Delaware’s sketchy system for hiding the ownership of corporate entities is back in the news thanks to hapless Michael Cohen, who apparently used his Delaware-sanctioned artificial personhood for all his non-disclosure-agreement needs. Delaware: The Backpage.com of American finance.
If the Trump presidency were a football game, this is the point at which the fans would start singing “Sha-na-na-na” on the way to “goodbye.” Trump’s screeching tweets this weekend sounded like they were composed by Napoleon XIV. The New Yorker’s Adam Davidson, a veteran of reporting from Iraq and Wall Street’s 2008 meltdown, makes a convincing case that the Cohen raids were the beginning of the end for Trump — not because of election collusion, but common criminality. Josh Barro at Business Insider takes solace in the fact that despite Trump’s autocratic nature, he’s facing numerous complaints that the courts are upholding. Reporters say the White House is eerily quiet, and aides can’t get Trump to focus on anything but the Cohen raid. Personally, I think the aides should be slipping rhino tranquilizers into his Diet Cokes.
Also, too, the tough actions against Russia came not because of Trump but despite him, according to a WaPo account.
Republicans hoping to run on their tax cut scam are paddling upstream. Quinnipiac polling shows most people don’t care about taxes anyway — only 8 percent list them as an election concern, and support for the tax cuts remains underwater. “If they can’t run on tax cuts in a district Trump won by 20 [points] and win, where can they run on tax cuts and win?” said David Wasserman, House editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.
Missouri Republicans have it even worse. The state party is so desperate to prop up rapist Gov. Eric Greitens they have threatened lawmakers their funding will be pulled unless they rally around a guy whose accuser’s claims were found credible by a committee dominated by Republicans. As I point out whenever I can, we train these special-forces guys to kill without remorse, but we don’t reprogram them into humans before we turn them loose into civilian society.