No wonder Donald Trump was so desperate to create today’s Kanye West distraction

| 7:06 pm EDT April 25, 2018
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Donald Trump brought in Kanye West today, gave him a signed “Make American Great Again” hat, and succeeded in getting him to play the fool. Kanye promptly tweeted a photo of himself wearing the hat and professed his love for Trump. Within minutes, Kanye’s fans were renouncing him, and other public figures were unfollowing him. Trump tweeted about Kanye twice just to keep the controversy going. Sure enough, we’re now learning what it is that Trump was trying to distract the public from.

Several major news outlets just announced that Donald Trump’s “attorney” is formally invoking the Fifth Amendment in the ongoing civil case between him and Stormy Daniels. The law does not see pleading the Fifth as an admission of guilt, but the court of public opinion largely does. Political and legal insiders have been expecting Cohen to do this, but it comes as a shock to the average not-particularly-political American, who is now thinking “If even Trump’s lawyer is pleading the Fifth, it must mean Trump did something really bad.”

It’s been widely reported that Trump and Cohen are still in contact, so Cohen likely tipped off Trump that he was going to plead the Fifth today. That gave Trump the opportunity to come up with a distraction in advance. Normally in these situations, Trump picks a fight with a famous black person in order to impress his racist base and use the resulting controversy to steer headlines away from what Trump doesn’t want people hearing. This time around, Trump decided to play up his relationship with one of the few famous black people who seems to like him. Go figure.

As far as the legal implications, Michael Cohen is pleading the Fifth in the civil suit because he fears that his testimony could be used to incriminate him by the federal prosecutors who are currently sizing him up for criminal charges. It’s worth noting that the Feds have already seized all of Cohen’s relevant communications, meaning that Cohen’s testimony may not matter anyway.