WHERE’S MY ROY COHN?
WHERE’S MY ROY COHN?
July 27, 2020
“The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.” Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, 1532
Donald Trump was hailed as a transactional president; a politician schooled in the logic of realpolitik; a grandmaster of the art of the deal. He would cut great deals for America; clean the clocks of those who deign to parasitize America the Beautiful; drain the swamp; and never leave anything on the table. Well... he didn’t; he didn’t; he didn’t; and he did. His greatness will be recorded by historians as No Points for Slytherin.
If Democrats impeach William Barr for his decision to represent the personal interests of Donald Trump over the interests of the United States - he will join the ranks of Trump’s prior personal attorneys: Roy Cohn and Michael Cohen, both of whom were disbarred. Rudy Giuliani will likely make it Four of a Kind at some point in the future. And if Trump is finally convicted for the crimes cited in his impeachment, even though he’s not an attorney, he’ll make it a Royal Flush.
We’ve had bad guys in America’s highest office before, but never have we had the den of thieves Jesus found among the callous merchants who had turned religion into nothing but a series of soulless transactional deals. Until now.
Trump has had tutorials in Tyranny 101 from Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Rodrigo Duterte, Abdel el-Sisi, Mohammed bin Salman, Recep Erdoğan, and the Kims. But not one could protect him from himself. And although he completely absorbed all of the lessons of his mentor, Roy Cohn, which were: “attack, always double down, accuse your accusers of what you are guilty of, and winning is everything” - Trump managed to bankrupt his casinos, bankrupt his companies, and now bankrupt the American economy. When we add to this résumé the art of insouciance in service of a deadly plague, and his laissez-faire response to police brutality in service of a putsch, his is nothing but a record of vandalism and looting.
But Trump is only one prince out of many. And princes come and go. It wasn’t simply a lack of ideas that made his ascent possible in the first place. It is the occult nature of the Republican agenda that formed Trump out of a lump of clay.
We have been consumed by teleological arguments in government - arguments intended to obscure a basic philosophy of “the end justifies the means”. Whether it’s Antonin Scalia’s “Originalism” or William Barr’s “Unitary Executive”, these men fuse their constitutional theory with their personal identity, and I would venture to say, with their religious identities as well.
Our judicial system is now in service to the exotic vocabularies of these men and the movement they represent. And we, as a nation, lack the critical thinking skills necessary to refute the gibberish inherent in their arguments, and the logical fallacies upon which their arguments rest.
We live in a theocracy now, where our Constitution, intended to be the voice of the Age of Reason, has become, instead, inerrant and purportedly in need of a king.
The corruption of our judicial system has left us a stupefied nation, where one is perplexed by how the Supreme Court's exegeses could possibly reflect the document it is obligated to interpret and defend. We are left wondering when the rationalism that our American founders seared into our Constitution became a crime against God; where be-robed men argue that women’s bodies are deemed the property of men; where corporations are people; where a new Black Death is permitted to ravage the countryside - as belief supplants reason and commerce overrules the urgency of imminent death.
These legal scholars, the five conservatives on the Supreme Court, have made a mockery of justice in America. Not only has our nation become a full-throated Christian nation, but no quarter is given to those who fail to bow to the doctrines of Mad King Don. We now have before us a royalist theocracy where once stood a 244-year-old pluralistic democracy.
American Conservatism is now governed by what Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island describes as “The Third Federalist Society” – a group within a group that is “the vehicle for powerful interests, which seek not to simply ‘reorder’ the judiciary, but to acquire control of the judiciary to benefit their interests. This third Federalist Society understands the fundamental power of the federal judiciary to rig the system in favor of its donor interests”. Senator Whitehouse further quotes Don McGahn, Trump’s former legal counsel, as saying: “Our opponents of judicial nominees frequently claim the president has outsourced his selection of judges. That is completely false. I’ve been a member of the Federalist Society since law school. Still am. So, frankly, it seems like it’s been in-sourced.” https://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/…/the-third-federalist-so…
Perhaps the Madness of King Don will be extinguished on November 3, 2020 with the cleansing power of a mammoth Blue Tsunami. But if our tsunami fails to clean out the Augean Stables of this extremist conservative movement, all they will have lost is one prince. Just one prince among a sea of conspirators intent upon subverting democracy with faux doctrines that obscure their real intent, the establishment of a plutocracy – a Den of Thieves that will burn our country down.
Image: Niccolò Machiavelli, 1469-1527, Florence, Italy
