Trump’s Worst Day

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This may be one of the most significant weeks so far in the Trump presidency because of two events announced within minutes of one another on Tuesday.

One, a guilty verdict in the trial of Paul Manafort, and two, a guilty plea from Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, meaning that each man will now be sentenced for eight felony counts.

What have we learned this week?

And what could happen next?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hello, and welcome to Radio Atlantic.

I'm Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic.

Joining me once again here in DC is my inestimable co-host for this episode, Jillian White.

Hello, Janet.

Hi, Matt.

Nice to have you.

Jeff and Alex are off gallivanting as they do during the Augusts.

And so Jillian is joining me at the table.

And with us here is The Atlantic's national correspondent, Franklin Ford.

Hello, Frank.

Hello.

Yay, Frank.

Down somewhere in North Carolina is one Atlantic staff writer, David Graham.

Hello, David.

Hello.

So glad that all of you could join us.

David, I want to start with a quote from your piece on theatlantic.com, Lowe this very day.

You wrote, quote, grasping the historical import of a moment in real time is tough, but it seems possible that in retrospect, August 21st, 2018 will prove to be a new nadir and a turning point for the Trump presidency.

Just after 4 p.m.

Eastern Time, a jury in Alexandria, Virginia returned eight guilty verdicts against Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman.

At the same hour, in Manhattan, Michael Cohen, a former attorney and aide to Trump, pleaded guilty to eight felony counts of his own.

David, why was this day such a moment?

You got two cases here where Trump is really getting hit from two sides.

One of them is the Manafort case, where this really, I think, strengthens Robert Mueller.

Trump has been calling this a witch hunt and a hoax for months now.

And Mueller has gotten some pretty serious wins, including some guilty pleas.

But this is the first time we've seen actual convictions in court.

And I think it's very hard to say that it's just a substances witch hunt when you've got eight guilty verdicts like this.

And at the same time, the Cohen thing is maybe even more serious because you have one of the president's closest aides

being convicted of some serious crimes and more importantly, implicating the president and having told him to commit campaign finance violations.

So suddenly for the first time, the president is not just close to crime, but he has been specifically accused of committing one himself.

We're kind of in this weird situation where the accusations slash charges slash pleas of crimes are competing with one another

for

importance.

Frank, do you have a read on this?

Having spent a lot of time reporting on the life and career and recent activities of one Paul Manafort, would you agree?

Is that

the Cohen case?

Michael Cohen's pleading guilty to eight felony counts?

There was a piece in New York magazine that described us as inhabiting the cave, inhabiting a cave right now, where we can't really see

the writing on the wall.

We don't know what the narrative is fully.

And so I think it's hard to say who's central, who's not central.

Clearly, Michael Cohen is central because he was Trump's lawyer.

The things that he was indicted, it pled guilty to are things that actually tie to the president.

So there's no doubting Michael Cohen's centrality.

But the Robert Mueller investigation had this end game, which was to try to dig into

allegations of collusion between

Russia and the Trump campaign.

And we don't know how that adds up.

We don't know what the underlying narrative is.

It could be something massive.

And Michael Cohen has hinted that he has, or at least his lawyer Landnie Davis has hinted that he has things to say about that.

And

we just don't know what Manafort has to say about Donald Trump and about this broader narrative.

Donald Trump clearly fears whatever Paul Manafort might say.

I mean, if Paul Manafort was disconnected from Donald Trump, Donald Trump would have very little reason to constantly dangle the prospects of a pardon in front of him.

Do we?

I mean, one of the things Trump, I think, in the past has been good at is every time something seems to crop up that implicates him in a crime or is seedy, he managed to either spin it or backpedal it.

You know, I saw a few things today that said, well, he wasn't convicted on tenfold counts.

So, you know, that was the majority of them.

But I'm wondering, is there any way to spin this or look at this where it's not actually all that bad for Trump?

Is there a way to spin out of this?

