Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political analyst.
[I]t’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good at all, and the misfortunes (and alleged misdeeds) of Michael Avenatti have proved a blessing for Terje Anderson and the Vermont Democratic Party he chairs.
Only Avenatti’s arrest on charges of domestic violence in Los Angeles last week stopped Anderson and his party from welcoming him to Burlington and White River Junction over the weekend.
Not that there would have been no value in seeing him here. It might have provided yet another piece of evidence into how transformative Donald J. Trump’s presidency is: it threatens to bring everything down to his level.
Or maybe that’s giving Trump too much credit. Perhaps everything was headed down to that level anyway, which is how Trump won to begin with.
Even before allegedly emulating Trump’s propensity for abusing women (both men deny it), Avenatti was the most Trump-like Democrat in captivity. He has been accused of underpaying his income taxes, cheating his business partners, stiffing his landlord, and grossly exaggerating his achievements.
At least some of those accusations have been confirmed by the courts, including the three-judge panel that found Avenatti had “acted with malice, fraud and oppression” in one case brought by a former partner.
Among the companies accusing an Avenatti-controlled company of not paying what it owed is Vermont’s own (well, formerly Vermont’s own) Keurig Green Mountain (now Plano, Texas’s own Keurig Dr. Pepper) which sued the Global Baristas company for failure to pay trademark licensing fees.
Global Baristas, according to an Oct. 21 article in the Daily Beast, was the firm Avenatti created to buy a Seattle-based coffee chain called Tully’s. To help finance the deal, Avenatti entered into a partnership with “Grey’s Anatomy” star Patrick Dempsey, but Dempsey soon sued to get out of the partnership after he found out that Avenatti had borrowed $2 million to finance the deal without telling him.
Tully’s closed all its coffee shops last March. Global Baristas owes several million in unpaid state and federal taxes.
Then there are the many Avenatti misstatements of fact that can only be called Trumpian: the never-provided identity or composite sketch of the thug who allegedly assaulted Avenatti client Stormy Daniels in Las Vegas; his endorsement of what turned out to be vague and unsupported claims by Julie Swetnick about Supreme Court nominee (now Justice) Brett Kavanaugh; bragging about the big settlements he’d won without noting that almost all of them had been reduced on appeal.
So why would Vermont Democrats invite him to speak?
“We didn’t,” said Anderson. “He invited himself.” After meeting Vermonters at a Democratic National Committee gathering in Chicago in August, Anderson said, Avenatti “kept calling. He kept following up. We decided, well, he’s a national figure of some prominence, let people hear from him.”
Besides, Anderson said, “We weren’t spending anything. He was taking care of his own travel, his hotel.”
Not that long ago, one responsibility of party governance was to winnow out the most objectionable candidates for high office. For both better and worse, those days are gone. If anyone is still a gatekeeper, it is not a state party leader. Just consider how Anderson’s counterparts in the other party failed to guard their gates two years ago.
So the problem is not the leadership; it’s the followership, or at least enough of it. As the short-lived Avenatti for president boomlet showed, enough of the leftish followership now plods the Trumpian path, ready to support a candidate who is famous and outrageous even if there is no reason to think he has the foggiest idea about how to run the government.
Avenatti rose to fame by representing Daniels (legal name Stephanie Clifford), usually described as the woman who claimed to have had “an affair” with Trump, for which she received $130,000 to keep quiet about, and then hired Avenatti to help her break the non-disclosure agreement.
Because all this threatened Trump, Clifford and Avenatti were lionized by part of the left. “Stormy Daniels is a Feminist Hero,” read the headline on the politically liberal website Salon last March, one of several accolades to her and Avenatti from left-of-center punditry.
Clifford’s account of her night with Trump (which Trump denies) amounted to her “#Metoo story,” The Salon article said, “and she deserves the same support of all the other women who have been brave enough to share theirs.”
Oh, please. First of all, Clifford claimed one sexual encounter with Trump, which hardly constitutes an affair. By her own account it was a completely consensual encounter, not because she was attracted to Trump, but because she wanted a gig on his “Apprentice” reality television program.
Equating her with victims of sexual assault is an affront to those victims. She wasn’t a victim. She was a grifter; she was in it for the money. And Avenatti was in it for the celebrity, which he used to bamboozle cable television hosts to take him seriously as a political figure. With the help of still other liberal commentators, these hosts presented him as the fighter who would enable Clifford to “tell her story.”
She could have told her story from the beginning. She didn’t want to tell it. She wanted to sell it.
Or to put it another way, the whole thing was a con, which — until it came crashing down last week — worked well enough for Avenatti to be listed as one of 15 possible Democratic presidential candidates in an article in the Washington Post.
The Washington Post?
Reflecting, it seems, the preferences of many Democrats around the country.
“We heard he talked to other state parties and people loved him,” Terje Anderson said. “He had three appearances in New Hampshire. People like him because he’s taking the message right to Trump.”
All that’s needed in some circles. The Trump campaign was all about Trump. So, by now, is the Republican Party. Democrats are not immune. If it isn’t all Donald Trump’s world, it’s heading in that direction.