Jeannie Suk Gerson, "What Michael Cohen's Guilty Plea Doesn't Tell Us About Trump"

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The more that it can be shown that these kinds of payments were normal for Trump—rather than something extraordinary he did when he became a Presidential candidate—the more it would bolster his case. This is presumably why Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s current lawyer, has suggested, since May, that there was a “longstanding agreement” that Cohen “takes care of situations like this, then gets paid for them sometimes.” What would seem like a puzzling admission is likely part of a legal strategy to make the payments from 2016 seem indistinguishable from those that Trump has made for reasons other than winning an election. (This strategy might be undermined by the fact that payments offered for McDougal’s story became exponentially larger after Trump won the Republican nomination.)