I think only if there's nothing,

if the Manafort hearing is a giant red herring, then yeah, then maybe Trump's in the clear here.

But

obviously,

the way that it's button in the press, I think is correct, which is that Robert Mueller's team was able to prove eight substantial

counts against the chairman of Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

These were not negligible things that they got him on.

They were pretty massive instances of

tax fraud and

bank fraud.

And we know that it's just a prelude.

This is throat clearing.

There's this trial that's coming next month in Washington that is actually much more substantial than the trial that just happened in Alexandria.

So remind us how those two trials are divvied up.

What distinguishes the trial that we just saw from Paul Manafort of the trial that we're about to see?

So the case had been broken into two parts.

One, it was about tax and bank fraud, and that's the Alexandria case.

And the case in D.C.

is about

Manafort's failure to register as a foreign agent based on the work that he did.

in Ukraine.

It's also about money laundering in terms of not just the tax violations, but the actual violations of the various prohibitions on moving money around in the way that he did.

Yeah.

Now, David,

is it fair?

Tell me if this catalog is complete and if it's fair to divvy up the different strands of the Mueller investigation this way.

So first, white-collar crime and corruption, all the potential money laundering-ish type stuff.

Second, potential collusion with Russia.

Third, the question of obstruction of justice.

And fourth, the miscellaneous campaign chicanery like payments to escorts.

Is that a good way of divving it up?

Have I missed anything?

I'm trying to think about the question of the payments.

You know, we don't know exactly what Mueller, as far as I can remember, we don't know exactly what Mueller's involvement in the payments is.

Ah, got it.

I mean, I guess I'm thinking of that through the intransitive property of the Southern District of New York,

which is prosecuting or to which Michael Cohen pleaded,

having been touched off by the Muller investigation also.

Right.

So we know he must have been involved in it at some point.

It's not clear that he's still pursuing that.

But I think, yeah, I think that's a pretty fair way to break it up.

So I'm curious, and Julia, I'm particularly curious for your thoughts on this question.

As someone who's covered New York and New York finance,

how would you order those four things in terms of their importance to our democracy?

Oh, gosh.

Like, which is, which, which is, like, because, you know, there's a lot of interest, obviously, in

the question about whether the Trump campaign may have colluded with Russia to sway the election.

There's certainly a lot of interest in like Stormy Daniels.

Yeah.

I mean,

I think the question of what is of interest in terms of its salaciousness and just general gossip is way different than probably what's most important for democracy, right?

So I think if we're talking about the importance to democracy, the question of collusion is championed there.

But I think if what we're talking about is kind of the seediness of the potential crimes and the intrigue there, I think the entire idea of kind of this gossipy, underhanded, completely kind of inept world where people are going to get caught in a presidential scandal off of paying off Stormy Daniels is just staggering.

It's just so juicy.

I think it's really, that is the thing that's really difficult for people to look away from.

And I think it's also one of those things that's really easy for people to wrap their heads around.

And I think that's also one of the things where kind of Trump's defense is much easier to understand and to either prove right or wrong.

You know, at first, he was saying he knew nothing about it at all, and then there were tapes that kind of suggested something different.

With collusion, I think a lot of people don't understand where the lines are there.

And then you have Trump constantly saying, tweeting, declaring no collusion, no collusion, no collusion.

So I think for a lot of people, that's a little bit trickier to understand, but probably the more important thing here.

Yeah.

How about you, Frank?

As someone who's dived in especially into the corruption universe here.

Oh, I think that collusion does go to just an entirely unique level in American history.

Just the idea that this country, especially Russia, just

given the legacy of the Cold War, given the adversarial relationship that has emerged over the course of the Putin era, it just feels like if his campaign was actively working with the Russians

to hack computers, to disseminate information, whatever, that that is just

so unprecedented that corruption is endemic.

Corruption is, in many ways, this narrative of our times.

It's everywhere.

