Naked Ambition Versus Ethics/Morality

In Michael Cohen’s upcoming book, “Disloyal,” he traces the line between naked ambition and national treachery, both his own and his now-infamous client Donald Trump.

 

I’ve read the foreword and pre-ordered the book based on that because it’s riveting, even though it didn’t surprise me, since I listened to Cohen’s testimony before Congress.

 

He is a good writer.

 

Sadly, the people who should read it before the next election will probably refuse to. They want to continue to believe the lie that Donald Trump is “the Anointed One” and the perfect man to bring about the End of Days.

 

Yeah, I know, fairy tale stuff. But the fact is, Trump is sick enough, deranged enough, power-hungry  enough to end our days, unless someone — a true patriot hiding somewhere in his midst — has made sure he can’t get to the nuclear codes that can call down death and destruction on his “enemies”.

 

Remember? He suggested nuking a hurricane to divert its path, for heaven’s sake!

 

He has no clue what a nuclear blast would do to the planet and its inhabitants. And even if he did, in his diseased mind, it might “serve everyone right” for not worshiping him (or at least obeying him under penalty of death) the way Kim Jong Un’s and Vladiir Putin’s subjects do.

 

We’ve all heard about malignant narcissists who have killed their wives, lovers or girlfriends when they decided they’d had enough and threatened to walk out on them, and then (frequently) themselves so they didn’t have to live forevermore with taunts of “you sure screwed up, loser!” while behind bars. Malignant narcissists are never wrong in their own minds; they’re always right, and they have their reasons.

 

Donald Trump is the most dangerous man on the planet–and he’ll become even more dangerous when he loses reelection in November–but the other Michael Cohen’s around him haven’t yet reached the conclusion that their little lives and fortunes aren’t the only ones at stake here. They look likely to ride the Trump Train into the canyon even as the bridge ahead of them gets destroyed, vowing “Only rats desert a sinking ship!”

 

That’s because rats are far smarter than they are. 

 

Michael Cohen may be a rat to Trump cultists, and in prison for being Trump’s fixer and arranger, but at least he’s clinging to the debris of the wreck, drifting toward a far-distant shore…and maybe someday he’ll even be able to live with himself again because he finally did the right thing even though doing the right thing weighed against his own selfish professional interests.

 

Michael Cohen admits he was a rat to have orchestrated so much of the destruction achieved by Trump, but he has redeemed himself in my eyes because, at long last, he woke up and realized that Trump’s ethics and morality were mere remnants of former usefulness, like the human appendix, to him: at times problematic and, as far as he could determine, completely unnecessary to survival or well-being.

 

Cohen realizes, belatedly, that ethics and morality work best even when one is nakedly ambitious, as he was.

 

I wish him well, because he finally stopped drinking the kool-aid and began listening to what really matters inside and outside himself.

 

It takes a real man to admit when he’s wrong, which is why Donald Trump will never do it.

 

I applaud Michael Cohen for his courage. No one who goes against Trump does it lightly. They know how he works: like a mob boss. One suggestion from a mob boss that he doesn’t like your face and pretty soon your face is gone.

 

Michael Cohen, luckily, is still here to tell the tale.

 

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