#michael cohen

[saywhat-politics]

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Trumpism Doesn’t Compromise — It Consumes

What’s unfolding isn’t politics as usual; it’s the deliberate capture of every map, court, and cultural institution to guarantee one party’s

Michael Cohen at MeidasTouch:

What’s happening now isn’t about negotiation, and it’s not about shared governance. It’s about bending the entire machinery of government — every institution, every lever of influence — to serve one ideology: Trumpism. Not Republicanism. Not conservatism. Trumpism. That’s an entirely different beast. It’s not a political philosophy; it’s a loyalty test. And in Trump’s America, you’re either a loyalist or you’re an enemy.

The MAGA-fied GOP isn’t just aiming at the usual suspects — the “woke” universities, the environmental agencies, the media. Now, the crosshairs are on places most Americans assumed were apolitical sanctuaries. The Smithsonian. The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Institutions dedicated to preserving our history and culture are suddenly “too liberal,” “too woke” for the Trump crowd and must be remade in the leader’s image. Even the Bureau of Labor Statistics — yes, the people who count jobs — is seen as a dangerous, left-leaning hive that needs to be “corrected.” And don’t even get me started on law enforcement. The Trump playbook is simple: federal law enforcement must be gutted, defanged, and reconstituted as a political weapon. First, it was the FBI and DOJ under constant attack. Then, D.C. police authority came into question. Next stop? Your town. If you think local sheriffs, state police, and prosecutors are immune to this takeover, you haven’t been paying attention. The endgame is a system where law enforcement doesn’t just enforce the law; it enforces Trump’s law.

[...]

The Washington Post recently laid out the stakes in brutal detail — even better than I did. Trump’s push to redraw congressional maps has set off a redistricting arms race. Both parties are in the fight, but it’s an uneven match. Republicans have more states under their control, more opportunities to shift the map, and fewer pesky independent commissions standing in the way. In short: they have the ammo, the battlefield advantage, and no hesitation about pulling the trigger.

In Texas, they’re already moving to add as many as five new red seats. Florida, Missouri, Ohio, Indiana — all ripe for partisan surgery to carve out more MAGA districts. The plan is to stack the House so deep in Trump’s favor ahead of the 2026 midterms that even a blue wave couldn’t dislodge them. And the Republicans are playing the long game. Redraw now, lock in power for a decade. Democrats? They’re scrambling. Sure, there are moves in California, Maryland, New York, Illinois, maybe Oregon. But let’s be honest; Democrats have already squeezed most of the juice from their controlled states. The GOP has more raw territory to work with, and the math isn’t on our side. Even Maryland’s lone red district and Illinois’s few remaining Republicans are more about symbolism than game-changing seat grabs. One Republican strategist put it bluntly: “There is no scenario where we don’t have more seats to go get than they do.” Translation: We’ve already beaten you on the battlefield map; now we’re just deciding how big the victory will be.

And here’s the real kick in the ass: this isn’t just a numbers game. Gerrymandering isn’t some abstract civics class issue. It’s the foundation for everything else. If you control the House, you control committee chairs, investigations, budgets — the levers that determine what gets done and what gets buried. It’s how you stack the courts, starve agencies, and pump money into pet projects that serve the ideology. If the Republicans lock in the House through redistricting, they can block anything that doesn’t pass the Trump loyalty test. Forever.

[...] The bigger picture? This isn’t just about winning elections. It’s about total institutional control — the kind that can’t be undone by one cycle or one president. Think about it: a Smithsonian reimagined to celebrate “patriotic” history, purged of anything uncomfortable; a Kennedy Center programming season that reads like the entertainment lineup at Mar-a-Lago; a Bureau of Labor Statistics that magically produces economic numbers that flatter the leader. And a law enforcement apparatus that enforces political loyalty above the actual law. That’s the America Trump and his loyalists are building.

Michael Cohen wrote a solid piece in MeidasTouch Network that the Trumpist capture of formerly apolitical and bipartisan institutions is a bad sign for America, trodding down a similar path that Viktor Orbán did in Hungary.