It's incredibly important that if the Trump scandals could culminate in some sort of reform movement that would be incredible to eradicate corruption, that would be incredibly significant.

But for me, collusion takes the cake.

So let's talk about that question.

And

to go straight to the Mueller investigation, David, one of my questions, it seems as though in Michael Cohen's plea deal,

first,

it sounds like not a lot of the prosecutors didn't have to give up too much in order to get that plea.

Is that fair?

That appears to be the case.

Yeah.

I mean, they seem to have had the goods on him on all these financial crimes.

He copped the campaign finance and he said the president was implicated.

I don't know what sentence he might have been looking at otherwise, but

there's no cooperation agreement here.

So it seems like they got a pretty clean win.

And so Cohen

has been deep inside the Trump operation since well before the election and for a good while afterwards.

What

is his,

what type of questions do you imagine that Robert Mueller has for Michael Cohen at this point?

What type of information could Michael Cohen be key to revealing on how the Trump campaign operated, how the Trump administration has operated?

I think it probably falls into two big buckets.

One of them is going to be things about the campaign.

So

Lanny Davis, who's Cohen's lawyer, has been going around saying that Cohen would be willing to talk about email hacking and what Trump might have known about email hacks that the Russians did before they were public.

That's the sort of thing Mueller, I think, would like to talk to him about.

He's also made some comments about the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting.

Sometimes conflicting comments about who knew what about them.

That's something prosecutors, I'm sure, would like to talk to him about.

The other bucket is Trump's business.

And we've gotten a lot of indications in places here and there that Mueller is looking at the way Trump ran his businesses, really getting the same sort of white-collar crime questions and potentially also to Russian collusion.

So that could be everything from the Trump organization serving as a money laundering hub for Russians to simple stuff like tax evasion or tax fraud or loan fraud, the same sort of things that we see both Manfort and Cohen getting in trouble for.

And Cohen could potentially be able to speak pretty extensively to both of those things.

Aaron Powell, what leverage do the prosecutors retain over Cohen now that he's pleaded?

Well, they haven't sentenced him yet, so that's one place.

And we also don't know what other crimes he might potentially have committed or prosecutors might think he had committed, they could still go after him for.

I think his plea shows that he's willing to play ball.

He's not going to go to the mat against them.

And so there are other places where they might have leverage on him.

He also, I think, seems to have

a certain amount of animosity towards Trump.

You know, he was once very close.

He said he would rather jump off of a building than turn on him.

When you say once, you're talking like three months ago.

Yeah, this is in March or April, exactly.

And, you know, he had said, he did some fairly outrageous things on Trump's behalf, you know, threatening physical violence against reporters and obviously cutting these deals with these hush money deals with these women who alleged affairs.

And now you get him out there saying that, you know, Trump is a danger to the Oval Office and he wouldn't accept a pardon from him and so on and so forth.

Probably because Trump's been going after him in the press as well.

Yeah, I was about to ask, so is Trump doing himself a disservice?

Is he potentially shooting himself in the foot?

I mean, I, just for my own edification, would love to read some tweets from today, if you guys don't mind.

And I think it just shows the difference between how Trump is tweeting Cohn versus Manafort.

So the first one was, if anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest you don't retain the services of Michael Cohn.

The best Trump tweet ever.

I think so.

And then the other about Manafort.

I feel very badly for Paul Manafort and his wonderful family.

Quote-unquote justice took a 12-year-old tax case, among other things, applied tremendous pressure on him.

And unlike Michael Cohen, he refused to quote unquote break makeup stories in order to get a quote-unquote deal.

Such respect for a brave man.

So

David has already answered.

He thinks he is shooting himself in the foot.

Frank, how do you feel?

Well,

I do really enjoy watching the Trump Cohen drama because

if you have a henchman such as Michael Cohen and that henchman thinks that he is in and he's irreplaceable and then the boss takes over a larger swath of territory and you think you're going to move up with the boss and then the boss is like, you know what?

