Steve Bannon used to refer to the Trump campaign’s crew of staff, advisers, aides, and hangers-on as the “island of misfit toys.” Karl Rove, no stranger to successful White House runs, better described them as “walking disasters.”
Two of those walking disasters are going to prison. Paul Manafort, Bannon’s predecessor as the top Trump campaign official, was found guilty on August 21 of eight counts of bank and tax fraud. Manafort is the biggest fish special counsel Robert Mueller has landed so far—even if the charges that Manafort hid or failed to disclose millions of dollars in income from his consulting work overseas do not directly reflect Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
The other of Trump’s associates heading to the clink is Michael Cohen, the president’s longtime lawyer and “fixer,” who pleaded guilty to eight criminal counts in federal court. That case, which Mueller passed off to the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, involved investigating private financial transactions Cohen conducted primarily on Trump’s behalf. Two were payments from Cohen to women, Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels, who claimed to have had sexual affairs with Trump and were preparing to go public with their stories before the 2016 presidential election. According to Cohen’s August 21 plea deal, he hid from the public information damaging to the campaign “in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office”—an obvious reference to Trump and one that implicates him particularly in the silencing of Daniels. This contradicts statements from the president, who has thus far denied he knew about the payments until after Cohen made them.
Trump seemed stunned by the one-two punch of the Manafort and Cohen news. At a rally in West Virginia hours after the verdict and plea deal were announced, he avoided the subject. The next morning, however, Trump settled into his familiar pattern: tweeting praise of those loyal to him, disparaging those he believes disloyal, and accusing others of having done something worse.
“I feel very badly for Paul Manafort and his wonderful family. ‘Justice’ took a 12 year old tax case, among other things, applied tremendous pressure on him and, unlike Michael Cohen, he refused to ‘break’—make up stories in order to get a ‘deal.’ Such respect for a brave man!” Trump tweeted on August 22. “A large number of counts, ten, could not even be decided in the Paul Manafort case. Witch Hunt!” and “Michael Cohen plead guilty to two counts of campaign finance violations that are not a crime. President Obama had a big campaign finance violation and it was easily settled!”
The White House followed his lead that afternoon, with press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders repeating a mantra in her briefing: “The president did nothing wrong, there are no charges against him.” Sanders insisted the Manafort case had “nothing to do with the president, nothing to do with his campaign.” She also said, “just because Michael Cohen made a plea deal, that doesn’t mean it implicates the president.”
“The White House is focused on the same things that we were focused on the first day that we got here,” Sanders summarized, reflecting the broad “this changes nothing” attitude that the president’s defenders have taken.
But a great deal has changed. Despite assertions to the contrary, Cohen has implicated Trump in an attempt to cover up embarrassing stories right before an election. And Manafort’s own legal issues are far from over—he’s preparing for a second trial, and the pressure on him to make a bargain with prosecutors will mount. The August 21 developments only accelerate the larger investigation and, politically, that’s making things complicated for both Republicans and Democrats.
Some GOP operatives are echoing the White House’s status quo assessment, saying the Manafort and Cohen news won’t alter their strategy in the midterms. Voters already have their minds made up about Trump, Mueller, and collusion with Russia, they say, and only something substantive directly involving the president and Russia would make a difference. “I’m not seeing this Manafort/Cohen news changing much at this point,” says John Thomas, a Republican consultant working for House candidates. “The special counsel can change things if and when he makes an announcement.”
But this doesn’t mean they aren’t worried. “It puts incumbent Republicans and candidates in battleground districts in a precarious spot,” says a House GOP campaign operative. “If these individuals support calls to move forward with investigations (or impeachment), they will depress the Trump-base vote because they are bailing on the president. If they stand firm and dismiss the charges as politically motivated, they will potentially alienate GOP-leaning and independent voters (like those key college-educated, suburban ones) because they aren’t acting as a sufficient check on the president.”
As Oklahoma congressman Tom Cole told the New York Times, “Anybody who says this is not disturbing is not being honest, so my advice to any candidate would be: Keep your powder dry and don’t rush to attack or defend anybody because you just don’t know enough to have a reaction that you can still defend three months from now.”
For Democrats, Trump World’s legal woes present an opportunity—if they don’t blow it. In an August 22 letter, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi urged her colleagues to focus on “protecting Special Counsel Mueller” and “calling on [Republicans] to immediately investigate the President’s relentless assaults on the FBI and the Special Counsel.” Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, latched on to the idea of delaying the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in response to the Manafort conviction and Cohen plea deal.
Their idea is to divert grassroots attention from the I-word, which Democratic leaders in Washington fear is what their base hungers for. Connecticut representative Jim Himes made explicit the case against impeachment his party’s leaders are only hinting at. “No forward motion should be made on impeachment until special counsel Mueller has had a chance to finish his work and to tell us what the truth is,” Himes said on CNN. But it was Kevin de Léon, the California ultra-progressive challenging incumbent Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein, who channeled the party faithful in a campaign email. The subject line: “IMPEACH IMPEACH IMPEACH.”
The events of August 21 have started to clarify what Trump and his island of misfit toys were really up to in 2016. That, in turn, brings forth the central question of the fast-approaching midterm elections: Should Trump face political consequences for what we’ve learned about his associations over the past two years? Republicans will be tempted to argue “no” to deny Democrats the issue, but there’s a high risk that what happened with Manafort and Cohen is just the beginning. Democrats will try to insist on the importance of these events without looking too eager and so rallying depressed Republicans to the polls to stop an impending impeachment. What neither party seems confident about is where the voting public will stand in November.
