GOP/LEGAL/MICHAEL COHEN/SENATE/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “Twenty-four hours after one of the most damaging days for Donald Trump’s presidency, the Republican wall of support around him shows no signs of crumbling. Though some GOP senators expressed discomfort with the the plea deal reached by Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and the guilty verdict rendered on former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, there has been no seismic shift in the GOP after a bombshell Tuesday [8-22-18]. Some Republicans attacked Cohen as not credible, some said Manafort’s conviction has nothing to do with Trump and others still said the matter doesn’t fall in their purview as senators. Moreover, the president still enjoys strong support among most Republican elected officials, a significant achievement given the rising prospects that Senate Republicans could be the backstop against an impeachment trial in the Senate if Democrats win the House. If Trump faces impeachment next year, for now it seems that he can count on the support of the Senate GOP…Republicans seem to have built an alternate reality for themselves, where they tune out legal and political crises wracking the White House to concentrate on the nuts and bolts of government. Though their criticisms of Trump’s actions helped end the administration’s family separation policy just a few weeks ago, there is no such campaign among Republicans to publicly chastise or fret about Trump’s standing in the party following a series of criminal convictions of his former campaign aides.”
–Burgess Everett and Noaln D. McCaskill, “‘It is what it is’: Republicans shrug off Trump’s legal meltdown,” Politico, Augusrt 22, 2018 4:05 pm