You're just, you're not presentable.

in Washington, basically.

Like you were good for me when I was operating in this one fiefdom, but I'm just not bringing you you along.

And then, like, slowly, piece by piece, the henchman starts to realize that he's being disposed of.

And then, I mean, I find that psychodrama to be pretty fascinating.

And I think Trump can't help himself.

David's right, that Trump can't help himself, that he's going to keep disparaging Cohen because he can only think of him in this kind of pissant sort of way.

I guess I want to make

the argument, the counter-argument,

that actually that the corruption is the it's I mean, corruption certainly is the question that I'm most deeply interested in here, um, in part because

it seems like to the degree that campaign operatives from the Trump campaign were cooperating in some ways with Russia, that even the relationships that facilitated that cooperation would have would have come out of this universe.

Paul Manafort's milieu, his relationships, his network, Ukraine,

Oleg Darapaska, Viktor Yanukovych,

these names that have

these Russian and Ukrainian figures who have suddenly entered our dialogue.

And that a part of that, as you have reported on so well, Frank,

is this decades-long story of just corruption in these circles.

And you're right, that the two storylines are so deeply intertangled.

So, if I could just like in

the 30-second version of history, so when the Soviet Union was dissolving, the KGB

had access to billions of dollars, which it quickly tried to save for itself.

And so, it started to offshore them in German banks and in British banks.

And

that began a process whereby which you had the resources of the old Soviet state being sought after.

And there was this massive rush to privatize companies.

And a lot of the privatization struggles happened in extremely violent sort of ways.

It was gang warfare.

And so you have fortunes being built in dirty ways.

And that money

for that money needed to go offshore.

It needed to go places where,

preferably places where there was rule of law so that the money couldn't be easily expropriated as

the Yukos fortune or many other fortunes in Russia have been expropriated.

And so the United States is an awesome place to offshore money because of our judicial system, because

If you take advantages of loopholes in our anti-money laundering laws, you can use real estate.

You can buy real estate to harbor dirty money.

And the New York or the L.A.

or the Seattle or Washington real estate markets are great places to be.

The value of your investment keeps going up.

It's not going to go down.

Yeah, there's this.

Adam Davidson had a conversation on Trumpcast with Jacob Weisberg a few weeks back where

he said a version of this.

And I guess I kind of knew that there's a lot of money laundering in New York real estate.

It's sort of

an open joke here that you look at 157, the giant tower, and you, oh, yeah, it's a bunch of Russian oligarchs who will never even see that place, and who knows how they got their money.

But this wholesale money laundering that Manafort and others, tens of millions of dollars, in some cases, billions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars.

And that is a relatively small universe.

And I think they all, it's not that they all know each other, but

it's a pretty open and thinly veiled secret that if you're going to be buying luxury condominiums in New York or Miami or London, and you're from Russia or the Middle East, you're going to be associating with a group of people who know exactly how to do this.

This was also Donald Trump's milieu as a real estate developer in New York

before he'd focused

in a more concentrated fashion on real estate, on branding.

Aaron Powell, of course.

You go back and remember the first stories that were reported about Trump and Russia, where the Trump sons were bragging about how the Russians love us and that they'd hired somebody to go to Moscow to market Trump properties explicitly to the Russian elite so that they could launder their money via Trump properties.

And it's connected to Paul Manafort because Manafort was helping to

safeguard and promote people who'd won massive fortunes in the post-Soviet scramble for wealth, both in Russia and Ukraine.

And they were paying him for those services with dirty money, which ended up getting shifted through Cyprus and Kyrgyzstan and all these places into the United States.

And of course, Manafort's job itself was to help improve

the perceptions of

the people who had amassed dirty fortunes so that nobody would come take it away ever.

Yeah.

Part of what's interesting to me about this,

and you know, I should just say, for the record, this is an incredibly serious and difficult moment.

