Former president and convicted felon Donald Trump “spews all sorts of nonsense” and is incapable of telling the truth, the man’s former attorney Michael Cohen told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi. Biden-Harris is the “easy answer” in this year’s election, he adds, and his former employer “has lied to you, the American public 35,000 times.”
“You will not hear a single thing of truth emanating from this man’s hole underneath his nose,” Cohen insisted. “You will not hear a single truth during this entire debate.”
With that in mind, he argued, Biden should have emphasized Trump’s lies from the very beginning of Thursday’s debate. “So, from the very first question, what I would have done is I would have come at Donald Trump with facts, something of course Donald Trump knows nothing about it,” Cohen explained. “There was no— it wasn’t even a minutiae of facts in anything that Trump says. He spews all sorts of nonsense.”
“And what you need to do is constantly remind the viewer that what Donald Trump is saying is a lie, that it is inaccurate, that it only exists. It only exists between his ears in that space called Trumpland and his MAGA supporters.”
“It’s just not true,” he added.
It’s not just what someone says while debating Trump, he continued, but “how you say it.” Cohen said, “There’s a specific way that you have to say things to Donald Trump in order to get under his skin, and that’s what Joe Biden needed to do in this debate.”
“He allowed Donald to get very comfortable,” he continued. “In fact, they didn’t talk about the 34 criminal convictions until minute 45 of a 90 minute debate. I would have come straight out and I would have started to talk about his criminal convictions.”
Host network CNN was heavily criticized for not fact-checking Trump’s many bizarre claims throughout the debate, particularly after the former president insisted that Democrats back “afterbirth abortion.” Many viewers were incensed after moderator Jake Tapper failed to respond after Trump said, “Yes, [doctors] can take the life of the baby in the ninth month, and even after birth. Because some states Democrats run take it after birth again, the governor, former governor of Virginia, … So he’s, he’s willing to, as we say, rip the baby out of the womb.”
As writer Charlotte Clymer put it, “Apparently, ‘debate moderator’ means a person who can read questions off a card and do absolutely no follow-up or fact checking or accountability or context for voters. This is truly one of CNN’s worst nights. Everyone involved in making decisions for it should feel embarrassed.”
Trump’s lies didn’t end and begin with “afterbirth abortion.” He also claimed to have been responsible for “the best environmental numbers ever” despite having expanded offshore drilling, withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement, and authorized oil and gas leasing on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, among other environmental blows.
Trump also repeated a claim that he offered to send “10,000 soldiers” to Nancy Pelosi in response to the Jan. 6 insurrection, something that has never been supported by evidence (and it’s worth noting that as Speaker of the House, Pelosi would not have been able to accept or deny such an offer as she would not have been in charge of the National Guard).
Elsewhere in the debate, Trump accused Biden of calling Black Americans “super predators” in the 1990s. In fact, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used the term “super predators” in a 1996 speech given in support of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, but at no point in the speech did she specifically use the term to describe Black Americans.
Clinton said, “Just as in a previous generation we had an organized effort against the mob. We need to take these people on. They are often connected to big drug cartels, they are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators — no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel.”
In 1997, Biden rejected the term “super predators” outright at a hearing. He said, “In 1994, there were about 1.5 million juvenile delinquency cases. Less than 10% of those cases involved violent crimes. So when we talk about the juvenile justice system, we have to remember that most of the youth involved in the system are not the so-called ‘super predators.’”
Biden’s Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act has come under increased scrutiny in recent years in large part due to its contribution to the mass incarceration of Black men. Critics insist the bill led to increased arrests, more prison sentences, and heavier policing. At the time, Biden championed the bill as evidence that the Democratic Party could be tough on crime.
“Let me define the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties. That is what is in this bill,” he said. “The liberal wing of the Democratic Party has 70 enhanced penalties…. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 100,000 cops. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 125,000 new state prison cells.”
In 2020, Biden said the bill was a “mistake,” particularly in terms of “what the states did locally.”
You can watch the interview with Michael Cohen in the video above.
