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ourloveisforthelovely · 4 years

Text

Second Time Around 8

Elon Musk

Chapter 7

Pairings: Elon Musk x Reader

Warnings: RPF

_________

Elon walked downstairs and flopped down on the couch. Feeling awful, was putting what he felt lightly. He quickly grabbed his phone and thumbed through the calendar. Sure enough, on that day’s date there was an entry that said, “Y/n doctor appointment 1:45.”

“Fuck me.”

Elon muttered. At 1:45, he had been sitting in his office staring at the wall blankly. If Elon paid attention to the date on the calendar then you wouldn’t be upset with him.

“I wouldn’t be sleeping on this couch.”

The next morning, you woke up to an empty bed. If Elon had come to bed you didn’t notice. Looking down at your phone, there was a text from Elon about a meeting at work.

“Now he is going to avoid me until he’s ready to apologize,”

You muttered before deciding to go back over to Ruth’s and apologize for your less than stellar behavior.

Standing on Ruth’s doorstep, you tightened your black tweed coat around your body. The last thing that you wanted to do was run into your mother. Apologizing to Ruth was going to be enough. Apologizing to Pattie would be a total experience that you didn’t want. You would have to face her but at the moment...you didn’t want to.

You let your mind roll back on your childhood, it was no wonder that you were the way you were. Your parents had been divorced for a few years before having a one night stand that resulted in your birth. Growing up, you knew that your mother was always regretful of her decision to sleep with your father. You were the second child that she really didn’t want.

The one thing that saved any type of maternal feelings was the fact that you were extraordinarily beautiful. Pattie saw having a daughter who took after her in the modeling industry as a great meal ticket! She was furious when you were six and your father put his foot down and said “hell fucking no” to modeling. Pattie’s sense of dissatisfaction intensified when you decided to go into the music industry like Eric. Ever since then your mother had little good to say about anything you did…

Shaking the thoughts from your mind, you rang the doorbell and waited for Ruth to come to the door.

“I’m a good person. I’m a good person.”

You muttered until the door opened. Ruth stood on the other side of the door with her warm motherly smile on her face.

“Y/n! What are you doing here?”

You looked down at your feet like an insolent child.

“I came to apologize for my less than stellar behavior last night. I kind of wrecked your dinner and acted like a two year old.”

Ruth smirked and stepped aside to let you in. She walked to the couch and patted the spot beside her. You sat down slowly as Ruth turned off the TV.

“It was actually kind of amusing. I was surprised to say the least. Y/n, I have to know. Are you really pregnant or were you just trying to give our mother a heart attack?”

You stood up and took off your tweed coat. Ruth looked at the small swell of your stomach under the black dress that you were wearing. She smiled.

“Oh, wow! This is wonderful! I am so excited for you! We have so much to do! Buy baby clothes and…”

You held a hand up.

“Is everything a trip to the mall for you?”

Ruth chuckled.

“I never thought that this was going to happen. How is Elon taking it? I figured the two of you had made some macabre plan to kill our mother.”

It was your turn to laugh.

“No, it was no macabre plan. He’s taking it well enough. Elon is kind of on my shit list at the moment. He totally forgot my doctor’s appointment yesterday. The doctor thought that Jeffree was the father. Jeffree showed up 30 minutes later when I called him in some sobbing fit because Elon didn’t show up.”

Ruth winced.

“Oh dear, yeah that wasn’t good. I’m sure he didn’t mean to forget. That man has a lot on him. I think that you know that too, Y/n.”

You looked down at your shoes.

“Yeah, I know that he does. I guess my hormones just went crazy...like he said.”

Ruth gently patted your knee.

“You're pregnant, Y/n. You are entitled to hormones.”

(Meanwhile)

Elon sat looking blankly at the computer screen in front of him. He needed to get a presentation prepared but nothing was happening. Glancing down at his phone, Elon was surprised that he hadn’t heard a thing from you. Yeah, he knew that he had really dropped the ball and he didn’t expect anything “lovey” but he expected something.

A knock at the door pulled Elon from his thoughts. He looked up as Kimball stepped in. His brother automatically winced at the expression on Elon’s face.

“Oh, you don’t look so good! Is something wrong? Oh no, is Y/n okay?”

Elon nodded.

“She’s fine. She is ready to kill me. I blame you, personally.”

Kimball was automatically offended before sitting down. He couldn’t help but wonder what exactly he had done to his older brother in the past 24 hours.

