Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump

by Michael Cohen

as he was always, always, always enveloped by crisis and teetering on the brink of disaster.

Just like his presidency!

Trump only cared about subjects that concerned him, and his benefit and well-being, so anything that detracted or distracted from the complete and utter focus on him and his ego was a waste of time and energy. The

A person so self-absorbed should never be President! It's very dangerous for everyone else!

“Can you believe how fucking stupid the IRS is?” Trump asked. “Who would give me a refund of ten fucking million dollars? They are so stupid!”

The IRS should ask for this money back!

What he cared about was identifying an issue that he could exploit to his advantage, no matter how divisive—in fact, the more divisive, the better, because it would arouse strong feelings for those who took his side.

This is just the way he is as President. He is the Divider-In-Chief!

But Trump had the innate ability to access the deepest prejudices and fears of people and exploit them for his benefit.

No kidding!

The difference was that Trump would never acknowledge his errors. Hell, he wouldn’t just deny his own mistakes, he’d blame others,

Trump’s version of loyalty is one way, as I famously learned, just like so many others have—indeed, like the nation has. But loyalty to Trump means the willingness to do things you know to be wrong and that are harming others.

Trump’s grandiose sense of self-importance, his need for constant praise, his exploitation of others without guilt or shame was the classic definition of a narcissistic sociopath.

She wanted me to quit working for Trump because he was constantly doing things like threatening to cut my pay in half, as he actually did, or withhold my bonus or fire me.

“What the hell!” he screamed at me. “Michael, I want you to call the president of CNBC and tell him we will sue them if they don’t restore me to my rightful slot!”

No one spoke the truth to Trump, and I’m sure that is the

case now that he’s turned the White House into the mirror image of his office in the Trump Tower, with yes men like me doing his bidding and never, ever, ever confronting him with reality.

with a reputation for playing fast and loose with the rules and laws, but the bank was upset at the way Trump used incredibly inflated valuations of his real estate holdings to justify his company’s loans. A mansion in Westchester that he had purchased for $7M was given a value of $291M, to cite but one example

The reason Trump leans on Kushner so heavily is that there’s no one else he can trust, to his way of thinking, to run the back channels and side deals that the Boss deems essential to any endeavor; present or future. Jared will do as he’s told, with discretion, in a way that Trump can’t find in other advisors.

If interest in Trump was waning, even just a little bit, he’d yank the chain of the media with an insult or racist slur or reactionary outrage—and there would be CNN and the Times and Fox News dutifully eating out of his hands. Like so much about Trump, if it weren’t tragic, you’d laugh—or cry.

In truth, he didn’t want to spend a dime of his own money, if at all possible, and any and all expenditures had to be the absolute rock-bottom minimum.

most of it faked, I figured, because it seemed like any sentient being who lived in New York City in 2015 would know that what he was saying was beyond the pale.

Trump truly is the boy in the bubble, impervious to the thoughts and feelings or others, entirely and utterly focused on his own desires and ambitions. Trump spotted me across the room.

Trump was channeling the resentment of people labeled as racist during the Obama years: white folks, conservative and Christian men and women who were sick of political correctness and tolerating illegal immigration and having to pretend that they believed things they simply didn’t believe. Trump was their champion.

The undereducated, the reactionary, the people who believe abortion is murder—here was a blunt and fearless businessman calling bullshit on the American political order.

Reading reports, taking briefings, seeking context and background for professional encounters—Trump does none of that, trusting that he can fake his way through life.

Trump had blown his temper, unsurprisingly, and he’d reacted the only way he knew how: destruction and total annihilation.

and of course he’d be the beneficiary of craven, Soviet-style fawning coverage on Fox—a hint of what has come to be our national disaster.

Locking up your political enemies, criminalizing dissent, terrifying or bankrupting the free press through libel lawsuits—Trump’s all-encompassing vision wasn’t evident to me before he began to run for president.

As the campaign went along, as Trump started to see ways to cheat and lie to win, he came to see that Russia could potentially be a great ally—not for the United States, but for him personally, a distinction that was starting to blur.

What appeared to be collusion was really a confluence of shared interests in harming Hillary Clinton in any way possible, up to and including interfering in the American election—a subject that caused Trump precisely zero unease.

but he wanted to do all he could to enable him to be able to borrow money from people in Putin’s circle, and that meant sucking up to the Russians.

Trump paid just over $40 million, put a few licks of paint on the mansion—no doubt third-rate Super Hide from Benjamin Moore, like at Doral—and then listed it for $125 million. It was the jet-set version of Flip This House.

“The oligarchs are just fronts for Putin,” Trump told me.

“He puts them into wealth to invest his money. That’s

all they are doing—investing Putin’s money.” Trump was convinced the real buyer of Maison de ...

The cosmic joke was that Trump convinced a vast swathe of working-class white folks in the Midwest that he cared about their well-being. The truth was that he couldn’t care less. I don’t mean that as speculation or an opinion. That

By ingratiating himself with Putin, and hinting at changes in American sanctions policy against the country under a Trump Presidency, the Boss was trying to nudge the Moscow Trump Tower project along. The

For months, it had amazed me that the national press investigated every accusation made against Hillary Clinton, as if she were the most devious and corrupt politician in history, while Trump’s long history of bankruptcies and infidelities and dubious business practices received relatively little scrutiny. I

That was really how it felt, on the inside: everything that I knew had to remain far from the public’s knowledge or Trump would lose in a landslide.

If Trump could screw a law firm, or a paint vendor, or a salesperson, he’d do it almost as a matter of principle. It was like paying taxes: that was only for the little people.

In truth, Trump lacked intimates and true friends, so he had nowhere to turn in his hour of need, a reality I now see playing out on the nightly news as he gets more and more isolated as president.

Next, Trump never, ever prepared or studied or planned, instead trusting his instincts, a practice that seemed certifiably insane to me.

The reason I’d had to pay Daniels in the first place was solely because he’d screwed David Pecker out of the $150,000 paid to silence Karen McDougal.

Trump was the author of his own troubles, though of course this reality was completely lost on him—a side effect of the shallow and childish world he inhabits.

There is a serious danger that Donald Trump will not leave office easily, and there is a real chance of not having a peaceful transition. When he jokes about running again in 2024 and gets a crowd of thousands to chant “Trump 2024,” he’s not joking. Trump never jokes.

This is an important observation!

That is Donald Trump’s greatest fear in life, believe me, and if he fails to get reelected, that will be his fate—and he knows it—so silencing me was an essential part of his overall plan to evade the law and avoid that outcome.