The questions that we are asking about this administration and the Trump campaign are deep, troubling questions.

But part of what they have done is to pull this universe more fully into public view than I think I've ever seen it in my lifetime.

The fact of these trials and the scope and the range of the investigations that are ongoing means that there's information coming into the public domain about how these different universes operate that we've never had before.

And I'm curious, I'll point this question to you first, David.

In the revelations that we've seen,

whether during Paul Manafort's trial or from the pleas that we've seen, the information that's been released about Michael Cohen, what has surprised you most?

What's the information that is now a matter of public record that is most astonishing to you?

I think that one thing that's been remarkable that we've seen, even as we still don't have a great sense of

what crimes, if any, were committed, whether that's obstruction or some sort of collusion-related crimes, one thing that these investigations have done really effectively is show the brazenness of the lies that the White House tells and that the president himself tells.

You know, the Cohen case with the payments is a great example of this.

First, the White House said Trump didn't know anything about them.

Trump himself said, oh, you've got to talk to Michael Cohen.

Then you had Rudy Giuliani saying, well, maybe there was this thing with a retainer, but he didn't know what the money was for.

And then Trump said, well, I paid him back after the fact, but I didn't know.

And then Trump filed a disclosure saying, in fact, he had paid Cohen for these things.

And then Cohen releases a recording of it.

So

even as we wait to see the sort of most solid conclusions about questions like obstruction and collusion, we've already gotten a good sense of just how chronically dishonest the leadership of the country is.

I'm going to ask you the same question, Frank.

You spent

before, well before this trial,

you spent

years, I think it's fair to say,

looking at Paul Manafort's life in Milieu and his career,

going back to the Halcyon days of Black Manafort and Stone.

What has been most surprising to you to see put in the public record?

So it's, I think it has been kind of a masterclass in showing how the system works.

And it's one thing to abstractly know it, and then it's another to see the emails where wire transfers get ordered or that, you know, the tailor kind of comes in and admits that the ostrich skin suit was

paid for by out of an account in Cyprus.

And so you just see, you see how it all adds up.

And

I think one thing that was pretty fascinating about yesterday was

before

four o'clock hour came, before Cohen and Manafort's fates were kind of known, Elizabeth Warren gave a very important speech in the morning about corruption.

And

it wasn't really about Trump corruption, but it was about the way in which Trump's corruption is broadly reflective of the system.

And she proposed a whole series of measures to crack down on lobbying.

It really does all tie together.

I mean, you see these things, like

the shell companies, the the use of anonymity,

the ways in which people have no allegiance to their country ultimately, and their willingness to abuse the tax system or possibly collude with a foreign government.

And

it's really, this is, this is about one rotten man, but it's about one rotten,

well, a series of rotten men who reflect a very, very rotten world.

I have a question for both of you, which is that in the day hours, I'm not sure how far we are since these convictions came down, Chuck Schumer has called for a delay in the nominations of Brett Kavanaugh, who is Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court.

I'm wondering how likely you guys think that is to happen and if that is a reasonable request.

I am very skeptical that anything like that will happen.

Whether you think it's reasonable, I mean, I guess it depends on whether you think the questions of the crimes that are alleged here are serious crimes that deserve prosecution or, in fact, change the course of the election.

And I think reasonable people can probably disagree about that, and that will affect the conclusion.

But as a matter of practical politics, I just don't see any way that Democrats can

win on this.

I mean, they just don't have the numbers.

If Mitch McConnell was the Democratic leader, or even if Harry Reid were still the Democratic leader, I can imagine them coming up with all kinds of crazy, arcane parliamentary roadblocks and just slowing down the wheels of confirmation.

That doesn't really seem like Chuck Schumer's forte.

It doesn't seem like he's willing to do, and it just doesn't seem like something the Republicans will allow them to get away with.

I want to point us forward a bit.

Obviously, we can't predict the future, but I want to ask you, Frank, about Paul Mayafort.

