Disloyal: The book by former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen hit the stores yesterday and it’s pretty devastating, although devastating never did much to hurt Donald Trump. Cohen’s book, Disloyal: A Memoir, details sexual escapades, tax fraud, racism, payoffs, and more.

  The White House says it’s all lies, told by a proven liar. “Michael Cohen is a disgraced felon and disbarred lawyer who lied to Congress,” said White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany. It’s true, Cohen went to prison, and the person he lied for was Donald Trump.

  Some prime material from Cohen:

• “From golden showers in a sex club in Vegas, to tax fraud, to deals with corrupt officials from the former Soviet Union, to catch and kill conspiracies to silence Trump’s clandestine lovers, I wasn’t just a witness to the president’s rise – I was an active and eager participant.”
• “As a rule, Trump expressed low opinions of all Black folks, from music to culture and politics.”
• “I also knew that the Mueller investigation was not a witch-hunt. Trump had cheated in the election, with Russian connivance, as you will discover in these pages, because doing anything – and I mean anything – to ‘win’ has always been his business model and way of life.”
• “There are reasons why there has never been an intimate portrait of Donald Trump, the man,” Cohen writes. “In part, it’s because he has a million acquaintances, pals and hangers on, but no real friends. He has no one he trusts to keep his secrets. For ten years, he certainly had me, and I was always there for him, and look what happened to me.”

The Businessman: President Trump’s re-election campaign, which was a fundraising juggernaut earlier in the year, might face a cash squeeze in the last two months before the election.

  Trump’s campaign and the Republican Party raised $1.1 billon through July, but already spent $800 million before the real spending needs to begin. The campaign has spent $350 million on fundraising itself, and laid out an unusual $100 million in advertising before the convention when voters usually start to pay attention to presidential politics.

  Once way behind in the money poll, former Vice President Joe Biden hauled in $350 in campaign donations in August alone. In the last two weeks of August, a critical time, Biden’s campaign spent $35.9 million on television, compared with $4.8 million for Trump. 

  Like all things Trump, there seem to be some question marks about where the money has gone. The campaign spent $21 million on legal expenses related to investigations into the president. And the Huffington Post reports that the campaign is paying $180,000 a year each to son Eric Trump’s wife, Lara, and to Don Jr’s squeeze, Kimberly Guilfoyle.

Government for the Defense: The Justice Department wants to replace President Trump’s private lawyers with government lawyers to defend him against a defamation lawsuit by the author E. Jean Carroll, who has accused him of raping her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. Justice Department lawyers say that Trump was acting in his capacity as president when he denied ever knowing Carroll and thus could be defended by government lawyers.

  In effect, they’re saying that denying you raped a woman is a presidential function.  

Viral News: The development of a coronavirus vaccine was dealt a blow when the drug company AstraZeneca suspended its trials after a volunteer test subject became ill. A company statement said, “This is a routine action which has to happen whenever there is a potentially unexplained illness in one of the trials, while it is investigated, ensuring we maintain the integrity of the trials.”

  President Trump has repeatedly said a vaccine might be ready before the Nov. 3 presidential election.

  This morning, 189,698 Americans are dead of the coronavirus.

Lilac City: With their department under investigation for the death of a mentally ill man and protests in the streets, the chief of police in Rochester, New York and two of his top command officers abruptly announced their retirement.

  Two other commanders resigned their positions and returned to the rank of lieutenant where they are protected by civil service from getting fired.

  This comes after seven officers were suspended with pay pending investigation of the death last March of  Daniel Prude, a 41-year-old black man who was naked and disoriented on a snowy street.

  Chief La’Ron Singletary wrote in his letter of resignation that, “As a man of integrity, I will not sit idly by while outside entities attempt to destroy my character.” He did not identify the “outside entities.” 

Buying the Vote: With the latest NBC/Marist poll showing President Trump in a dead heat with Joe Biden in Florida, Trump went to that state yesterday to win votes with a presidential order.

  Speaking in Jupiter, Trump announced that he would sign an executive order extending the moratorium on offshore drilling on Florida’s Gulf Coast while expanding it to Florida’s Atlantic coast, and the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina.

  “We’re here today to celebrate our incredible record of natural conservation and environmental protection,” Trump said in an astounding rewrite of his environmental record. 

  Trump has loosened restrictions on  air pollution, rolled back clean water protections, removed climate change from a list of national security threats, and pushed for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

 Annie Karni and Lisa Friedman write for The NY Times that Trump is “repudiating one of his administration’s undeniable policy accomplishments: the stunning rollback in less than four years of environmental regulations that go back decades.” 

Oh, Nooooo !!!!: Kim Kardashian announced that after 14 years, “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” will air its last season next year.  Kim said in an Instagram post, “This show made us who we are,” and we’d have to agree.

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