What is going on with Michael Cohen’s jacket?
Bonnie, Australia, by email
Hello, Australia! How very pleasing to have a voice from down under, especially as my shaming ignorance of that fine continent means that pretty much the only nods to Australia in this column in the past decade have been limited to my frequent worshipful references to Bouncer’s dream. Now, we all know that Bouncer’s dream was not only the greatest moment ever on Neighbours, but possibly the greatest piece of art of all time. But still, that is probably not representing modern Australia’s concerns, so how pleased I am to get your email, Bonnie.
And I am even more pleased to see that what modern Australia is concerned with is Michael Cohen’s jacket. Ah, Cohen: the lawyer who is three parts Barry Zuckercorn from Arrested Development and one part straight-to-DVD rip-off “sequel” of Goodfellas. Cohen is currently my favourite attorney, finally beating George Galloway’s law firm, Chambers Solicitors, which sounds a little like the name someone would give a law firm after Googling “words for law firms”. It’s the nomenclature equivalent of three children standing on top of one another’s shoulders inside a trench coat. Anyway, no need to rehash old relationships, let’s turn to lawyer of the year Cohen.
As most of you are doubtless aware, Cohen is rather busy at the moment, as he is under federal investigation for – oh, where to begin: the alleged $130,000 (£91,600) payment to Stormy Daniels, because everyone knows lawyers make payments to porn stars all the time for no reason? Violations of campaign finance law? Bank fraud? Wire fraud? The choice, as Our Graham on Blind Date would say, is yours! Truly, who could have guessed that the US president having as his lawyer and spokesman a former personal injury lawyer who operated a taxi fleet in his spare time would work out so badly?
And Cohen has been working with the Trumps for a long time. Doing what, it has never been entirely clear. He tried and failed to develop Trump golf courses in New Jersey and he tried and failed to build Trump towers in Kazakhstan. The man may not have Trump as a name, but he is a true Trump. He was even on the board of the Eric Trump Foundation (AKA, the Derek Zoolander School For Kids Who Can’t Read Good), which you might remember is nominally a children’s health charity. Alas, this foundation got into a bit of trouble last year when it emerged that some especially large beneficiaries of its largesse were the Donald J Trump Foundation and the Trump Organization, both of which are probably sick as hell, but perhaps not quite in the way donors to the Eric Trump Foundation envisaged as they handed over their dough.
But never mind what a man does, it’s who he hangs out with that really reveals the measure of the guy. So let’s look at Cohen’s circle. Earlier this week, as his attorneys were in court attempting to seal documents taken from him by the FBI, Cohen and his distinctive tartan jacket were smoking cigars and having some drinks on the Upper East Side, alongside their nearest and dearest. One of those nearest, it transpired, was Jerry Rotonda, a Deutsche Bank executive who was once accused of racially abusing and threatening to run over a black parking attendant who had given him a $20 ticket. Meanwhile, it also transpired this week that Fox News host Sean Hannity, the Trump presidency’s very own Squealer, is also a client of Cohen’s. Hannity insisted he “never retained [Cohen’s] services” while simultaneously insisting in the same breath that he should have “client-attorney privilege”. Don’t think too hard about this – your already fragile brain might break.
But the jacket, the jacket. Now, there has long been a theory that clothes allow people to disguise themselves, but actually the opposite is true: clothes reveal the real nature of a person. So just as Louise Linton, the wife of US Treasury secretary Seth Mnuchin, spends a fortune on clothes but always looks like a cut-price B-movie villain, and Trump clearly spends a fortune on suits but always looks like something on the bottom of my shoe, so we see with Cohen. Sure, the man might have once spent $58m buying a New York apartment building, and sure, he owns fancy cars, but the jacket does not lie: he is nothing more than a shonky used-car salesman. Like Tom Hagen in The Godfather, he might not be a blood relative, but he is truly of the family.