One of the questions that you raised in your piece this week after the verdict came down was why didn't Paul Manafort,

why did he actually go through with this trial, given the severity of the case in front of him?

I know you're not his confessor, but what from having spent so much time...

So the dominant theory about Paul Manafort is that

he was proceeding in the hopes that he'll get pardoned eventually.

But I just don't, I don't buy that.

I don't buy it as a matter of the guy's character and temperament, which is that I think that he is delusional, that he's very, very adept at living in a state of denial, which is why his

finances became such a mess, despite the fact that he was strapped.

You see it in his personal life constantly, where he ends up making very, very obvious mistakes that anybody in his position would have told him, yo, don't do that.

It's why he tampered with witnesses, even though he could be pretty sure that Robert Mueller was paying very close attention to his every move.

And so I think his capacity for denial led him to believe that he had a chance of getting off.

And I don't think that a pardon is a very feasible thing because the timing is incredibly awkward.

As we've discussed, Manafort has a second case awaiting him next month.

And

in the time between now and the start of that next case, he has to make,

and he's also got sentencing looming for this case.

He's got to make a series of decisions about what he's going to fight.

And so if he decides to go to trial in the second case, he's going to have to spend, he's going to have to spend money.

He's going to be incredibly exposed.

He doesn't know the full extent of what Robert Mueller's interest in him is.

And so

Trump could pardon him now, but then he'd have to pardon him again and maybe again after that.

And so I just, I don't see this being a viable strategy.

And Donald Trump's the type of guy who would entertain something like a pardon without really thinking it through fully, without realizing that it just wouldn't work.

Yeah.

But operating under the premise that he's kind of delusional about how all of this works, do you think that it could have been in his mind that as long as he stayed loyal to Trump, Trump would, in some capacity, be it a pardon or something else, take care of him at the end?

I mean, if you look at it on paper, it seems like that has to be the way that he has been thinking about it because it just doesn't

make sense.

It's like, why would you subject yourself to this, to the possibility of

dying in prison, of

spending down the last remnants of your family's fortune

on a trial.

He always had

four or five lawyers with him at the table, and these were high-rent lawyers.

I mean,

he wasn't doing this defense on the cheap.

And so

you'd think that the pardon would be the thing.

But again, it's just,

if you just think it through on paper, when is the pardon going to come that's going to save him?

Like,

he's going to have to go through a couple of these trials.

And now he's going, you know, he's got these 10 other counts.

He's going to have to, they're going to, the government's probably going to want to rehash and a separate trial.

And so it's just endless pain that he's going to be forced to absorb.

So,

David, I'm going to point

my last question to you.

First, I'm going to read a piece in the Weekly Standard from Atlantic contributor Jack Goldsmith,

who writes.

about the Trump administration and the moves that Goldsmith expects from the president.

He says, quote, first, he will continue to draw a red line at his no-collusion claim and insists that anything else Mueller finds is the harvest of an illegitimate democratic witch hunt that seeks to overturn the election results through criminal process.

This approach depends on Mueller finding no serious dirt on Trump related to Russian meddling.

Even if that assumption holds, the mounting stench of criminality and closing the Trump presidency may render the red line politically irrelevant, which is why the president is also likely to deploy offensive weapons.

Three powers that a president can wield unilaterally with practically limitless discretion and with little constraining process are pardons, dismissals of executive officials, and security clearance revocations.

I tee that up for you, David, just in part because I think

it was interesting to read Goldsmith's view of the moves that one might expect next.

And so I'm curious for you, as someone who's been paying very close attention to the patterns and tendencies of the Trump administration, what do you expect next from the administration or the president?

Well, I should preface this by saying that the best way to be made a fool of is to make predictions about Donald Trump.

It is why I asked.

This is a lesson I have learned from difficult experience.

Do it.

Come on, predict the future, Demograph.

I think Goldsmith is basically right.

