Michael Cohen just stuck a dagger into Donald Trump
Let me begin by saying I believe every word of Michael Cohen’s opening statement to Congress. There sometimes comes into the life of a person a moment of clarity when they know in the deepest reaches of their being that nothing short of the truth will serve. I believe that moment finally arrived with Mr Cohen and it is reflected in his statement. Say what you will about Mr Cohen as a human being, and I can think of much that is savagely and deservedly deprecatory, his opening statement has the unalloyed, unmistakable ring of truth.
From his identifying, for the record, that Donald Trump really and truly is “Individual 1” in the Mueller investigation, to his characterizing Trump as a bigot, a liar, a thief, a conman and a racist, it all summoned for me the Donald Trump I have grown to know and despise with an illuminating honesty that simply cannot be counterfeited.
But there was one item, a minor item really, if extortion can be called “minor,” that stuck out for me in particular, one that I did not want to get lost in that breathtaking catalog of Trump malfeasance. It was when Cohen said he was providing copies of letters to Congress that he wrote on Trump’s behest, among which that included a “direction that threatened his high school, colleges, and the College Board not to release his grades or SAT scores.”
What pricked my memory about that is I recalled from the days when I took my own SAT test that a sufficiently high SAT score, when taken before 1994, can serve as an entree to the high IQ society “Mensa.” I further recall that, when Trump learned that Rex Tillerson referred to him as a “moron,” Trump crowed that he would happily challenge Rex Tillerson to an IQ test.
Well, as surely as a capital “T” rhymes with “P” that stands for “pool,” Trump has another bit of trouble that has come home to roost in the form of a lie. I’m guessing that if his SAT score is poor, and an SAT score is commensurate with an IQ score, Donald Trump’s IQ may very well turn out to be quite low indeed. And let’s face it, if it were otherwise he certainly wouldn’t ask his fixer to hide it now, would he? Trump is many things, modest isn’t one of them.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.