There is a move that daytime television producers make when a show has run out of plot. A character who died — buried, mourned, whose death powered two seasons of grief — walks back through the door. There was a secret hospital.
There was an identical twin. Ratings spike for a week while the audience waits to find out what it meant, and then the writers discover they have nothing for the character to do, because the return was never a story. It was a substitute for one.
That is what aired on WABC radio on Thursday night, and it is worth being clear about who it was for. Michael Cohen spent a decade as Donald Trump's fixer, went to federal prison, testified against him in a Manhattan courtroom and helped produce 34 felony convictions. Cohen built a second career calling Trump a criminal.
Eight years of that, and the reckoning Thursday lasted under a minute. "A good advocate, and then they weaponized you like nobody's ever been weaponized," Trump offers — no villain in the story after all, just an unnamed third party that did this to both of them. Cohen takes it: "Well, maybe just you and I, sir." Then Trump says the line that matters most: "I respect the fact that you recanted everything you said." He starts a sentence, is talked over, gives up, and pivots to a fond anecdote about 2016.
Nobody utters the words “prison,” or “conviction” or “hush money.” The dead man walks back through the door and the show moves on. Remember, the public largely came to know Cohen thanks to the Stormy Daniels hush money case. On May 30, 2024, a unanimous jury convicted Trump on all 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection with a scheme to silence adult film star Daniels, real name Stephanie Clifford, whose story about having sex with Trump threatened to derail his 2016 presidential campaign.
Cohen — who testified that he frequently sought approval for his “loyalty” to “the boss” — agreed to pay Daniels out of his own pocket, took out a home line of credit to front the cash, and created a shell company from which he could transfer the funds to Daniels’ attorney. Trump, the first-ever criminally convicted president, avoided jail time in that case but was handed a sentence of “unconditional discharge” that preserved the jury’s unanimous verdict. Cohen would go from saying he would “take a bullet” for Trump to calling him a “conman” and liken him to a Mafia boss.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