[corporationsarepeople]

Trump Bus Rolls Over MAGA Mike

Mike Johnson discovers what every loyalist eventually learns: the Trump bus never stops, and sooner or later, everyone hears the engine rev

Here’s the part MAGA never learns: Trump demands absolute loyalty when it serves him, and then, like any political figure operating in pure self-interest, he moves in whatever direction reality requires. That’s politics. But Johnson, like so many before him, made the fatal mistake of thinking Trump’s political instincts wouldn’t eventually collide with his own self-preservation.

[onlytiktoks]

[tomorrowusa]

Apartheid Elon probably thinks that he can just goose step off the scene. But Donald Trump is not quite finished with him.

Few people know how Trump's mind works the way his former attorney Michael Cohen does. His take on the next stage of the Trump-Musk feud is insightful – as well as occasionally entertaining.

[mysharona1987]

When that porn star hush money was a real bummer.

[porterdavis]

Trump 2028: The Joke That’s About to Kill American Democracy

He told us exactly what he planned to do — dismantle democracy, destroy the Constitution, and rule unchecked. The real tragedy? We still are

[prolifeproliberty]

READ: Full jury instructions at Trump’s hush money trial

The Manhattan jurors have begun their deliberations in the first criminal trial against a former U.S. president.

There are 55 pages of jury instructions, but the most important pages are pp. 27-31

This is where the judge instructs the jury on what the charges are and what is required for a guilty verdict.

Many people have spread misinformation that Trump was just convicted of campaign finance violations. This is untrue. He was not tried on those charges.

The charges he was tried on were 34 felony counts of Falsifying Business Records in the First Degree

This means they are saying Trump broke this law 34 separate times (in reality it’s that the same transaction is recorded and reported in multiple places, so each of those would be a separate count)

Normally, falsifying business records is a misdemeanor with a 2-year statute of limitations, which would mean they couldn’t have charged Trump with this UNLESS they could upgrade it to a felony.

To make it a felony, the prosecution is supposed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that:

1. He actually knew and approved of falsifying the records (Trump does not do his own accounting, if you weren’t aware)

2. He did so or agreed to do so with the intent of covering up another crime

The jury instructions include one possibility of what that crime could be (campaign finance violation), but the prosecution could not prove that he committed that crime and he was not officially charged and tried for that crime. The judge proceeded to tell the jury that they did not need to agree on whether the campaign finance violation was the crime that Trump was supposedly trying to cover up (p. 31). They only needed to agree that Trump was covering up some kind of crime.

Again, for those who haven’t followed this case, here was what the prosecution said happened:

Michael Cohen, as an attorney for Trump, made a payment to Stormy Daniels in exchange for he keeping quiet about a sexual encounter she claims she had with Trump

Michael Cohen claims that he told Trump about the payment and was reimbursed for the payment, and that the reimbursement was recorded as a payment for legal fees (this is where they claim it’s being falsified)

Only the defense was able to completely discredit Cohen’s story about when he supposedly had this conversation with Trump about the payment. (The video has lawyers reviewing the transcript, reading it, and commenting on the significance)

And then there’s the fact that the only evidence that Trump even reimbursed Michael Cohen for this payment is a $420,000 transaction marked as legal fees. Thing is, the payment to Stormy Daniels was $130,000. More importantly, Cohen had previously testified that he had been receiving $420,000 a year as a retainer from the Trump organization for several years. That is, $420,000 was his normal annual retainer fee, split into monthly payments of $35,000.

In this video you can skip to about 49 minutes in to hear these lawyers read the transcript and discuss Cohen’s explanation of how a $130,000 reimbursement somehow ended up looking exactly like his normal annual retainer.

So based on this testimony, it looks like the Trump organization may not have even reimbursed Cohen for the payment, they just paid him his normal legal fees, which is why they were recorded as…legal fees.

So when I say this trial is a sham, this is what I mean.