ABC’s Matt Dowd: Trump Associates Like ‘Sopranos’ Meets ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’ At A ‘Star Wars’ Bar
As Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe hums along and has seemingly ensnared more and more associates and lickspittles of President Donald Trump, some of the folks who have been caught up are, shall we say, very colorful characters. This caused a couple of pundits this morning to reach into their bag of pop culture references to describe these guys.
Moments after political dirty trickster and Joker cosplayer Roger Stone wrapped up his interview on ABC’s This Week about being a potential target of the Mueller investigation, host George Stephanopoulos moderated a roundtable discussion that talked about the probe.
During the discussion, Stephanopoulos noted that one of the things that’s been shown is “whether it’s Michael Cohen or Michael Flynn or George Papadopoulos or Jerome Corsi is that it seems like everyone around President Trump on anything having to do with Russia were not telling the truth.” This caused former Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile to claim that last week’s Cohen guilty plea regarding lying to Congress on Trump Tower Moscow negotiations was a “smoking gun,” something The View co-host Meghan McCain pushed back on.
“I think part of the problem with what you just said — sorry — is that when the media treats every news bit like it’s a smoking gun, it means nothing’s a smoking gun,” McCain declared. “And part of the problem is all of these — I call them Marvel villain actors that worked on the Trump campaign — these were all really bad guys from day one — from far before when they met President Trump.”
She added, “And I think when you’re talking about people like Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen right now — oh, he’s really bad guy. The question I have — does it have anything to do with the investigation. And we don’t know because Mueller hasn’t come out yet.”
ABC News chief political analyst Matthew Dowd jumped in, noting that Cohen’s statements surrounding the Moscow project highlight that the president is vulnerable to blackmail. He then piggybacked on what McCain had said about these current and former associates and allies of the president.
“I would add to what Meghan said, which is they are Marvel villains,” Dowd stated. “It’s — it’s like the Sopranos meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and they’re all sitting at the Star Wars bar. It’s all of these folks surrounding it I think are problematic.”
He continued, “I will give one thing to Bob Mueller, is that if you look back, all the investigations, independent counsels, special counsels and all of that, he’s already had over 33 indictments and guilty pleas. It’s more guilty pleas and more indictments than any investigation we’ve seen since Watergate. And so there is — there’s more than just smoke, there’s a ton of fire. I think the ultimate question we don’t know the answer to is is the president impacted about this. And we don’t know the answer.”
Watch the clip above, via ABC News.