“What did I do exactly?”

Elon rolled his eyes.

“If I hadn’t been here talking to you I would have never missed Y/n’s appointment and she wouldn’t have unleashed holy hell on me. She screamed at her mother then went after me. I have to go sofa shopping when I get done here. I slept on mine and to be honest it was dreadful!”

Kimbal sat clearly processing what Elon had told him. He held up a finger before finally speaking.

“So you're telling me that because I was calming your ass down it is also my fault that you missed her appointment? Sorry, but I think that is absolute garbage! When I came here, you were looking at that wall there like some kind of nutcase. You are not taking out your problems on me! I take your side enough as it is!”

Elon held a hand up.

“Okay! I’m sorry! I kind of feel like an ass.”

Kimbal smiled.

“Well, you should! You missed her appointment and I was being delightful! Where is she now?”

Elon shrugged.

“She isn’t at home. I called Jeffree and she hasn’t gotten into the music studio yet.”

Kimbal took out his phone. He had a feeling that he knew where this was going. You were probably avoiding Elon like the plague and Elon probably hadn’t tried to call you either.

“Give me a minute.”

Elon watched his brother as the phone rang.

“Y/n! Hello! I was just calling to check in. Is all well? Uh huh. Oh, that’s lovely! I heard about the experience with your mother. That was amazing.”

Kimball glanced over at Elon who was scowling at him. He was clearly wanting information and Kimbal was just babbling on and on.

“Alright, yeah I’ll let him know.”

When Kimbal hung up, he gave Elon a glare.

“What? I was in the middle of a conversation!”

“Sorry to disturb your hot tub party but I want to know where my fiance is!”

Kimal nodded.

“Right, she is at her sister’s house.”

That all made sense. Of course you were at Ruth’s. You were probably apologizing for the night before. Elon smiled. As much as you didn’t want anything to do with Pattie; you at least had enough respect for Ruth to apologize for the rather unsettling dinner scene.

“I’m not surprised. Well, I better go apologize.”

(Meanwhile)

You sat across from Ruth who decided that you needed to eat more. She shoved a bagel with cream cheese in front of you.

“I will tell you this, mom had no idea what to say when you left! She just sat there staring at a wall. If you wanted to shock her, you did it!”

You smirked before nibbling on the bagel.

“I was hoping that she would hit the floor but it didn’t happen.”

Ruth smiled and quietly washed a few more dishes before turning back to you. Her face was a bit more serious now.

“Have you told your father yet?”

You automatically winced at that question. No, you had not told Eric yet. That was going to be a whole other barrel of monkeys! You were lucky that Eric hadn’t figured it out yet. His nose was like a doberman when it came to you having problems. Eric always knew when you had a problem! You sighed again.

“No, I haven’t. Ruth, you know that if I tell him he will be here trying to take care of me.”

Ruth nodded. She knew exactly what you were thinking about too. Eric had always been more “careful” with you after your brother Conor died. Careful was probably an understatement!

The doorbell ringing pulled Ruth from her thoughts.

“I’ll be right back.”

Once she opened the door, Ruth smiled seeing Elon on the other side.

“Hello Ruth. I was hoping to speak with Y/n.”

Ruth nodded with a smile.

“Of course, she’s calmed down some. I don’t think that you have anything to worry about.”

Elon nodded, clearly relieved. The last thing Elon really wanted was to fight with you.

“That sounds wonderful. Where is she?”

Ruth pointed to the kitchen.

“Go ahead, I’ll stay here so you both can have some privacy.”

________

@elonscult and @xjjlex

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grimelords · 5 years

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I’ve finished my September playlist, only almost a month later. It’s got everything, The Weeknd, desert psychedelica from Niger, and Australian yodelling from 1941. What more could you want!

listen here

and if you’re interested, sign up for my tinyletter to get these playlists delivered to your inbox here

XO / The Host / Initiation - The Weeknd: First of all Trilogy is a masterpiece. The Weeknd is a legend forever for this alone. Back when he was an anonymous character and before he tried to pivot to being a proper pop star and started beliving his own bullshit. This trio of songs for me is one of the highlights of the whole thing because this is where things really take a turn and it serves as a nice flipside to earlier songs like Glass Table Girls (even quoting some of the lyrics from it in a very cool reprise). Where most of the songs from House Of Balloons are about his own descent into this hedonistic life, by the time you get to Echoes Of Silence he lives there comfortably, and he's turned from cool, dark and tormented to coldly evil and calculating. He's the master of the dark palace and he's drawing this woman in. The chorus of XO is straight up cult language 'all we ever do is love, open up your mind you can find the love'. She's broke and addicted trying to escape her life and he offers her this community. Which is where Initation comes in and things get really dark. This song feels like the real truth of those stories you hear of Drake flying instagram models around and it's a masterpiece of the dark underside of the drugs money and models bragging you're used to.

