Donald Trump just got run over by the Taxi King
The Beatles had the Sun King. Counting Crows had the Rain King. Donald Trump has spent his time in office focusing on the Rocket Man. It turns out he should have been focusing on the Taxi King. Who the hell is that? As it turns out, that’s the nickname of a real-life Russian immigrant who just royally screwed over Trump and Michael Cohen in order to save his own backside.
When Cohen isn’t busy handing out hush money to porn stars and yelling “Says who?” on cable news, he spends his time running a taxi cab company. Apparently he’s not very good at it, as his taxi business is deeply in debt. And in what comes as a shock to no one, Cohen has been partnered up with some particularly shady characters, including Evgeny “Taxi King” Freidman. Today, Freidman decided that he isn’t going to prison for his own various assorted crimes, and that instead Michael Cohen is going to prison, because he just cut a plea deal against him.
So what does this have to do with Donald Trump? Well, everything. If Cohen had any remote chance of avoiding spending the rest of his life in prison, those odds just got run over. This suddenly puts Cohen in prime position to cut a plea deal of his own, whether he wants to or not. Who saw this coming? Certainly not Trump, both because he’s lazy and clueless and focuses on the wrong things, and because sometimes no one knows what the next surreal twist and turn in this bizarre saga is going to be. So what now?
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As we wait to see whether or not Michael Cohen realizes it’s over for him and cuts a plea deal against Donald Trump, it’s important to keep in mind that there’s nothing Trump can do about it. He can’t fire his way out of this, because Robert Mueller isn’t even involved. The case against Cohen is being handled by the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, which is being run by a Deputy, after Trump’s own SDNY nominee recused himself. Trump got blindsided today by, of all people, a taxi cab guy.
