In Disloyal, Cohen encouraged Trump’s presidential run in Revenge, “Don’t forget, I was never part of the Trump presidential circus. The discrepancies between the two books keep mounting. Having spent more than a decade burying bodies for Trump-as minutely detailed in Disloyal-Cohen shouldn’t have been that surprised to find his former boss not playing fair. (Now Trump’s fate rests on him, not the other way around.) Cohen is equally livid about Trump’s alleged politicization of the FBI and the IRS, although his outrage seems a little disingenuous. Framed as a screed against the Justice Department, it opens with the attention-grabbing but unconfirmed accusation that the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office won’t bring criminal charges against Trump because doing so would expose the illegalities in their prosecution of Cohen. ![]() However, where Disloyal was self-lacerating, with Cohen owning up to much of his contemptible past, Revenge is self-exonerating and accusatory (much like Trump himself). Lukács’s mediocre hero is actually pretty close to Cohen’s conception of himself in Disloyal. ![]() (A lifelong-if conflicted-Marxist, Lukács had his own notable run-in with the preeminent WHI of his day: Residing in Moscow during Stalin’s reign, he was imprisoned and narrowly escaped execution in the early 1940s.) All of this we learn courtesy of history’s mediocre heroes, who are caught up in and register the collisions of their moment: the dilemmas of democracy, the moral degeneration of the upper strata, the repellently brutal side of aristocratic rule, to name a few. The great historical personalities are especially attuned to the reactions of the people they’re geniuses at reading the smallest change of mood and translating that energy into action. Cohen’s former boss fits this role perfectly. Hegel) the “world-historical individual.” The WHI’s distinctive talent is basically telling people what they want-giving direction to the strivings already present in society, with which his own aims happen to coincide. Whatever individuality or psychological truth he possesses isn’t his it’s a reflection of the historical peculiarities of his age.īy contrast, we have the character type Lukács called (cribbing from G. The mediocre hero’s very mediocrity (a certain blurriness of character, let’s say) makes him especially well suited to the role. The catastrophes of national life-a country split into hostile forces bent on mutual destruction, for instance-are condensed in the mediocre hero’s plight, cluing readers in on how those crises developed in the first place. A wimpy, middle-of-the-road personality type, the mediocre hero is hurled into the maelstrom of social forces and antagonisms, and because he’s a bit of a nullity on his own, his destiny encapsulates those contradictions and turning points. Reading Disloyal, I found myself recalling the term mediocre hero, coined by the Hungarian literary critic György Lukács to describe the second-fiddle sort of character who crops up in many of the historical novels Lukács admired. Have the wounds of the past several years left the rest of us as mentally gouged as our canary? No longer a witness to history and to Trump’s political self-invention, he has been fractured by history, though perhaps in illuminating ways. In the second go-around, he seems to have come undone, and is by turns scattershot and floundering. Reading the two memoirs back to back presented certain quandaries: Although they cover much of the same ground, something in Cohen radically shifted between them. Indeed, the pathos of the books lies in how nakedly Cohen presents himself as a man once besotted, which does occasionally get weird: Not only did he and Trump talk multiple times a day, but if “one of us called the other, we answered immediately, like the inhalation and exhalation of breathing together, or conspiring.” However one feels about Cohen the man (or about reformed Trump enablers more generally), I’m willing to entertain his claim that having lived in Trump’s gargantuan shadow for 12 years makes him our canary in the coal mine, a stand-in for the millions of Americans who were-and still are-in thrall to the man. While waiting for a copy, I made my way first through its best-selling predecessor, Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. ![]() James’s announcement was great advance publicity for Cohen’s latest memoir, Revenge: How Donald Trump Weaponized the US Department of Justice Against His Critics. So Donald Trump must have thought earlier this fall-and not for the first time-when New York Attorney General Letitia James credited Michael Cohen, his former personal attorney (now disbarred), with handing the state a road map for its fraud lawsuit against Trump and his three oldest children.
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