You know, I, in fact, I wrote, gosh, in June of 2017,

the question was

not if, but when Trump would fire or try to fire Mueller.

And at the time,

I was was very smug about that.

I thought I was going to lay down a marker and it was going to be, someday I was going to be vindicated.

As it turned out, when I wrote that, he had already tried to fire Mueller.

He's tried since then.

It seems like a sure thing he'll try again.

And maybe he'll be successful and maybe he won't.

Security clearance revocations, we've already seen that going on.

He's put up these trial balloons with somebody like John Brennan, who is tangential to the Russia investigation insofar as basically he's just commenting on it in the press and annoying or embarrassing the president.

But there are other people he could do this against.

You know, we see him threatening to revoke the clearance of Bruce Orr, who's a currently serving high-ranking Justice Department official.

So, you know, we've seen all these places where Trump has telegraphed that he intends to pursue a scourged earth approach if he needs to.

And over and over again, he has, in fact, followed through on that.

So

I am with Goldsmith on this.

Thank you for that.

All right.

I need keepers this week, so stick with us.

After the break, we're going to talk about what we don't want to forget.

At L'Oreal Group, We aim to decrease the use of virgin plastic in our packaging by 50% by 2030.

This is how we create the beauty that moves the world.

All right, let us turn to Keepers,

the weekly ritual in which I ask you what you have heard, read, watched, listened to, experienced recently that you do not want to forget.

First, let us start with a keeper from our listener, Ben.

My keeper for this week is perpetual youth.

I'm 25 years old.

I still can't grow a full beard.

I occasionally get pimples on my face, and I definitely still worry about what that girl on the bus next to me thinks of the way my hair looks.

But more than that, I think it's so important as we go through life to keep that sense of childhood awe, that everyday realization of just how wonderful reality is, the sense of curiosity, the sense of creativity and imagination that comes with youth.

And I think we should all lean into that and remember that growing up is mostly a myth.

Maybe I'll feel differently when I'm 30, the

age of unequivocal adulthood, but for now, I'm going to hold on to some of my childlike tendencies.

Thank you.

The enduring

importance and power of holding on to our youth.

That's sweet.

Even as we age, I like it.

I like it.

I like to think of myself as surrendering every year a little bit of precociousness for a little bit of gravitas.

Jillian White, what you want to keep?

All right.

So you guys have actually already heard my keeper during this episode, but I'm going to bring it up again because I

want to hold on to it forever.

So my favorite genre of tweet is ridiculous or deeply petty, always unnecessary.

And I feel like Trump's tweets on Wednesday after the convictions were just such a perfect crystallization of not just that, but kind of his Twitter persona.

So I'm going to read my favorite tweet for you again, and then I'm going to print it out and hold on to it.

And remember that at one point, the President of the United States tweeted this.

If anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest that you don't retain the services of Michael Cohen.

Exclamation point.

Yeah.

Thank you for that.

I'm not going to forget that one anytime soon.

Frank, for what you want to keep.

Right.

I have this libel case.

I'm looking for

a lawyer.

I'm going to turn to Cohen.

So

kind of apropos of our discussion earlier today, I've been reading about corruption.

And one very good book that I'm reading right now is by Zephyr Teachout, who's running for Attorney General in the state of New York.

Full disclosure, she's a friend of mine, but

she wrote a book called Corruption in America.

And a lot of it is about our founding fathers and the way that they thought about corruption and how so many of their anxieties are precisely the things that are happening now.

That the fall of democracy would come in the form of foreign interference.

It would come in the form of greed and of gifts and of money moving around in all the ways that we've been discussing.

So

it's a pretty incredibly on-point book.

We will throw a link in the show notes.

David Graham.

I want to say first to Jillian that somebody at Trump's Rally in West Virginia Tuesday was selling leatherbound editions of Trump's tweets printed out.

So now I know what I'm getting you for Christmas, which is great.

And you didn't get me on

patience.

