the time to preëmpt Cohen’s Vietnam-draft-dodger allegation with an attack of his own, Twitter-taunting the Connecticut Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal (“Da Nang Dick,” in Trumpspeak) as a Vietnam “total fraud,” because he has been accused of misrepresenting his service record. “I have now spent more time in Vietnam” than Blumenthal, Trump tweeted. Some days, Trump is so brazen it is breathtaking. Wednesday was one of those days.
By Thursday morning, however, it was clear that no amount of Trump bluster or deflection could obscure the twin disasters of the last twenty-four hours. Trump had finally gone to Vietnam, and lost the battle, if not the war. Back in Washington, the Cohen testimony had been a humiliation, the most public turning on a President by his lawyer since the White House counsel John Dean warned Richard Nixon, in 1973, that Watergate was a “cancer on the Presidency.” One striking aspect of Cohen’s testimony was that Republican members of the House Oversight and Reform Committee chose not to argue with the substance of the allegations against Trump, in effect refusing to mount a defense of the President. Instead, they concentrated their questioning on matters designed to undercut the already suspect credibility of Cohen, who will soon go to prison for, among other things, lying to Congress. In Hanoi, meanwhile, the deal that Trump had hoped to cut with Kim failed to materialize—even the shameless flattery that Trump had lavished on the young dictator was insufficient to sway Kim from his demands for immediate sanctions relief while maintaining North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. Trump had no choice but to leave Hanoi empty-handed.
Amid Cohen’s many sensational claims of criminal wrongdoing by the President, it was perhaps understandable that this one Trump lie of many did not dominate the headlines. In seven hours of testimony, Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer testified that the President had paid hush money to cover up an affair with a porn star and produced signed checks to prove it; that he had known in advance about the WikiLeaks dump of hacked Democratic e-mails during the 2016 campaign; that he had engaged in a wide array of questionable and possibly illegal business practices; and that he had lied to the public about doing business in Russia throughout his race for the Presidency. With so much alleged wrongdoing to contemplate, Cohen’s claim that Trump was both a Vietnam draft-dodger and an inveterate liar about it was almost a throwaway.
Yet Cohen disclosed this on a day when Trump was actually in Vietnam, having travelled there to broker a breakthrough deal on nuclear disarmament with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un. “I find it ironic,” Cohen said in his testimony, addressing the former boss he once promised to take a bullet for, “that you are in Vietnam right now.” Ironic is one word for it; incredible is another. Earlier that morning, Trump had offered a rich example of his you-can’t-make-this-up Presidency. Sitting in his Hanoi hotel room before going to one of the most important negotiating sessions of his Presidency, Trump took the time to preëmpt Cohen’s Vietnam-draft-dodger allegation with an attack of his own, Twitter-taunting the Connecticut Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal (“Da Nang Dick,” in Trumpspeak) as a Vietnam “total fraud,” because he has been accused of misrepresenting his service record. “I have now spent more time in Vietnam” than Blumenthal, Trump tweeted. Some days, Trump is so brazen it is breathtaking. Wednesday was one of those days.
By Thursday morning, however, it was clear that no amount of Trump bluster or deflection could obscure the twin disasters of the last twenty-four hours. Trump had finally gone to Vietnam, and lost the battle, if not the war. Back in Washington, the Cohen testimony had been a humiliation, the most public turning on a President by his lawyer since the White House counsel John Dean warned Richard Nixon, in 1973, that Watergate was a “cancer on the Presidency.” One striking aspect of Cohen’s testimony was that Republican members of the House Oversight and Reform Committee chose not to argue with the substance of the allegations against Trump, in effect refusing to mount a defense of the President. Instead, they concentrated their questioning on matters designed to undercut the already suspect credibility of Cohen, who will soon go to prison for, among other things, lying to Congress. In Hanoi, meanwhile, the deal that Trump had hoped to cut with Kim failed to materialize—even the shameless flattery that Trump had lavished on the young dictator was insufficient to sway Kim from his demands for immediate sanctions relief while maintaining North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. Trump had no choice but to leave Hanoi empty-handed.