Tuesday, Aug. 21, was the worst day of the Donald Trump presidency to date. That afternoon, Michael Cohen, his former personal attorney, pled guilty to tax fraud and campaign finance violations. Two minutes later, Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman, was found guilty on eight charges of tax and bank fraud. While neither case directly implicates the president — Cohen came close in a courtroom statement — both increase pressure on a mercurial, tempestuous and unpredictable man. The world must prepare for a U.S. president angry, distracted and eager to pick fights to divert attention from his own troubles.
Cohen was Trump's "go-to guy" and fixer, who famously said that he would "take a bullet for Trump." Yet on Tuesday afternoon, Cohen pleaded guilty to five counts of tax evasion, one count of making a false statement to a bank and two campaign finance violations: willfully causing an illegal corporate contribution and making an excessive campaign contribution.
More damning still, he told the court that "in coordination with and at the direction of a candidate for federal office," he worked in summer 2016 to keep an individual from publicly disclosing information that could harm the candidate, adding that he worked "in coordination" with the same candidate to make a payment to a second individual. In other words, the unnamed "candidate" — Trump — told Cohen to pay "hush money" to two women who alleged that they had had affairs with Trump to prevent those allegations from becoming public and damaging his campaign.