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In Cohen’s new book, he spares no detail in painting Trump as a power-hungry and amoral figure — and he certainly doesn’t absolve the Trump children of their role under his reign. But there’s a certain pity in how Cohen describes the children, who he’s known for nearly 15 years.
Related video: Cohen memoir casts him as ‘star witness’ against Trump
Kevin Spacey sued by Anthony Rapp for alleged sexual assault at 14
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“The truth was that all three kids were starved for their father’s love, abandoned by their egomaniacal dad and humiliated when he openly cheated on their mother,” Cohen writes. “Now all three are forever trapped in a cycle of seeking his attention.”
In other words: no matter the impact of their actions, Cohen would like us to consider that the Trump children’s motivations do deserve our pity. But haven’t we always known that Ivanka, Donald, and Eric must have suffered as their parents’ marriage broke up, as all kids of divorced parents suffer, particularly when there’s infidelity involved?
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It’s not surprising that Ivanka and her siblings felt humiliated and betrayed by their father’s highly-publicized affair. But Cohen does remind us that Donald’s insensitivity, as usual, goes beyond the pale.
Over 20 years after his first marriage-ending affair, Donald said this to Cohen on the subject of current wife Melania Trump finding out about his affair with Stormy Daniels: “I can always get another wife…That’s no problem for me. If she wants to go, so be it.”
As we know, Melania did not want to go. But it’s fair to assume that Donald’s attitude has shifted as little as his behavior when it comes to his marriages, and it must have been a tough attitude to absorb for the 12-to-16-year-old Trump kids about their mom.
Only Ivanka knows the truth of how she felt then and how she feels now — but we’re fascinated with what that journey must have looked like for her to be her father’s biggest supporter today.
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After initial WH denial, Trump confirms revelation from Woodward tapes that he downplayed coronavirus
After White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany initially said President Trump didn’t downplay the coronavirus, he later confirmed to reporters that he did that to "reduce panic" among the public. On Wednesday, audiotapes between Bob Woodward and Trump were revealed in which the president said he played down the severity of the virus.
WASHINGTON — In early August, more than 460,000 motorcycle enthusiasts converged on Sturgis, S.D., for a 10-day celebration where few wore facial coverings or practiced social distancing. A month later, researchers have found that thousands have been sickened across the nation, leading them to brand the Sturgis rally a “superspreader” event.
“The Sturgis Rally was one of the largest in-person gatherings since the outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States,” said Joseph J. Sabia, one of the study’s authors, a professor of economics and the director of the Center for Health Economics & Policy Studies at San Diego State University. He described the “public health costs” of the rally as “substantial and widespread.” He and his co-authors estimate that dealing with the fallout from the rally will involve more than $12 billion in health care costs.
“The spread of the virus due to the event was large,” the authors write, because it hosted people from all over the country. But the severity of the spread was closely tied to the approaches to the pandemic by Sturgis attendees’ home states. In some places, any spread related to people returning from the rally was blunted by strong mitigation measures, like a face-mask mandate or a prohibition against indoor dining.
Motorcyclists on Aug. 7 during the 80th Annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in Sturgis, S.D. (Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images)
The findings come in a new paper, “The Contagion Externality of a Superspreading Event: The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and COVID-19,” published by IZA — Institute of Labor Economics, a German think tank. Its four authors are all researchers affiliated with American universities.
It is not clear if the study was subject to peer review.
The rally was held in a state whose governor, Kristi Noem, is a close Trump supporter and, like the president, a skeptic of many coronavirus mitigation measures, such as the wearing of face masks. And while the rally itself had no political orientation, Trump has made overtures to bikers, even inviting some to ride at the White House. At the Sturgis rally, a group called Bikers for Trump registered voters.
The new research paper contains an unlikely but telling quotation from Steve Harwell, singer for the band Smash Mouth, which performed at this year’s rally: “Now we’re all here together tonight. And we’re being human once again. F*** that COVID s***.” Trump used a Smash Mouth song during the 2016 campaign; the band played at the Lincoln Memorial ahead of his 2017 presidential inauguration.
