Trump's ex-lawyer Michael Cohen eyes House seat

Daily Point

Another LI native gets the political bug

Michael Dean Cohen was born and raised in Lawrence, a son of medical professionals. He attended the Lawrence Woodmere Academy through high school. He’s most famous for his association with former President Donald Trump, serving for years as the real estate heir’s tough-talking “fixer” in business and then politics.

Now Cohen, 56, has told the website Semafor that he is “interested” in running next year in a Democratic primary in Manhattan’s 12th Congressional District, presumably against 31-year veteran Rep. Jerrold Nadler, who last November won the newly drawn, east-west crosstown seat, defeating Rep. Carolyn Maloney.

“There’s a multitude of folks encouraging me to run,” Cohen told Semafor. Which “folks” he’s referring to, we have yet to hear.

The Nassau County native is long since ensconced in the five boroughs. Twenty years ago Cohen, while a Democrat, ran as the GOP nominee for a New York City Council seat in Manhattan; Democratic charter-school advocate Eva Moscowitz trounced him at the polls. In March 2017 Cohen tweeted: “Made the official move today and joined the #RepublicanParty! It took a great man (@POTUS) to get me to make the switch. #MAGA.”

Cohen had handled the effort to keep porn actor Stormy Daniels from telling her tales of dalliance with the real estate heir before the 2016 election. That hush-money coverup, earlier a subject of federal inquiry against Cohen, is now the subject of one of the ex-president’s three indictments. By the end of 2018 Cohen had pleaded guilty to tax evasion, making false statements to a federally insured bank, and campaign finance violations. Cohen was released to home confinement after serving about a year of his 3-year prison sentence due to COVID.

By then, he and Trump, in whose buildings he had once bought apartments, had long since had it with each other. In February 2019 Cohen described to members of Congress why he thought of Trump as a racist, con man and cheat. Rather presciently, he said of his ex-liege: “I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power. This is why I agreed to appear before you today."

Nadler has his own widely watched public history with Trump. Long before heading both House Judiciary Committee impeachment inquiries against the last White House, Nadler was a local antagonist, opposing parts of the future president’s West Side development plans.

Cohen might find serving as a “flipped” witness a breeze — compared to getting elected. “What’s this guy doing? No idea,” a longtime city-based Democratic Party consultant told The Point. “He’s been disbarred. Maybe he just has a lot of time on his hands.”

— Dan Janison dan.janison@newsday.com

Pencil Point

MAGA millions

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Reference Point

Toughening up the 'soft American'

America is soft.

So goes the plaint that arises from time to time, as various politicians, thought leaders or public scolds worry that the nation might be losing its competitive edge.

One such occasion was the summer of 1959, when Newsday’s editorial board latched on to a variation of that theme in an Aug. 10 piece called “Too Easy a Life.” The genesis was a “shocking” article in the Saturday Evening Post in which Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hanson W. Baldwin posited that our military was going soft.

“As Baldwin explains it, the armed services are fat and sloppy because we civilians are fat, sloppy and selfish, more interested in creature comforts, big-fin cars and air-conditioned homes than in the survival of our country,” the board wrote. Blame was ascribed to “the welfare state,” which helped raise many poor people out of poverty but also allegedly had expanded so much “as to make us all conformists rather than individuals, dedicated to the principle of the safe, secure life — a far cry from our pioneer forbears.”

Baldwin theorized that programs and initiatives like the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, health benefits and federal scholarships “tend to shield the individual from the harsh realities of the world we live in.” He also said the Russians and Chinese still valued hard work over security.

“Can American man — after years of protective conditioning — vie with the barbarian who has lived by his wits, his initiative, his brawn? Will he retain his will to fight for his country?” Newsday’s board quoted Baldwin as saying.

“The evidence of the Korean War suggests he has already lost that will,” the board wrote.

The board saw a series of solutions — from a shake-up of military leadership to giving American children “better moral training and a firm faith in the rightness of the American cause — with which comes pride of citizenship.”

The backdrop, of course, was the Cold War and America’s obsession with losing its edge over the Soviet Union in any sphere of competition. The board declared its solidarity with “the nationwide program of physical conditioning” proposed by President Dwight Eisenhower. In May, Eisenhower had declared a National Youth Fitness Week off a recommendation by the President's Council on Youth Fitness, which seemed to indicate that American children were lagging behind their European peers.

That led to the creation of a physical fitness test that anyone of school age at that time will remember. It included pull-ups, sit-ups, a shuttle run, a standing broad jump, a 50-yard dash, a softball throw and, later, a 600-yard walk-run.

President John F. Kennedy ratcheted up that concern in his term, which would begin 17 months later and feature further retooling of the fitness test. Before taking office, he wrote an article for Sports Illustrated called — what else — “The Soft American” in which he stated, “The harsh fact of the matter is that there is also an increasingly large number of young Americans who are neglecting their bodies — whose physical fitness is not what it should be — who are getting soft. And such softness on the part of the individual citizen can help to strip and destroy the vitality of a nation.”

Newsday’s board channeled JFK’s hawkish concerns when it wrote that “the penalty for complacency is ruin” as it lamented Baldwin’s “grim warning of what we have let happen to ourselves.”

— Michael Dobie michael.dobie@newsday.com, Amanda Fiscina-Wells amanda.fiscina-wells@newsday.com