Think back on a time when you did not know the name Michael Avenatti — an almost mythological age all but lost to the mists of memory. You know when that was? March. March 2018. A mere seven months ago — though in the age of Trump, seven months now seems like seven millennia.
Liberals are forever accusing conservatives of wanting to go back in time, but right now, I’d bet, many of them wish they could get into Doc Smith’s DeLorean, set it for March 2018, and drop a dirty dime on Avenatti that would have put him away before he could do the damage he’s done to their cause.
After months of promising to deliver a coup de grace to the president that never materialized, Avenatti then inserted himself into the Brett Kavanaugh hearings … in a spectacularly ill-considered way that ultimately redounded to Kavanaugh’s benefit.
Then, on Monday, Avenatti’s peculiar legal strategy vis-à-vis Donald Trump was curb-stomped by a judge who not only ruled against his porn-star client Stormy Daniels’ deeply stupid defamation suit (one no rational person would ever have filed) but ordered her to pay Trump’s legal fees!
How is she going to come up with that kind of money? I really and truly don’t want to know the answer.
Before March, Avenatti was just some slick West Coast litigator in a suit whose bespoke sheen both reeked of money and tawdriness. Then he emerged, like Venus from the half shell, dazzling liberals and Democrats with the beauty of his untrammeled aggression.
He promised to go for Trump’s jugular, and he would go through secondary jugulars to get to the target — Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s, most prominently.
What was it Avenatti was fighting for? To a remarkable degree, liberals came to believe he was fighting for America, and doing so by using whatever tools he had at hand — in particular, Daniels’ odd claim that she had somehow been duped when she signed a non-disclosure agreement on the eve of the 2016 election that paid her $130,000 to keep quiet about the night she spent with Trump several years earlier.
However gross the whole business might have been, the agreement was legal, and legally binding. Avenatti’s rage on his client’s behalf somehow became a stand-in for the rage of Trump-haters at the president’s every waking breath. No matter that anyone with a pulse in this country had already come to understand that Trump is the opposite of a paragon when it comes to decent behavior.
We were suddenly being enlisted in a battle for the soul of the country with the banner for decency being held aloft by a sex worker and her testosterone-overdriven mouthpiece and his fanciful set of legal claims.
Sure, Avenatti might be a sleaze, but he was their sleaze, he was America’s sleaze — willing to take it to the Mad King and bring him down. Almost instantly it seemed to liberal America as though it had found its very own Trumpus ex Machina, a loudmouthed and fearless provocateur who could beat the president at his own game.
Say what you will about Trump, he was world famous for decades before he became a politician and had honed his take-no-prisoners style over many years in the public eye. The idea that just anybody can become a contender for Trump’s cultural dominance by acting like an irresponsible jerk demonstrates how successfully he has addled his enemies.
You can try to make Jean-Claude van Damme a movie star, but put him head-to-head with Arnold Schwarzenegger and guess whose movie is going to gross five times more on its opening weekend. (Sorry if you find these references dated, folks; I’m getting old.)
And by taking up the case of Julie Swetnick, who made the preposterous claim that Brett Kavanaugh had served as some kind of recruiter for a gang-rape crew and then backed off the claim in her first serious interview on the subject, Avenatti actually did harm to the liberal cause.
The ludicrous spuriousness of Swetnick’s charges cast a shadow on the more formidable (if evidence-free) claims of Christine Blasey Ford and made it easier for Sen. Susan Collins to cast her crucial, eloquently explained vote for Kavanaugh. No Avenatti, maybe no Kavanaugh. Maybe some of us Kavanaugh fans should send Avenatti a fruit basket.
The Kingslayer has slain himself. In “Game of Thrones” terms, Avenatti should go down in history solely as Extra #3, The Guy Who Got Eaten By a Dragon. But that will require liberals looking for a savior to stop and get down to the more serious business of beating Trump by … beating Trump.
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