Sociopath (feat. Kash Doll) - Pusha T: Get a load of this new Pusha song where he's got Rodney Dangerfield ghostwriting for him. I got a bitch that'll master your card.. my wife ova hea!! Also the funny gritted teeth way he says it cracks me up. He also says boop bop be boop bop. There's so many good moments in this very silly song from a man that is normally terrifyingly serious.

Ice Cream - Muscles: I suddenly remembered this song the other day and I'm so glad I did. A good example of how you can get so much feeling out of music that has no relation at all to the lyrics. In the right mood this song makes me so emotional and I can't even pin down why. The way he sings 'ice cream is going to save the day' somehow just makes the urban alienation of the verse even more pointed. It's such a silly little dance song and that's what's so strong about it. It's dancing at night and unsuccessfully trying to forget what happened today.

Running - Gil Scott Heron & Jamie xx: It’s extremely strange that this remix album ever happened, thinking back on it. Stranger still that a Gil Scott Heron song got remixed by Jamie xx and then remixed again by 40 and turned into a Drake song in I’ll Take Care Of U and all three versions rock. Anyway, this song and this whole album remain fantastic - it still sounds futuristic in a way where nobody else really followed Jamie’s sound, everything else went a different direction so this an In Colour feel more and more unique to me as time goes on.

Boyfriend (Repeat) - Confidence Man: I’m in love with this album. It’s the closest I’ve found so far to the level of absolute fun in dance music since Duck Sauce’s album. I love the the attitude of her lyrics, which carries through the whole album. I love when her Australian accent peeks out for a second on a few words. I love his rebuttals that almost but not quite put it over the edge into a comedy song. I love the big fading out leadup to the drop near the end where a huge throat singing drone just swallows the whole song for a second.

Ever Again (Soulwax Remix) - Robyn: Extremely hot remix alert!! Thankyou to Zan Rowe's Monthly Mixtape playlist for putting my onto this.Sometimes all you need is one ferociously hot bassline to make a life complete.

$50 Million - !!!: !!!’s new album has one of the best covers I’ve seen recently, I advise you to check it out. It’s interesting to be so far into your career (this is their 8th album since 2001) and still be writing songs about selling out, a concept which has largely disappeared from music discourse since musicians started making no money post napster. I vaguely remember the turning point being when Kimya Dawson, after blowing up via the Juno soundtrack, turned down a coke ad for a ludicrous amount and the blogosphere at the time turned on her and said she should have taken the money because she was living in a van at the time. Nobody gives a fuck about selling out anymore because bands make more from tshirts than streams so you’ve got to act like a brand just to make a living. Anyway I’ve gotten off track. This song rocks, especially for the breakdown near the end.

Tipped Hat - The Paper Scissors: A song I haven’t heard in over ten years that suddenly popped into my head the other day. I love the way this guy’s voice sounds, just completely committing to sounding like a hand puppet. I’ve been playing bass a lot more recently and so have developed the worst man habit of becoming more sensitive to and pointing out extremely hot basslines to people, so I’d be derelict in my duty to not share this one.

Heimsdalgate Like A Promethian Curse - of Montreal: I love this song about literally pleading with your brain to come good. Here’s a good quote about this album “I went through this chemical depression, and that's when I was writing a lot of the songs for Hissing Fauna. They're all songs about that experience. And I was experiencing it in the moment that I was writing the songs, and sort of asking myself: What the hell is going on? Why are you all of a sudden totally paranoid and plagued by these anxieties? And why is everything so distorted and confusing and fucked up? My lifestyle hadn't changed that much. And then I realized, well, there's something going on inside of me that I don't have control over, and then you realize how vulnerable you are to these things, these elements that you can't understand, or unless you go on medication and get it under control. It's like you're being betrayed by your body.” Something I really admire about this album is that the lyrics reflect black metal levels of mental anguish, he was absolutely going through it the worst anyone can go through it “I'd gotten to that point where nothing was working. I was borderline suicidal, and my relationship with my girlfriend had totally eroded and she'd gone back to Norway with our daughter and everything was totally fucked, and I was just like, What can I do? "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal" is about that.” But the music is one hundred percent committedly twee and I really admire the effect that that split mood gives. “The lyrics tell the story of what was really going on and the music sort of represents this other emotion that I wish existed. The music was really happy because I wanted to make something that would lift my spirits.”

