I wasn’t going to mention Michael Cohen’s tape of Trump discussing paying off a Playboy model, because, I mean, we know Trump is a dog. And it will make no difference to his base. There’s a chance the payment violated campaign finance law, of course. The most interesting part about it is that it involves the guy who owns American Media/the National Enquirer. The world would be a better place without the National Enquirer.

The real significance is that this is just the beginning. Manafort’s first trial is about to begin. There will be more trials. There will be a steady drip of revelations from now on. Charles Pierce:

My guess is that Cohen has tapes of everything. (If he’s smart, he does, anyway.) There will be a flood of them, sooner or later. I’ll let the legal ethics wonks parse out exactly how badly Cohen has blown up the canons of ethics. I suspect his law license is as far down his list of priorities now as it was when he was running clean-up errands. But he’s the first member of the inner circle to put a bargaining chip on the table. There will be other chips from other people. This is far from the last deal to go down.

Also:

If I’m the president*’s actual lawyers, I’m begging Rudy to stop helping now.