Thursday
One of the interchanges in Trump fixer Michael Cohen’s testimony before the House Investigation Committee yesterday jumped out at me because it had such an 18th century flavor to it. Kentucky Republican James Comer, seeking to undermine Cohen, challenged him with the following:
Comer: “You called Trump a cheat. What would you call yourself?”
Cohen: “A fool.”
Writers like John Wilmot and Jonathan Swift regularly talk about cheats and fools or, more commonly, knaves and fools. While knaves were worse, fools were not innocent. Cohen allowed himself to be fooled by Trump because it served his interests and boosted his ego.
But what we saw in the hearing was Trumpian knaves going after one of their own once he decided to don a mantle of honesty—or as Wilmot puts it in his masterpiece Satyr against Reason and Mankind, decided “to play upon the square.” Like the knaves described by Wilmot, Trump’s GOP defenders unsheathed their knives the moment that Cohen “dare[d] be less a villain than the rest”:
And honesty's against all common sense:
Men must be knaves, 'tis in their own defense.
Mankind's dishonest; if you think it fair
Among known cheats to play upon the square,
You'll be undone.
Nor can weak truth your reputation save:
The knaves will all agree to call you knave.
Wronged shall he live, insulted o'er, oppressed,
Who dares be less a villain than the rest.
There were a number of knaves agreeing to call Cohen a knave when he sought to salvage his reputation with truth. Attack dog Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, while an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State, turned a blind eye to wrestlers complaining that a team doctor was sexually harassing, abusing, and molesting them. Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who earlier in the day tweeted an implied threat against Cohen’s family , was once arrested for a DUI. North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows, who brought a token African American Trump supporter into the hearings to prove that Trump is no racist, once directed a racist birther joke against President Obama. Amongst the GOP participants, the contest appeared to be “who’s a knave of the first rate”:
Thus sir, you see what human nature craves:
Most men are cowards, all men should be knaves.
The difference lies, as far as I can see,
Not in the thing itself, but the degree,
And all the subject matter of debate
Is only: Who's a knave of the first rate?
Did you feel any of the disgust expressed in Swift’s poem “Ireland” as you watched the proceedings?
Remove me from this land of slaves,
Where all are fools and all are knaves;
Where every knave and fool is bought,
Yet kindly sells himself for naught…
And when their country lies at stake,
They only fight for fighting’s sake…
Knavish fool though he may have been, however, Cohen at one point rose to heights I didn’t know he was capable of. Sounding like a chastened tragic hero—say, Oedipus or Richard II– Cohen offered his tormentors some advice, as reported by the Washington Post:
After a relentless battering from Republican lawmakers over his established dishonesty, including lying to Congress, Cohen called them out for carrying President Trump’s water. He pointed to a poster board that a Republican lawmaker had put up with the words “LIAR LIAR PANTS ON FIRE!” next to a supersize photo of Cohen.
“It’s that sort of behavior that I’m responsible for. I’m responsible for your silliness because I did the same thing that you’re doing now for 10 years,” he told the Republican committee members. “I protected Mr. Trump for 10 years.”
Then he warned, more ominously, “The more people that follow Mr. Trump as I did blindly are going to suffer the same consequences that I’m suffering.”
At the end of the day’s hearing, chair Elijah Cummings attempted to remind the committee what was at stake, declaring, “We’re better than this.” His plea to honor our higher selves brings to mind Wilmot’s depiction of an ideal statesman at the end of his poem. To be sure, Wilmot isn’t sure that such an individual exists—the description begins with an “if you can find” clause—but it’s still good to spell out an aspirational ideal:
If so upright a statesman you can find,
Whose passions bend to his unbiased mind,
Who does his arts and policies apply
To raise his country, not his family,
Nor, whilst his pride owned avarice withstands,
Receives close bribes through friends' corrupted hands…
Being the skeptic he is, however, Wilmot ends the poem sounding like he’s just witnessed the GOP shenanigans at the hearings:
If such there be, yet grant me this at least:
Man differs more from man, than man from beast.
Let’s hope that, in those Cohen hearings held behind closed doors, people are operating higher up on the man-beast scale.