Many of the researchers behind the Sturgis study previously examined the protests against police brutality that swept across the nation earlier this summer. Many Trump supporters wondered why neither the media nor public health professionals condemned those protests, when they seemed to plainly contravene social distancing guidelines. But most people at those protests wore masks, and there was virtually no indoor socializing of the kind that aerosol scientists say poses the highest risk of viral transmission. That combination prevented those protests from becoming superspreader events.
A protest in Rochester, N.Y., on Sept. 6, following the release of video evidence that showed the death of Daniel Prude while in police custody. (Maranie R. Staab/AFP via Getty Images)
In that earlier paper, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the authors also surmised that even as protests brought thousands together in outdoor environments, they drove others indoors, whether out of fear of violence or concerns about viral spread. “This enhanced mitigation offset the effects of diminished social distancing,” Sabia told Yahoo News. He said a similar effect could be observed after the Trump campaign held a rally in Tulsa, Okla., in June. That rally saw low attendance, which may have prevented it from becoming a viral hot spot.
“We found no evidence that local residents in Sturgis increased stay-at-home behavior during the event,” Sabia added. “Rather we found that many decreased stay-at-home behavior, likely to attend the rally.”
Indeed, no such offset was evident in Sturgis, where people moved around more, not less, once the bikers arrived, according to cellphone records. Those records were collected by a company called SafeGraph and stripped of identifying data. Civil libertarians have expressed concerns about using cellphone location data for pandemic response; public health professionals maintain that such data is invaluable, allowing them to track demographic patterns with an accuracy that would otherwise be impossible.
South Dakota has a mostly rural population, which may explain why it declined to institute any of the restrictive measures that went into effect throughout the country in March and April. Trump traveled there in July to speak at Mount Rushmore.
Still, more than 60 percent of Sturgis residents had wanted the rally delayed. City officials considered that possibility, but ultimately allowed the event to move forward. Gov. Noem showed little concern about the possibility of the rally leading to greater viral spread. “We hope people come,” she said on Fox News. “Our economy benefits when people come and visit us.”
Bikers came to Sturgis from around the country. They congregated in local bars and restaurants, which allowed indoor seating. They attended concerts and motorcycle races. Then they went back to their states of residence — and, according to the new research, carried the coronavirus with them. More than 90 percent of the attendees came from outside South Dakota.
“The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally,” the authors of the study conclude, “represents a situation where many of the ‘worst case scenarios’ for superspreading occurred simultaneously: the event was prolonged, included individuals packed closely together, involved a large out-of-town population (a population that was orders of magnitude larger than the local population), and had low compliance with recommended infection countermeasures such as the use of masks. The only large factors working to prevent the spread of infection [were] the outdoor venue, and low population density in the state of South Dakota.”
Motorcyclists at the Sturgis rally on Aug. 7. (Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images)
Using anonymized cellphone data and public health reports from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the researchers concluded that not only did the Sturgis rally cause a rise in coronavirus infections in surrounding Meade County, but it led to similar spikes (of varying intensity) across the nation, from Southern California to Maine.
South Dakota saw a 35 percent rise in cases, while counties in other states from which a significant number of residents traveled to Sturgis saw increases of 10.7 percent. Those counties were mostly in Western and Midwestern states, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, Washington and Wyoming. Counties deemed “second highest inflow counties” saw a 12.5 percent rise in infections.
In aggregate, the data “provide strong evidence that the Sturgis Rally appears to have been a superspreader event,” the authors conclude.
The researchers found that the rally, which hosted 462,182 people between Aug. 7 and 16, “generated substantial public health costs,” totaling $12.2 billion. (That calculation is based on figures on health care costs associated with the coronavirus from another IZA study.) The authors note that the cost was “enough to have paid each of the estimated 462,182 rally attendees $26,553.64 not to attend.”
OpEd: A lot of those assholes will die. That's a good thing. I love MAGAts..... DEAD ONES!
OpEd: If you still support Trump after this you deserve to have your throat slit!