Do you want a leatherbound?

Or

I feel like we could probably

find a better material,

tweet preservation

medium.

Valore.

Acid on paper.

Valore.

I love it.

All right.

Until these convictions, I thought the biggest story I was going to be covering this week was one in my backyard, which was a group of people came together and and with ropes tore down a Confederate statue on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

And in the course of doing that, I was rereading a speech that Julian Carr, who is an industrialist and benefactor and violent racist in the area, gave when the speech was dedicated.

And I think when these things happen, it's easy to get wrapped up in the moment.

But I want, as grim as it is, I want to keep that speech as a reminder of the reasons why these statues were put up and what they stood for at the time, because I think that's important to recall.

Yeah.

Wow.

I'm going to preface my keeper by

calling back to last week's Radio Atlantic episode in which we talked about diversity and authenticity.

And by the way, I have now seen Crazy Rich Asians and I can recommend it.

And if you are here for hilariously objectifying shots of gorgeous half-naked men, you will have a great time.

Anyway, so we talked briefly about Black Klansmen and

we might have implicitly cast a little bit of shade on Spike Lee and his, shall we say, unsubtle approach to depicting racism in his films.

But for various reasons, I got to spend some time recently with Joan Morgan's excellent new book about Lauren Hill's best album to date.

The book is called She Begat This, 20 Years of the Miseducation of Lauren Hill.

And one of the most in one of the many insightful conversations Morgan includes in this book is her interview with Joycelyn Dingle, the co-founder of Honey Magazine, which is sadly now defunct.

But so Dingle is talking with Jordan Morgan and she's describing what, quote, Spike Lee's ungentrified Fort Greene, Brooklyn was like around that time in the late 90s, early 2000s.

And I just love her description of this milieu.

Quote, it was so black and something I'd never experienced, even though I'd been in other black situations.

I'm from the South and I went to Hampton.

It was bold and audacious and fun and sexy.

Black people owned businesses.

I saw people come from all over the country and I saw how important it was to have black things and how much they honored Spike's work.

After they bought the book, they bought the clothes.

It wasn't just the store, it was the culture he helped to usher in with his films.

I got to see black people who

lived that way.

Men who loved being black, who loved their corner store, who loved the dude who ran the corner store.

It was something I fell in love with.

I loved that little description of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, never having inhabited that milieu myself,

but it was a good reminder that even though a younger generation of black filmmakers and filmgoers, let's say,

may not recall all these things that

were part of the work of folks like Spike Lee,

there was a lot there.

And I got to, and I think, you know, the value and importance of that community, of celebrating

a neighborhood together, a way of being together.

My partner just went back to his hometown of Plainview, Minnesota for Corn on the Cob days and had a similarly great, I imagine, experience there

with the, I imagine, corn on the cob eating contest that they do

in Plainview.

Anyway,

spikely.

No shade.

Yeah.

Here for it.

I support any shout out to to a pre-gentrified Brooklyn.

May it rest in peace.

All right.

Frank, David, Jillian.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thanks, Matt.

Thank you.

Edifying and joining us, and we'll see you next time.

That'll do it for this week's Radio Atlantic.

My thanks to the inestimable Jillian White for sitting in as host.

Jeff and Alex will be back soon.

Thanks again to Frank Forer and David Graham for joining to help us sort through all the crazy news.

This episode was produced and edited, as always, by Kevin Townsend with production support from Kim Lau.

Catherine Wells is the Atlantic's executive producer for podcasts.

Our theme music is the wonderful Battle Hymn of the Republic, interpreted by the wizard John Batiste.

Let us know your keeper.

Call us at 202-266-7600 and leave us a voicemail saying what you do not want to forget.

Catch us at theatlantic.com/slash radio.

Check out the show notes in the episode description.

And if you like what you're hearing, make sure to rate and review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

Most importantly, thank you for listening.

May you have a better week than the president as we'll see you next week.