Michael Cohen’s testimony today was so devastating, Donald Trump’s handlers had to keep trying to calm him down
The comedian Lewis Black once had a great line about how George W. Bush was such an erratic idiot, his “handlers” might have to use pieces of meat as a treat to calm him down and distract him, as if he were a circus animal. That’s nothing compared to the extent that Donald Trump needs “handlers” these days, given that Trump is perpetually agitated, often confused, and mostly senile.
To that end, Trump showed up to his New York civil fraud trial on Tuesday, in a supposed attempt at intimidating Michael Cohen, who was on the witness stand. This kind of testimony can’t be easy for Cohen (or anyone else), but we’ve already seen Cohen come through in the clutch in these situations time and again. The idea that a senile Trump could rattle Cohen, just by giving him a mean look from the defendant’s table, is laughable. Instead it ended up being the opposite.
According to one reporter who was in the courtroom, while Michael Cohen was testifying, Donald Trump kept silently “fussing” at the table, and his attorneys had to keep “patting him on the arm” in order to calm him down. You can almost imagine Lewis Black standing there yelling “Get the meat!”
It’s now pretty obvious that Donald Trump didn’t go to this trial to try to intimidate Michael Cohen. Given Trump’s emotionally fragile and clearly rattled state, there was no chance of Trump intimidating anyone. All that Trump’s appearance did was project weakness and defeat. If anything, Trump insisted on attending Cohen’s testimony because he was scared to death of what Cohen was going to reveal. Given Trump’s reaction, Cohen’s testimony had to indeed have been devastating.