The widower of a onetime aide to Joe Scarborough, the former congressman turned MSNBC host, told Yahoo News in a series of emotional interviews that the conspiracy theories about the death of his wife — promoted by President Trump on Twitter and embraced by the devotees of the QAnon conspiracy cult — have caused “inhuman” pain and anguish for him and his late wife’s family.
“It got to the point that I literally could not stomach this,” T.J. Klausutis, an Air Force engineer, said in exclusive interviews for a new three-episode season of the Yahoo News podcast “Conspiracyland.” Titled “A Death in Florida,” the “Conspiracyland” series explores the circumstances surrounding the July 2001 death of Klausutis’s wife, Lori, and how they triggered nearly two decades of conspiracy theories, first pushed by liberal bloggers and more recently adopted and turbocharged by Trump and his allies.
“I’ll use the term ‘suffering,’ quite honestly,” Klausutis said about the impact of the steady barrage of social media postings, complete with malicious and demonstrably false claims, about what happened to his wife. “And nobody, and I mean nobody, should have to be used in such a fashion. ... It’s just inhuman.”
Klausutis, who designs navigation guidance systems for the U.S. military, is speaking out publicly for the first time, three months after he wrote a poignant letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, pleading with him to take down the president’s tweets about the death of his wife. It was a plea that, once made public, reverberated throughout Silicon Valley and, in the view of some analysts, prodded social media companies to become more aggressive about policing the disinformation and baseless conspiracy theories that proliferate on their platforms.
But Twitter has yet to take down Trump’s tweets about Lori Klausutis — a stance that continues to infuriate her husband. A medical autopsy found that, while working in the Fort Walton Beach, Fla., office of then-Rep. Scarborough in 2001, she died in a tragic accident caused by an undiagnosed heart condition. The local police found no evidence of foul play.
A composite image of Michael Cohen and President Donald Trump.
AP/Business Insider
Michael Cohen, former personal lawyer and fixer to the president, said in his book that Donald Trump ogled his then-15-year-old daughter in 2012.
The three were at Trump's New Jersey golf club eight years ago when Cohen caught the president staring at his daughter, according to the Associated Press (AP), which obtained a copy of the book.
"When did she get so hot?" Trump asked when he learned the girl he'd been leering at was Cohen's daughter, according to Cohen.
Related: Cohen says Trump 'would start a war' to avoid leaving office
Michael Cohen says Trump 'would start a war' to stop himself from being removed from office
President Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen believes that Trump will "do anything and everything" to remain in office, even if it means he has to "start a war."
Cohen included the detail in his upcoming book, "Disloyal: A Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump," which is set for release on Tuesday.
Multiple parts of the book are fixated on Trump's interactions with women throughout the years, the AP reported. Cohen worked for Trump from 2006 to 2018.
In another part of the book, Trump once leered at contestants at a Miss Universe pageant, saying that he could "have all of them," according to the AP.
It's not clear when this took place. Trump owned the Miss Universe pageant family from 1996 to 2015, and Cohen said he was married at the time.
Trump has also cornered and forcibly kissed multiple women at his office, Cohen wrote, according to the AP. Cohen did not say which office this took place in.
When reached for comment, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany gave the following statement: "Michael Cohen is a disgraced felon and disbarred lawyer, who lied to Congress. He has lost all credibility, and it's unsurprising to see his latest attempt to profit off of lies."
Cohen's claims are among many other damning accusations of sexual misconduct leveled against Trump over the last four years.
In 2016, weeks before the presidential election, a damning tape surfaced of Trump saying it's okay to grope women.
"I'm automatically attracted to beautiful -- I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything," Trump said on the tape, adding: "Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything."
Dozens other women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct. Trump has repeatedly dismissed all allegations, which span ogling, harassment, groping, and rape.
Cohen wrote the memoir while serving a prison sentence in upstate New York. He had admitted to financial crimes and lying to Congress, and has since then publicly come forward about his relationship with Trump.
Since Cohen's arrest, the White House has tried to distance itself from the former fixer, painting his stories as "lies" and saying that his prime motivation for pushing these allegations was to make money from his book.
Attention Feed Bloggers Full publication of this article is contingent on the actions of John Deere.
