The Company Trump Keeps

Opportunists, scammers, and abusers like him

You can learn a lot about a man by the company he keeps.  In the case of Donald Trump, a crowd of sketchy characters is being revealed in his business fraud trial in a Manhattan courtroom.

To begin with, there’s Stormy Daniels, the adult film star/director who alleges she had sex with Trump at a celebrity golf tournament back in 2006. Though yet to testify, Daniels occupies the center of the case, which hinges on the fact that she was paid $130,000 to keep quiet so Trump’s 2016 campaign would not be damaged by another scandal.

I say “another” scandal because at the time of the payoff, which was allegedly covered-up by  the accounting fraud, Trump was dealing with the fallout from the release of a video tape in which he brags about how women let him grab them by their genitals. “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” he can be heard saying. “They let you do anything.”

One shady character who has  testified is Keith Davidson, the Los Angeles lawyer who practiced what you could call a legal extortion racket. As Daniels’ representative he threatened that she would go public with the story if she wasn’t paid. This scheme was a typical Davidson move. As the Los Angeles Times put it, “His niche is extracting money from celebrities for clients threatening to release sex tapes or share embarrassing stories with the media. “

Davidson was preceded in the trial by another smarmy witness,  National Enquirer publisher David Pecker.  Pecker was a key player in the payoff scheme, funneling money from Trump’s in-house lawyer Michael Cohen to Daniels, who agreed that she wouldn’t talk to other press outlets. In a practice  called “catch and kill” Pecker then made sure the story would never be published, which would benefit Trump’s campaign.

To say that Pecker’s actions ran counter to the practices of actual journalists is an understatement. Although everyone knows The Enquirer  is a rag filled with half truths and fabrications, catch-and-kill revealed that the tabloid pays to keep information out of the public arena.

And about Michael Cohen.  He spent years serving as Trump’s bully-boy fixer, berating and threatening people on his boss’ behalf and generally behaving like a thug (his word, not mine.)  In the case before the court, he will testify about how he attempted to hide Trump’s payment to Daniels. Trump’s lawyers will do everything they can to discredit him and in Cohen’s record of lies and thuggery they have a lot of work with. If I were a prosecutor, I’d likely accept that this guy is no angel and then I would stress that he was, in every instance, doing what Trump wanted.

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The rogues gallery involved in the hush money maneuvers gives us a sense who Trump really is. These are his kind of people. So too are the creatures in his political circle who are being unmasked in other legal proceedings. On Monday Trump’s former trade advisor Peter Navarro failed in his effort to get released from prison as he appeals his conviction for contempt of Congress.  What was his crime? He refused to testify before the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. (I served on the committee.)  

As Navarro sits and stews in a federal prison, Trump’s former White House advisor Steve Bannon is trying to wriggle out of charges that he defrauded people who had sent donations to an organization formed to help Trump build a wall along the US border with Mexico. Bannon’s organization promised that no money would be used to pay salaries. Now it seems that hundreds of thousands of dollars were secretly paid to the group’s president. Bannon, who says he’s not guilty, is slated for trial in May.

Meanwhile, in courtrooms around the country a host of Trump associates are facing charges related to their efforts to overturn the 2020 election and keep Trump in office. Boris Epshteyn, Sydney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and others were all part of Trump’s inner circle and now appear to have been willing to do whatever was necessary to please him.

From Stormy to Rudy the people who move in Trump’s world seem to fit a certain profile. They are manipulative and aggressive people who are willing to do anything to get what they want. In other words, they are a lot like him.