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Why does the president of the United States need a fixer?
Apr 17, 2018, 1:44 PM
This April 11, 2018 file photo shows attorney Michael Cohen in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)
(AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)
If you watch a lot of crime shows like me, then you’ve heard of a fixer. He’s the guy you call when things have gone horribly wrong and you need someone with connections to smooth things over.
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The Godfather had Tom Hagen. In the Wire, it was Stringer Bell. I always loved this character in the movies, but to be honest, I thought it was a dramatic device. The screenplay writer needed a convenient character that could solve the lead character’s problems quickly.
“Hey, call the fixer.”
Then you can explain to the audience a complex plot narrative in one straight forward scene.
Evidently, I was wrong. Apparently, fixers exist in real life. And Donald Trump, the president of the United States, has one. His name is Michael Cohen.
I’m not going to get into the minutiae about all the seized documents and what it means. The thing that I keep coming back to is: “What kind of person needs a fixer?”
The fixer
Do you reach a certain level of wealth or power and you all of the sudden need a this kind of service? Does Bill Gates have a fixer? What about Paul Allen or Warren Buffett? Is it standard issue when you’re a billionaire to have a fixer? What if you’re just super rich?
Or does the need for a fixer align more with what you do than the size of your bank account? Is it more that people who need fixers are doing things that need to be fixed? All of the examples from Hollywood involve a main character that is doing things in the shadows of life. They are doing something wrong. You know, like paying a porn star to keep quiet so your wife who just gave birth to your son doesn’t find out about the affair.
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I’m not a federal prosecutor or a judge, so I have no idea what all of this means.
I do find it fascinating that our sitting president hired a lawyer to show up in court yesterday to argue against his own justice department. A hearing where his other lawyer, who is also his fixer, argued he should be able to redact seized documents. And those documents could be about things he may or may not have done before he was elected. Things that necessitated a fixer.
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