Alan Zendell, November 14, 2025

The playbook written by disgraced lawyer and consigliere, Roy Cohn, who died in federal prison, was essentially about starting fires. Fires, among other things, are effective distractions. The more fires you start the more chaos and confusion you create. Start as many fires as you can, so many that your opposition can’t possibly fight them all, and the ones they can will stretch their resources. Create so much confusion that no one can tell truth from fiction, and delay every legal proceeding as long as possible. If innocent people get hurt (or dead) along the way, that only adds to the chaos.

That’s the strategy Cohn used to keep mobsters out of prison for decades and the lesson Donald Trump learned in the 1980s and 90s, when his friends were mafia dons and other criminals like Jeffrey Epstein. Think about it – his friends were murderers, rapists, pedophiles, traffickers, and prostitutes. He was tutored in how to evade inconvenient laws, regulations, and convictions by Cohn, himself. And that strategy is the basic operating plan for Project 2025 which drives everything the current Trump administration does.

But that strategy is not without risk. If the fires they start get out of control, they might burn everything down both physically and metaphorically. More importantly, the more fires they start the more likely they are to get burned, themselves.

Trump started two conflagrations before the election. He claimed his tariffs would make America rich, and all Americans would benefit. As anyone reading this already sees whenever they purchase anything, it’s not working out that way; none of the “deals” Trump claims credit for have done anything to lower prices or put money in average people’s pockets.

The second huge blaze was arresting and deporting immigrants with criminal records. The objective sounded good and righteous, but the execution was something else. Stephen Miller, a Trump sycophant who was never elected to anything, decided that ICE had to fulfill quotas that would result in a million deportations this year. Does anyone believe that besides entering our country illegally, there are a million immigrants living here who are criminals? A thousand? The reality is that nearly all the arrests have been of people with no criminal records. They have torn families, communities, and major cities apart. It’s deliberate, wanton mayhem that is an international embarrassment.

Trump claims he ended seven wars (do you have any idea who was fighting whom?) and would end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza on his first day in office. Nearly ten months later, Gaza is in ruins, because Trump gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a blank check and turned a blind eye to what most of the world, including half of Israel, views as genocide. And after publicly wooing Vladimir Putin like a lovesick teenager, only to have Putin humiliate him repeatedly in front of the entire world, Russia is now pounding Ukraine mercilessly, recklessly killing civilians and destroying vital infrastructure in major cities as winter approaches. When was the last time you heard Trump mention Ukraine?

There were many other blazes aimed at undoing the principles and institutions on which on republic rests. Attacking law firms that Trump perceived as too liberal, extorting major universities to bring their education agendas in line with MAGA philosophy, ignoring court orders, emasculating Congress, using the Justice Department as a tool of political revenge, and threatening the sovereignty of other nations. And presently, bringing the United States to the brink of war with Venezuela and murdering the crews of boats leaving that country without any consideration of laws or due process.

And now the piece de resistance, the growing firestorm over the Epstein files. One fire too many, even for MAGA. Trump attacked and alienated so many people, he’s lost track of who his enemies really are. By courting evangelists and other right-wing extremists with his disingenuous claims of trying to create a white Christian America, Trump lost sight of the fact that many of his supporters include deeply religious people with moral centers, things Trump cannot relate to except as transactional tactics.

Trump badly miscalculated his base’s reaction to pedophilia. The possibility that the Epstein files might implicate Trump in the grooming and rape of underage girls, or that he was fully aware of what Epstein was doing, but chose to look the other way, is something much of his base will not ignore.

The lesson: if you start enough fires, you’ll eventually go up in smoke. The fact that many sources are predicting at least a hundred House Republications intend to vote for full release of the Epstein files over the frantic, desperate demands of the president, and the Senate’s refusal to obey Trump’s order to end the filibuster clearly demonstrate that the Democrats’ waiting game of letting Trump run wild until he hangs himself may be bearing fruit. Trump is not invulnerable.

Perhaps Americans will once again rise up in defense of the values we were raised with and turn Trump into a lame duck before the first year of his term is over. Maybe we really are the good guys, after all. Maybe the sun will rise tomorrow.