The Falwells, Cohen, Giancarlo and the Unified Theory of Trumpism Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

The Falwells, Cohen, Giancarlo and the Unified Theory of Trumpism

Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 2h

Last week we got a few more dollops of information about this long-emerging story about Jerry Falwell, Jr, his wife and their inexplicable relationship with a Miami “pool boy” named Giancarlo Granda. This story is, unsurprisingly, catnip for everyone who reviles the Falwells’ brand of weaponized sexual traditionalism under the guise of religion and their baleful impact on our national politics over almost half a century. Of course, at TPM we just love a good political scandal. But I want to take a moment to explain why I think this is a big and significant story beyond your ordinary scandal or the hypocrisy that is often the social license to obsess over them. But I want to take a few moments to explain why I think this story is actually a pretty big deal itself and part of something much larger.

First, let’s get into the story itself. We don’t know just what the story is yet with the Falwells and Granda. But the upshot of last week’s news was that it’s pretty clear there’s something about the relationship, something tied to sex, that is totally incompatible with their public image or the institution they run. They put up over a million dollars to put the young Granda into business running a booze and sex-fueled hostel for no clear reason. They vacationed with him at a secluded resort. There are naked photos of Becki Falwell somehow in the mix. Something went on here.

Where this all becomes a much bigger deal is where Trump comes in, and specifically where Michael Cohen comes in. We know now that Michael Cohen had struck up a relationship with Falwell – bizarre in itself – as far back as 2012. He worked on building a relationship between the Falwells and Trump. And somehow he found out about the nude photos and even came into possession of one. He also apparently tried to broker a deal of some sort to keep the photos (and presumably the larger story fo the Falwell-Granda relationship) secret.

Then finally you have the Falwell endorsement of Donald Trump on the eve of the 2016 Iowa Caucuses which provided a critical boost to candidate Trump. The Trump-evangelical bond is now so deep-seated, embedded and almost doctrinal that I don’t think exposure of Falwell or even some recantation by him would really budget it much at all. But three years ago it was a critical part of what built the alliance.

Let’s review. It seems clear there’s a big sex-related secret. You have what people at the time found an almost inexplicable endorsement. We know that Michael Cohen secured the endorsement. We have very good reason to believe that Cohen knew about the sex-related secret and even did something negotiating to help cover it up. Put this altogether and it simply doesn’t seem credible to me that the sex-related secret and the endorsement aren’t connected. This is all the more likely when you consider that Cohen was basically in the business both of covering up sex-related secrets and weaponizing them against others, as needs dictated.

Admittedly, some of these “knows” are really only “credibly reporteds” or “we more or less knows”. But if you doubt, tell me where in the chain the reasoning breaks down.

If Falwell’s endorsement of Trump was the product of blackmail or extortion or simply Falwell’s knowledge that he couldn’t cross Cohen and Trump that is of course a very big deal – something of vastly more consequence and significance than any hypocrisy or embarrassment simple non-traditional tastes of one married couple.

Here we get to the larger point. We know that Trump’s rise has been a curious mixture of payoffs and coercion to cover up his personal lapses or embarrassments. Just as much, though, his political and business ascent has been based on weaponizing “dirt” against his opponents. The relationship with The National Enquirer has been at the center of both. We don’t hear much about it now. But remember that Cohen showed up offering to cut a deal to prevent the exposure of the affair of Trump fundraiser Elliott Broidy. Broidy got silence (until aggressive reporting tied to Trump screwed it all up); Cohen got a nice payday; who if anyone was pulling the strings in the background has never been clear to me.

It goes beyond Trump.

The 2016 election hacking is itself not that far off from it, states or the plutocratic rich organizing theft and selective disclosure. These services were on offer to Trump during the campaign, funded by gulf dynasts, provided by Israeli private intelligence services. Harvey Weinstein used the Israeli private intelligence firm Black Cube to keep ahead of the rising chorus of potential accusers who eventually brought him down and exposed his history of harassment and assault.

We still don’t have a good explanation of how the same company ran a disinformation and dirt-digging campaign targeting Obama era officials behind the Iran nuclear deal. People around Trump? Saudi Arabia? Israel? Players on the peripheries of one or all of these governments? We don’t know.

For all the investigations into Trump and Russia we end up with no clear evidence that there was some kind of sex tape based “kompromat” that Russia was holding over Trump. It seems like that this story – really only contained in the rumors of the Steele dossier – was just rumor or misinformation. The real kompromat was more likely the pre-existing business relationships and the campaign contacts themselves. A few years earlier North Korea hacked into and revealed emails from Sony pictures because of their anger over a movie that lampooned Kim Jong Un.

Then there’s Rudy Giuliani, the President’s private attorney, Fox News doyen on an unending tour of visits to strongmen, oligarchs and subgarchs in various global capitals, making big money and keeping lines in the water for material for his boss’s reelection campaign.

I lack a fully worked out theory of all this. But this swirl of money payoffs, soft or hard blackmail, stolen pictures and emails, NDAs and privatized intelligence services all seem of a piece, one that mixes the rising transnational global plutocracy, strongman rule in former or decaying democracies and more. In other words, the era of Trumpism.

Even the occasional exposures of caches of documents about overseas tax havens are related, though they may be on the side of the angels in themselves. People like Trump mobilize tribalistic antipathies at home – Muslim bans – but they’re thick as thieves with the gulf dynasts who are a centerpiece of the global plutocracy. Opaqueness, secrecy are central features of this world. But so is exposure. Is this a contradiction? Not really. The central factor is power in a generally lawless space, one in which the power to conceal and selectively expose is the a central attribute of power and prerogative of hyper-wealth. Mob families have hitmen as well as massive defensive postures and the best bodyguards. There’s no contradiction at all.

Trump’s hush money to Stormy Daniels, his relationship with the Enquirer and the other payoffs and scandals and dirt are often treated as a sort of clickbaity comic relief of Trumpism. In fact, I think they go to the heart of it and the heart of Trumpism that goes far beyond him in time and geography.

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