Anderson Cooper Dismantles Trump's Relentless Lies About the Michael Cohen Payoffs

From Esquire

One metric for how comically bad things are getting is when a serious, venerable newsman-type gets fed up. There are few more venerable or serious-apart from on New Years Eve-than Anderson Cooper, who has kept a straight face for years as the Republicans who trundled into his studio slipped further and further into fact-free phantasmagoria. But this week of weeks proved too much for even stoic AC to put up with, as Donald Trump's web of lies around the hush-money payments his lawyer, Michael Cohen, made to his alleged mistresses was torn asunder by a series of court filings from federal prosecutors.

Cooper laid waste to Trump and his administration Wednesday night for their relentless, shameless lying on the issue:

"A straight-up denial," said Cooper, and "just a straight-up lie."

Never forget that Trump used to just flat-out deny any of this ever happened-one or more of the 5,000-plus false claims he has made to the American public he theoretically serves. He denied the affairs. He denied any knowledge of the payments. Then he denied any involvement. Cohen denied Trump ever reimbursed him. Then, as Cooper pointed out, Rudy Giuliani went on Fox News and said outright that Trump knew about the payments and reimbursed Cohen-choosing, as any good lawyer or public relations professional would, to say his boss "funneled" the money. You know, like upstanding citizens do. Now Trump happily says publicly that it was a "simple, private transaction." What? I thought it never happened?

But as Cooper also highlighted, it wasn't just Trump lying through his teeth day after day. He had a whole network of distinguished liars, like Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who had the unmitigated gall to say recently that she hopes to be remembered as "transparent and honest." Her only competition in the Shameless Sweepstakes this week is Melania Trump, who provided an encyclopedia entry for "projection" in an interview with Sean Hannity. (Always remember that Melania pushed birther conspiracies about President Obama on TV. Also, that she used so-called "chain migration" to get her parents citizenship while her husband railed against it in the public square.) And, of course, there's the president.

The World's Most Powerful Man jumped on the Tweet Machine this morning for another chapter of He Doth Protest Too Much. The president once again tried to extricate himself from complex legal trouble via grammatically challenged tweetstorm.

Here, you're supposed to believe the guy who has lied about every single aspect of the case up to this point when he tells you he didn't direct Cohen to break the law. This contradicts federal prosecutors, who say Trump directly participated in the scheme, wherein Cohen set up a shell company in Delaware to make the secret payoffs to the alleged mistresses to stop them playing a role in the campaign. This was an attempt to obscure an in-kind contribution to Trump's presidential campaign-a crime. Executives from AMI, the National Enquirer holding company that participated in the payoff of Karen McDougal, have seconded the notion that Trump was a full participant and that the payment was related to the campaign. And, of course, Cohen himself has said the same.

The only one who disagrees is El Jefe, who elsewhere in the tweetstorm suggested Cohen had pled guilty to a non-criminal offense. That's not really how this whole thing works. But Trump's more basic problem is that he is the Boy Who Cried Wolf, except the wolf is any topic, ever, and the crying is lying. No one has any reason to believe anything he says, because if the last two years have proven anything, the truth is usually worse than what he's lying about initially. Quite simply, the President of the United States has no credibility whatsoever.

Yet there are millions of Americans who will believe this drivel, spit out the same week Trump had a meltdown in the Oval Office while demanding $5 billion in American taxpayer cash for his Wall:

He "often stated" that Mexico was going to pay for it. That's it. That he's subsequently said other things does not change that, much as the president continually tries to push anything beyond 48 hours ago down the memory hole. Surely, his allies in Congress will try to push the fact that Trump is now an un-indicted co-conspirator in a federal crime in the same direction. Will they do the same, again, with whatever comes out of the multiple other investigations into him? What will AC's show look like that night?

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