Jesus Rabbit - Guerilla Toss: I love the wobbly weird bass sound in this weirdo UFO cult song. I love the bleepy bloop melody that runs through it and I love how fundamentally unstable the whole song sounds, like it’s made out of paperclips and foil and papier mache.

Suburbia - Press Club: I can’t believe I didn’t know about Press Club for so long. I only found out about them this performance https://youtu.be/bCmtc-T5Unk which I’m shocked to learn has less than 5k views considering it’s one of the very best TV performances I’ve ever seen.

Come For Me - Sunflower Bean: I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about this song before and I’m probably going to say the exact same thing but who cares! This song fuckin rocks. I love how assured it is, like “if you’re gonna fuck me then stop fucking around and fuck me already.” It also feels so musically similar to I Can Hardly Make You Mine by Cults to me, which is a great excuse for me to listen to that song every single time I listen to this song.

Thousands - Club Night: This Club Night album is really really good. It's like a really nice middleground between midwest emo and Cymbals Eat Guitars. The way this song blows up halfway through with 'what if we want it!!' is so good. This whole band feels like they're from 2009 but in a good way, the tail end of indie and twee with these prog or postrock structures where the songs just go and go, and you can just get completely lost in it.

Cemetary - Brutus: The first thing you've got to know about Brutus is the drummer is also the singer. Normally who plays what is not really important but in this case I think it's very important because it makes the drums a lead instrument more than they normally would be. When she's not singing my focus is still on the drums because they're linked and I absolutely love it. This song is great and every song I've heard of theirs is just as good, I love Brutus and they're one of the best new bands I've found recently. Someone in the youtube comments said 'there's something really special about hearing a song for the first time and just knowing you're going to listen to it hundreds of times in your life.'

Enter By The Narrow Gates / Spirit Narrative - Circle Takes The Square: I think that I think of Circle Takes The Square as a household name just because they have such an outsized importance in my own life when they're definitely not at all. They're legendary for making The screamo (good kind) album in As The Roots Undo and then taking 8 years to make a followup, which is this album Decompositions, but I don't really know if they're well known outside of like, people who have opinions about what were the hottest music blogspots in 2010. I chose both of these because you can't really have one without the other, the whole album basically runs as one long piece of music and so this just kind of jarringly ends at the end of Spirit Narrative, sorry about that please listen to the entire album. Because of the status As The Roots Undo enjoys I feel like this album was kind of ignored, or overshadowed by the reputation it was trying to live up to, almost exactly like The Avalanches with Since I Left You and Wildflower, when just like Wildflower it's a more expansive, developed take on the original sound that trades some of the rawness for a more polished and considered approach and comes out arguably better than the orginal. I feel like I have so much to say about this album but I don't really know where to begin, just listen to it.

Vitrification Of Blood (Pt. 1) - Blood Incantation: I am by no means a metal scholar, but I know that when the word 'blood' is in both the song title AND the band name that means it's good metal. I love this song, and this whole album is great. It's very 'classic' death metal but there's touches (beyond the extreme length) of psychedelica as well that puts it on another level you can just get lost in. The way the guitar goes to space at 3:40, and again properly into orbit at 6:50 is just magical. The more I listen to this band the more I understand those guys who only listen to metal, there's a whole ecosystem in here and it's really got everything you need.

Out Of Line - Gesaffelstein: This whole song is basically intended as an intro for Pursuit on the album but it’s so powerful just on its own. I love imbuing weirdo lyrics like ‘a bitter sunken love in a bleach blonde submarine’ with such ominous power through the commanding delivery. I love the way the big grunting vocals on the offbeat build to sound like a summoning ritual. I love making a big processed bell the centrepiece of your extremely evil sounding song. It’s sort of a shame that Gessaffelstein has never really gone back to the vision of his first album and has spent his time since diluting it down for guest production on Weeknd songs and the like because it feels like there’s still so much more to get out of this sound. That he hasn’t gone back and dug deeper makes Aleph stand out more and more as a singular masterpiece as time goes on.

