What Trump Most Fears

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/04/why-is-trump-so-furious-about-any-probe-into-his-business/558110/

What Trump Most Fears
It’s impossible to know what the president wants so desperately to hide, but every threat to examine his business dealings produces frantic defensive maneuvers.
David A. Graham 12:17 PM ET Politics


It’s always been the business that worried Donald Trump. This was true during the presidential campaign, it was true during the transition, and it remains true now.

The president continues to waffle over what to do about special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe—fire Mueller? Fire Rod Rosenstein?—but for the moment, he seems content with bluster. As federal prosecutors in New York circle his longtime fixer Michael Cohen, however, Trump’s legal team has sprung into action, seeking the right to review and withhold documents seized from Cohen. Meanwhile, well-sourced reporters at The New York Times and Axios both say that Trump is much more rattled by the Cohen case than by Mueller’s investigation.

snip//

The irony is that even though inquiries into his personal business seems to rattle Trump more than the Russia probe, it’s the Russia probe that precipitated the Cohen raid. According to press reports, the FBI and U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York raided Cohen on a referral from Mueller, who had obtained evidence outside his purview but still relevant for potential prosecution. One important element of the Cohen raid is his role in payments to two women who alleged affairs with the president, Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, and from there it threatens to spread into other corners of the Trump business realm—at least that seems to be the president’s concern. This journey from sex scandal to business scandal is a curious mirror image of Bill Clinton’s travails, which began with an inquiry into his business dealings at Whitewater and ended with his impeachment in a sex scandal.

I have written elsewhere about how Trump tries to apply lessons from his business career to politics. For example, his experience with developments that failed spectacularly has made him strangely sanguine about his ability to bounce back from political defeats. The skirmish over Cohen’s documents is a test for other tactics he learned in business. Once again, he is attempting to work the refs, demanding access to the documents and portraying the raid as a great blow to civil liberties. That may or may not work. If it does not, his tactic of paying a fine and moving on is unlikely to apply here.

The great mystery remains what Trump thinks is in the Cohen files that could damage him so. There is a range of liabilities: We know about payments to ex-mistresses, past associations with mafia figures, violations of federal and state laws and casino regulations, sketchy development deals overseas, and sexual-assault allegations—but whether the files contain damaging details about these things, or about something novel, is something only Cohen and Trump really know. Regardless, the past few days have made plain something that has, for years, been hiding in plain sight: The president views his personal business history as his real liability.