OpsLens

The Cohen Maneuver

So we hear today that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen received a three-year sentence after a guilty plea over actions involving the president. Various pundits are now sure that this path will lead to an indictment of the president either by the Manhattan-based U.S. attorney, the Mueller team, or the attorney general of New York. Perhaps all of them. They base this on info that Cohen supposedly gave the prosecutors.

As it stands right now, one problem. As the no-jail-term deal for former DIA chief and U.S. Army General Mike Flynn shows, prosecutors give deals when you sing. When you don’t sing you go to jail. So, if Cohen sang, why is he going to jail?

He is because, contrary to popular misconception, none of this has anything to do with the law. He may not have sung at all except in self pity. The game being played, the Cohen Maneuver, is simply this: use the law as a public relations tool to indict and raise suspicion. Let the press and the Dems do the rest and hope that the cloud over the president’s head will lead to his resignation or loss in the 2020 race. Mueller, Cohen, Flynn, all of it is absolutely meaningless outside the perspective of coordinated political/psychological operations. This is the way it may go down.

Rumors fly and gossip abounds for the next couple of months, enough time to get the new Dem House in and settled. The House Judiciary Committee will start to probe Trump on a plethora of issues, all the while claiming their only duty is to the law and the people. But two or three committee members will be designated as attack dogs and one GOP coward will be marked for favorable treatment by the committee majority and media when he or she shows signs of selling out the president.

In the midst of this the president will be indicted by the Manhattan-based U.S. attorney on charges of violating campaign finance laws. Nobody is even sure if a sitting president can be indicted or if the money in question is just a personal campaign donation, which is harmless and legal. But the charges really don’t matter. He could be indicted for returning the wrong soda bottles to the grocery for deposit (do they still do that?) and the same level of Captain Renault public outcry will issue forth from the usual suspects. Pretending to be taken aback by such a serious development they did not see coming, the Dems will immediately call for Trump to resign, as may a couple of Republicans. He will tell them to pound sand and his arch supporters across the nation will start feeling politically antsy, much like Brexit voters in the UK today feel they voted for something that is being unethically and unjustly being taken from them.

The ongoing Judiciary Committee hearings will now switch to a planned long and laborious hearing over articles of impeachment. The other charges will go away so the focus will be on impeachment. They want the hearing to last, be a death of a thousand cuts as the issue drags on and on into the 2020 election year. All throughout 2019 pleas will come for Trump to resign “for the good of the country.” There will be a false boomlet for Pence in the press, praising his high integrity and steady hand at the tiller. Polls will constantly reinforce the message, as responders who the pollsters already know well will beat a softly increasing preplanned eventual crescendo favoring presidential resignation. The president will hold fast.

Trump supporters will start to take to the streets in righteous anger. They will be violently provoked by Dem and far- left activists. When they respond they will be portrayed in the press as bully boy henchmen of an administration desperately clinging to power and considering extraconstitutional means to do so. Trump has so divided the nation he must now resign, will be the refrain. Marches to advocate that will be held both nationally and internationally. Certain unnamed Euroleaders…Macron and Merkel…will ask him to resign because of the malevolent global cloud he puts over the perception of America. They will claim to do this because they love and respect America. They will be lying.

There will be a close impeachment vote coming out of the House Judiciary Committee. The media chorus will reach fever pitch now. For they know that if he doesn’t resign and it goes to the senate for trial, like Clinton before, the chance for conviction there is slim to none. Every stop will be pulled out, every trick used. The full force of culture including television, movies, newspapers, academia, and the lot will all be mobilized to force the president from office. But this guy is a fighter. He will remember Grant’s words at Spotsylvania Court House, “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.” It will.

The vote in the full House could go either way. Most in the GOP will hold firm out of concern for their own political survival. They will also be put on notice by their constituents that apostasy will be treated badly next time at the polls. The Dems have to choose between their base, who will be baying for Trump’s blood, and the knowledge that no matter what they do he’ll probably survive a senate trial. Moderate Dems just elected in the House will see their careers cut short and their middle of the road creds in tatters if they vote for impeachment. If Trump wins he ends it there. But his people will have their revenge and he will win convincingly in 2020, brandishing the martyr’s crown. If it goes on to the senate he will not be convicted and will recover quickly, much like Bill Clinton did, blaming the Dems for the great time of national upheaval they caused by their ultimately unsuccessful witchhunt.

Some of us in politics in the mid 90s tried to convince our GOP colleagues not to back Clinton impeachment, recalling the wise political aphorism, “When your enemy is destroying himself get out of the way.” Bill Clinton would have kept twisting in the wind if the GOP had gotten over itself and let him sway to and fro. But they had to pile on. Clinton was then able to turn the whole thing back on them and came out hardly scathed. The Dems today are more filled with hysterical bile than the GOP was then. Their impeachment plan will likely come to the same Pyrrhic outcome if they try to force the president from office.