Kamane Tarhanin - Mdou Moctar: Turning to Mdou Moctar after the new Tinariwen album kind of disappointed me, with all it’s big name guests nothing really hit me. I love this song though and I think a big part of it is the sort of loping, 6/4 rhythm that combined with the drone gives it this feeling of endlessly tumbling over itself in place, especially as the guitar heats up.

Achabiba - Fatou Seidi Ghali: I know very little about Fatou Seidi Ghali except that I saw she was supporting Sarah Louise at a show. From some googling it turns out that she’s the leader of a Nigerois band called Les Filles de Illeghadad who you can probably look forward to seeing on next month’s playlist. I also learned that the demonym for someone from Niger is Nigerien or to minimise confusion with Nigeria, Nigerois (said in a french way). They play a sort of desert psych in the realm of Mdou Mocter or Tinariwen, but this song (also the only solo song she has on spotify) shows her acoustic side. I love the swirling melody over the drone as the hand percussion keeps it in place and I love the very delicate vocals, but a probably unintentional thing I love a lot about this recording is the unmistakable iphone locking sound near the very start that instantly removes so much of the mystic exoticism that these sorts of artists are often written about with and places it firmly in the same sprawling modern world we all live in.

Floating Rhododendron - Sarah Louise: I love Sarah Louise. She’s a phenomenal guitarist and has such a big love for traditional folk music with her side project House And Land, but unlike everyone else in the genre is also very interested in pushing guitar forward to new and strange places. Her latest album was super experimental layered electric guitars and voice that still managed to maintain the deep connection to nature that runs through all her work. I would also highly recommend following her on instagram because her passion runs over. She’s regularly just out in the woods somewhere explaining how wonderful a particular mushroom is. This song one of the first ones I ever heard from her, and it’s back when she was just doing very beautiful 12 string acoustic work, but she recently added it to spotify and it’s a very nice reminder of where she came from and how far she’s gone in such a short time.

Lark - Angel Olsen: The new Angel Olsen is absolutely great. I love how much she is just completely going for it on this album, absolutely unleashing. Taken against earlier songs of hers I’ve loved like White Fire, where the majesty was in her quiet power and the ability to absolutely command silence with a whisper quiet song, this song feels like the direct inverse, an about-turn into all the gigantic majesty of swirling strings and top of your lungs vocals - going all out and leaving nothing on the table. The way this song blows up about three different times until by the end you’re caught in this gigantic swirling maelstrom of screaming sound is just out of this world.

Door - Caroline Polachek: Caroline Polachek’s brain is huge. When I first heard the chorus of this song I couldn't believe it. Are you allowed to have a chant that runs in a spiral like this be the chorus of your pop song? Is that allowed?

North, South, East And West - The Church: The Church feel like they don't get enough respect. They don't seem to be in the same league as Cold Chisel and The Angels and all the other dad rock Australian bands from that era for some reason. They're very good though and I've been really getting into this whole album and this song specifically lately. Maybe what's working against them is just how much his voice sounds like Bono's in this song but surely that was a boon at the time!

Western Questions - Timber Timbre: This has become one of my new favourite songs to sing. The way the words fit together is my favourite kind of poetics where they just sound incredible, phonetically, and can mean anything you like for large chunks. Like “the gelatinous walls of the seeds that seldom remain / while the bulls are browsing needles through computer casinos / honour the name”. Especially “bulls are browsing needles through computer casinos” is just extremely nice to say. I love the character of this song and am yet to completely understand what it’s saying other than personifying some worldwide blackpilled spirit of nihilist evil. What I love is the experience of all encompassing evil in this song, like a worldwide conspiracy connecting everything together that makes it all make sense. It doesn’t make you happier but it makes it make sense. I also love the finality of the big fill near the end that ushers in the outro riff that ties everything up.

