IF IT'S CONCLUSIVELY DEMONSTRATED THAT TRUMP IS A CRIMINAL, REPUBLICANS WILL HAVE NO PROBLEM WITH IT

The Wall Street Journal quotes a Trump lawyer saying that Michael Cohen is likely to flip:

One of President Donald Trump’s longtime legal advisers said he warned the president in a phone call Friday that Michael Cohen, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and close friend, would turn against the president and cooperate with federal prosecutors if faced with criminal charges.

Mr. Trump made the call seeking advice from Jay Goldberg, who represented Mr. Trump in the 1990s and early 2000s. Mr. Goldberg said he cautioned the president not to trust Mr. Cohen. On a scale of 100 to 1, where 100 is fully protecting the president, Mr. Cohen “isn’t even a 1,” he said he told Mr. Trump....

Speaking from his experience as a prosecutor, he said even hardened organized-crime figures flip under pressure from the government. “The mob was broken by Sammy ‘The Bull’ Gravano caving in out of the prospect of a jail sentence,” Mr. Goldberg said.

Jonathan Chait finds this curious.

... as a public-relations strategy, isn’t Trump’s lawyer supposed to say he believes Cohen is innocent, and would be shocked to learn if he did something wrong, because of course Trump has never engaged in any illegal behavior and would never tolerate it among his employees? He’s probably not supposed to casually liken the president of the United States to the boss of a criminal syndicate.

Chait has a similar response to a quote from voluble Trump loyalist Anthony Scaramucci:

Asked today by Katy Tur if “there’s any chance [Michael Cohen] would end up cooperating, flipping,” Anthony Scaramucci said no, because Cohen ‘is a very loyal person.”

You meant because Trump is innocent, right? Cohen is not going to testify against Trump because Trump did nothing wrong?

Chait is right -- in politics, if you're defending an officeholder under investigation, you're supposed to say that that officeholder wouldn't dream of violating the law. These guys have let the mask slip.

But for supporters of the contemporary Republican Party, I don't think that matters. Either they don't believe that their heroes are guilty or they believe that their heroes were found guilty through a "witch hunt" conducted by the liberal Deep State.

Look around. Don Blankenship, who spent a year in federal prison after an accident in one of his coal mines killed 29 miners, might win the Republican senatorial primary in West Virginia. Rick Scott, whose company oversaw what was at the time the largest Medicare fraud in history, has won two terms as Florida governor and could defeat an incumbent senator this year. Staten Island's Michael Grimm, a convicted felon, is running a credible race to unseat the Republican who took his old congressional seat. Missouri governor Eric Greitens, accused of rape, blackmail, and campaign fraud, still has a 41% approval rating in his state.

I think we're rapidly approaching the point at which being an accused criminal, or even a convicted one, will be a selling point in the eyes of the GOP electorate. Republicans will dine out on their convictions the way Jay-Z regularly invokes his drug-dealing past or Lenny Bruce boasted of his arrest record. The Deep State man can't bust our movement! MAGA!

Incontrovertible evidence of Trump's criminality may emerge soon. It might drive him from office. But I don't believe it will lower his poll numbers.