Decades ago John Deere had a reputation of doing right by farmers. Now like so many once great American companies John Deere is a deplorable corporate citizen whose mission is to screw the American farmer. The extortionists at John Deere have decided to make their equipment overly complex and unreliable so that the can charge farmer for expensive repairs. Most farmers are able to repair their equipment on their farms but that didn't sit well with the trash currently running John Deere so like the car companies they decided to sell equipment to farmers that is unreliable and impossible to repair without diagnostic software that they won't supply to their customers. Now repairs that can be done onsite by the farmer have to be done at John Deere "stealerships" making the repair more costly and time consuming for the farmer.
DEMANDS and SPECIFICATIONS
Provide our with repair software and stop making your shit equipment purposefully complex. If you bastards haven't noticed Americans are getting fed up with corporate fuckery.
Give all farmers worldwide who purchased John Deere equipment in the past a 70% cash rebate.
Failure to comply with these demands will result in continued exposure of the maltreatment of farmers by John Deere and its other wrongdoing by its top executives which could result in angry peasants showing up at the mansions of those over paid thugs and exacting some do it yourself justice which really is their only recourse when dealing with lawless criminal corporations like John Deere.
The home addresses and personal information of John Deere executives and members of the board of directors will be made available to any interested party.
The video below provides further detail regarding John Deere's mistreatment of farmers.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Though Saturday evening's 146th Kentucky Derby will lack spectators, the horses, jockeys and trainers will be far from alone in Louisville.
On Saturday afternoon, armed demonstrators organized by Dylan Stevens – an online personality known as "The Angry Viking" – confronted protesters who were demanding justice for the shooting death of Breonna Taylor during a police raid. The Taylor protesters are calling for the Derby to be canceled.
As Taylor activists chanted, "Say her name: Breonna Taylor," the armed group, which had convened earlier at a downtown park, responded by chanting: "All lives matter," "U-S-A" and "Back the blue," referring to police. Groups exchanged heated words with one another, but there were no major physical altercations.
Stevens told protesters he does not oppose them. He said the group was there because, in July, the leader of "Not F*cking Around Coalition" said he would "burn the city to the ground" if justice was not delivered for Taylor.
Video taken by Courier-Journal reporters at the scene showed dozens of predominantly white men, women and children with Stevens' group marching through downtown Louisville, clad in helmets and face masks. They were openly carrying firearms and holding "Trump 2020" and American flags.
There appeared to be little police presence, reporters said.
Meanwhile, Churchill Downs was taking safety precautions following a police situation in the area, according to Louisville Metro Police Department spokesman Lamont Washington said.
"There is an active police situation near the backside to the track," Washington said. "Because of that, Churchill is taking additional precautions."
Washington declined to provide further detail.
Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer warned people Saturday not to believe everything they hear when it comes to protests, saying there has been a plethora of "rumors" and "misinformation."
Related: 'Massive demonstration' in Louisville led to 64 arrests
Breonna Taylor: 'Massive demonstration' in Louisville led to 64 arrests
Following four-days of events meant to draw attention to Breonna Taylor's case a 'massive protest' led to many arrests.
"Since protests began, we've seen rumors & misinformation circulating on social media, causing unnecessary worry," Fischer said on Twitter. "@LMPD has a plan and is ready for Kentucky Derby day," he said, referring to the Louisville police department.
Fischer linked to a web page titled "Information about the Kentucky Derby and protests." The release says the city "fully supports First Amendment rights and expects peaceful protests."
"If activities become unlawful, LMPD has plans in place and is prepared to handle the situation," the page said.
Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron took to Twitter Saturday morning to say he recognizes protesters want "answers in the investigation into the death of Breonna Taylor."
"Today, while we honor a KY tradition with the running of the Derby, we remain cognizant of the community’s desire for answers in the investigation into the death of Ms. Breonna Taylor," Cameron wrote in a tweet. "We continue to move forward with our investigation, reviewing each fact to reach the truth."
For 101-straight days, protesters have been demanding that Cameron criminally charge the three officers involved in the fatal shooting of Taylor, a Black woman shot to death inside her own apartment on March 13.