Cold Cold World - Blaze Foley: I got heavily into a country music thing this month and spent a bit of time trying to find ‘real’ country, which of course turns out not to exist at all. The entirety of country music is built on a false nostalgia for an imagined time long past when things were real, some unspecified time in the collective consciousness between cowboy times and coal mine times. I don’t say this to say ‘country music is a fraud’ but that it’s built on a foundation of myth and that’s what’s so good about it. It’s constantly reframing the past as it relates to the present and is energised by the friction between them. Blaze Foley is a good example of this in the modern era because he seems to exist more as a myth than a man. He had three studio albums, the master tapes of which all disappeared through various means (lost, stolen, seized by the DEA) and so the majority of his surviving material is live recordings or long-lost studio recordings that resurfaced decades after his death when his fame and mythology already preceded him. He also thankfully lives up to the myth, he was truly a great artist and it’s a shame more of him hasn’t survived.

Where The Golden Wattle Blooms / Why Did The Blue Skies Turn Grey - Shirley Thoms: Further to what I was saying about country music before, Australian country is a whole other thing. Transferring the myth and the mythmaking to a new location adds another layer of abstraction. Shirley Thoms was the first female solo act to record country music in Australia in 1941 and was most notable for her yodelling of which she is damn fine. This is a great song and a good a starting point as any in trying to trace the origin of country music in Australia. That it's so english in its identity, so evidently imitating an american style (which is in turn imitating a german yodel) is just more good evidence that nothing is 'real' and traditions of the past and future are malleable at all times.

Talkin’ Karate Blues - Townes Van Zandt: Townes Van Zandt is widely regarded as a songwriter’s songwriter and one of the best country songwriters to ever live, but like a lot of great country songwriters also has one or two songs like this - strange comedy songs about learning karate and getting your arm ripped off.

Strange Tourist - Gareth Liddiard: This album is a masterpiece on the level of Ys and it feels criminally underlistened in my opinion. Luckily in the last week or so some renegade has done up the wiki article on it to a couple of thousand words so that's a start. Because this is a song I've listened to one million times and love a lot, it's hard for me to write about it in a general way so instead I'm going to talk about something very specific and new that I've only begun to appreciate recently. The way he uses the vowels of the japanese words to create these assonant runs in lines like "Koda Kumi sang a coda pink as sarin gas / I took a trip to Nagasaki in a rented Mitsubishi / Then went camping in the Jukai under Mount Fuji" and "They found him frozen in a hollow in Aokigahara forest where them harakiri weirdos go" is really something, and a nice illustration of the two sides of Liddiard's songwriting: densely technical poetics in a song about living with a housemate who was a real freak.

I Dream A Highway - GIllian Welch: I’m not even going to go into the lyrics of this because it’s such an out of this world perfect song but I’m going to say this: it’s really something that this song goes for nearly 15 minutes, sits on the same three chords the whole time and never ever feels long. This song is longer than Emily by Joanna Newsom but doesn’t feel like an epic of the same scale at all. It’s just a mournful slow ode to change and decay that goes on forever and could keeping going on for twice as long if it wanted to.

Deep Water - The Middle East: The way the vocals in the verses are delivered, trailing off and mumbling bits and pieces is somehow magical, like it’s more interested in communicating the gist and the feeling than the actual words. You can just pick whatever part of it you like. Petrol stations and a copper mine, the kind of place I think I could die. This song also has two minutes of silence at the end for album reasons so enjoy that.

listen here

#playlists

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ghostofdarwin · 6 years

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In a split-screen whiplash, a regular Tuesday turned into a blockbuster, with two top people close to President Trump now facing prison.

First, it was Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman, found guilty of tax evasion and bank fraud by a jury in Virginia. Minutes later, in New York, it was Trump's longtime former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, pleading guilty to tax evasion, falsifying submissions to a bank and campaign finance violations.

The kicker was that Cohen said he made those unlawful contributions — intended to silence women who had dirt on Trump — at the president's behest.

So what should be made of Tuesday's developments? Here are six takeaways:

1. This was a remarkable and potentially consequential day in the Trump presidency

Step back for a moment: The president's personal lawyer pleaded guilty. His campaign chairman was convicted. In addition to a lesson in the company we keep, what came of those felony pleas and convictions was the closest Trump has been tied to something potentially criminal as president.

That is a big deal. Mark this day down. Before Tuesday, the focus in the investigations into Russia election interference and potential campaign finance violations had been on myriad players. Cohen's plea and claim that he acted at the president's direction — and that he was reimbursed with campaign cash to pay hush money to a porn star and a former Playboy model — was the clearest potential implication of the president so far.

2. It proves the danger of the Mueller investigation for Trump

Because of the broad mandate and authority of special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe, it could go virtually anywhere. None of the charges Tuesday has to do directly with Russia. Yes, Manafort owes Russian oligarchs money, but that is as close as it got. (Prosecutors weren't even allowed to use the word "oligarch" during the trial.)

Neither case had anything to do with Russian collusion or interference in the 2016 campaign.

And yet, here we are. It goes to show that even if the two main tracks — collusion and obstruction — don't get proved, when you start turning over rocks, you find worms. For example, look where independent counsel Ken Starr's investigation of President Clinton started in the 1990s (a bad land deal) and ended up (the president's sex life). There's no telling where Mueller's investigations might lead.

3. Clear, incontrovertible evidence is the key to proving anything and winning public opinion

There are so many unreliable narrators all around — Cohen is hardly believable, Manafort was convicted of multiple counts of fraud, and Trump has spouted a record number of falsehoods, at a pace of nearly eight per day since becoming president.

So, it is safe to say that when trying to prove a shared, independently verifiable truth, there better be proof. Really solid proof — such as documents and recordings.

And, there are tapes — lots of them. Remember, the feds still have all of Cohen's recordings and documents that they seized during their raids on his home, hotel room and office. Having that kind of incontrovertible evidence is key, especially in this time when "truth isn't truth."

4. Is there another shoe to drop soon?

Rudy Giuliani, the president's outside legal counsel, has claimed that there is a Sept. 1 deadline for Mueller to wrap up his investigation to "keep us clear of the election." Well, that's not true. But there are guidelines at the Justice Department that state: "No employee may use his official authority or influence to interfere with or affect the result of an election."

Some have interpreted that over the years to mean that there is an "unwritten" 60-day rule, an arbitrary amount of time that seems clear of an election. (Sixty days from Election Day, Nov. 6, would be Sept. 7.) While there might not be an official hard-and-fast date, Mueller is likely sensitive to avoiding any appearance of interfering in the midterms. He certainly would not want to put his investigation and investigators in the same position as former FBI Director James Comey during the 2016 election.

So, were Tuesday's events foreshadowing what comes in the next couple of weeks before the election campaign kicks into high gear?

5. This adds to the Democrats' scandal push

No matter how Trump tries to spin it — calling the investigation a "witch hunt" or Manafort a "good man" (at a West Virginia rally where chants of "Lock her up!" could be heard) — the conviction and Cohen's guilty plea are black eyes for the president. They add to Democrats' narrative that in the midterms, they are running against a scandal-plagued administration and party — something that helped them take back the House in 2006.

A case in point is Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator and possible 2020 presidential candidate, who unveiled an anti-corruption platform on Tuesday. She said the Trump era "has given us the most nakedly corrupt leadership this nation has seen in our lifetimes."

Democrats are also running an ad targeting Republican scandals that pulls no punches. And, amid the Manafort-Cohen news, the Justice Department announced charges against Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter of California and his wife for spending $250,000 of campaign money on family trips to Italy, Hawaii and Las Vegas, and for personal items, including clothing at a golf course, shopping at Target and Walmart; and delinquent dental bills.

Hunter, a founding member of the "Trump Caucus" in the House, denies he did anything wrong. At the very least, however, it is going to give Democrats one more headline with which to hammer the GOP, as the list of scandals continues to grow.

6. Trump says he hits back harder, so what will he do?

Trump has encouraged people to "hit back five times harder than they ever thought possible." First lady Melania Trump said during the campaign, "When you attack, he will punch back 10 times harder." And Trump himself took it up even higher than that before running for president.

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump When someone attacks me, I always attack back...except 100x more. This has nothing to do with a tirade but rather, a way of life!

8:56 AM - Nov 11, 2012 1,210 3,600 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy Whatever the degree, Trump is a bare-knuckled fighter. And this week, he has taken some serious blows. So what is he going to do? How is he going to respond?

Russia Is The 'Dark Cloud' That Hangs Over Midterm Elections The president has seemed to encourage Attorney General Jeff Sessions to end the Russia probe, tweeting that he should "stop this Rigged Witch Hunt right now"; he reportedly nearly had Mueller fired; he called Mueller's investigators "thugs" and likened the investigation to McCarthyism; and he stripped former CIA Director John Brennan of his security clearance.

So what's next? Pardon Manafort? More security clearances revoked? Nothing is clear.

As one Republican strategist noted, this election is all about "volatility." And nothing is more volatile right now than the man in the Oval Office.

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