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September 9 - September 24, 2020
Trump had colluded with the Russians, but not in the sophisticated ways imagined by his detractors. 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. Trump
For more than a decade, I was Trump’s first call every morning and his last call every night. I was in and out of Trump’s office on the 26th floor of the Trump Tower as many as fifty times a day,
Apart from his wife and children, I knew Trump better than anyone else did. In some ways, I knew him better than even his family did, because I bore witness to the real man, in strip clubs, shady business meetings, and in the unguarded moments when he revealed who he really was: a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.
I urge you to really consider that fact: Trump has no true friends. He has lived his entire life avoiding and evading taking responsibility for his actions. He crushed or cheated all who stood in his way, but I know where the skeletons are buried because I was the one who buried them.
He is capable of behaving kindly, but he is not kind. He is capable of committing acts of generosity, but he is not generous. He is capable of being loyal, but he is fundamentally disloyal.”
To Trump, life was a game, and all that mattered was winning. In these dangerous days, I see the Republican Party and Trump’s followers threatening the Constitution—which is in far greater peril than is commonly understood—and following one of the worst impulses of humankind: the desire for power at all costs.
I’m certain that Trump knows he will face prison time if he leaves office, the inevitable cold Karma to the notorious chants of “Lock Her Up!” But that is the Trump I know in a nutshell. He projects his own sins and crimes onto others, partly to distract and confuse, but mostly because he thinks everyone is as corrupt and shameless and ruthless as he is; a poisonous mindset I know all too well. Whoever follows Trump into the White House, if the President doesn’t manage to make himself the leader for life,
and Trump never actually jokes—will discover a tangle of frauds and scams and lawlessness. Trump and his minions will do anything to cover up that reality, and I mean anything.
Rudy Giuliani, William Barr, Jared Kushner, and Mike Pompeo are Trump’s new wannabe fixers, sycophants willing to distort the truth and break the law in the service of the Boss. All this will be to no avail.
Hyperbole was his instinctual method of communication, exaggerating his own talents and wealth and physical characteristics and achievements, as if by enlarging things he could make them real.
“Don has the worst fucking judgment of anyone I have ever met,” Trump would often tell me, adding that he’d been reluctant to bestow his first name on his first-born son. He didn’t want to share his name with a “loser,” if that was what his son turned out to be.
Trump had predicted, “the real estate market is going to be very strong for a long time”—only days before the global economy crashed.
Through Trump’s years of repeated boom and bust, casinos had remained at the heart of his brand and business strategy, nearly always with the result that creditors lost money loaned to these concerns—part of the reason virtually all of the banks in the United States refused to do business with him.
To an outsider, my attraction to Trump—or as I described it, my “obsession”—seemed to have its roots in money and power and my lust to possess these attributes, if even only by proxy. What other explanation was there for my starstruck, moth-to-the-flame compulsion to insinuate myself with a man so transparently problematic in myriad ways?
I remember this like it happened yesterday. Trump glanced in my direction, gave me his devilish grin and winked at me. He motioned for me to come closer as the masses started to jostle and push to get closer. When I was right next to him he whispered, “This is what Trump is all about.” The energy, the action, the chaos, it was intoxicating and I never wanted it to stop. I was a junky in need of a fix.
it was obvious that my role as Trump’s personal attorney was essentially managing chaos, as he was always, always, always enveloped by crisis and teetering on the brink of disaster.
He could lie directly to the faces of some of the most powerful religious leaders in the country and they believed him—or decided to believe him, a distinction with a real difference.
“I was there with Big Ben Roethlisberger,” referring to the Pittsburgh Steeler quarterback and Super Bowl winner. “When these two girls came over to us. When we found out that Stormy was a porn star—can you believe they call them stars?—Big Ben was in heat. The only problem for him was that he was standing next to Trump and all they wanted was Trump.
He constantly referred to himself in the third person, a trait that I saw as a quirk at the time, but in hindsight was the indication of dissociative egomania that should have served as a warning.
Winning was always, always, always Trump’s top priority, no matter the price, less a competitive streak than a compulsion that has led the nation and maybe even the world to the brink of disaster.
She knew her husband almost certainly cheated on her, but she’d made her peace with the deal she’d entered into with Trump. She could know it was true, in her heart, but she didn’t want to know. Like her husband, she relied on plausible deniability.
A “friend” approaching Trump for assistance in a time of need was making a mistake of epic proportions. Trump doesn’t help people, he preys on them, and buying the estates of the formerly super wealthy was a specialty of his, as his purchase of Mar-a-Lago illustrated; beating down the price and taking advantage of people who’d once been wealthier
And so it came to pass. Trump bought the house for $6.7 million, making the total purchase price for the entire estate less than $13 million, when the asking price had been more than $100 million.
There was an undeniable kind of genius to Trump’s approach, a completely amoral will to win, no matter the cost—in this case, essentially taking away the Kluges’ son’s inheritance in one fell swoop.
“What a deal,” Trump said to me. “I just stole the property. In this case someone else’s loss is Trump’s gain.”
The final price for the Doral Hotel and Spa was $150 million, financed by a loan of $125 million from Deutsche Bank, and a complete renovation was quickly undertaken at the cost of $250 million.
As the renovation continued, I discovered that despite the rhetoric, Trump was cutting corners, having “cheap attacks,” and screwing the many contractors and subcontractors who were working on the project.
Trump would say so many things that were illogical or just plain bullshit, as we consciously would know, but we would stay on his message, even though we knew it was nonsense.
Trump is a master at getting otherwise seemingly sensible people to enter into his fantasyland because of the fear that failure to do so means banishment. This explains the behavior of many members of Congress and the Cabinet,
Once the small lies and delusions pass, then it became easier and easier to swallow bigger and bigger lies and delusions. I know this insanity up close and personal.
Trump was constantly making errors, large and small, like pretty much any human being. The difference was that Trump would never acknowledge his errors. Hell, he wouldn’t just deny his own mistakes, he’d blame others, circular logic
The buck didn’t stop at Donald Trump’s desk: it never got there. What “don’t disappoint me” actually meant, I knew, was an implicit threat that I would be fired if I didn’t somehow resolve a situation he had created to his satisfaction.
This episode encapsulated my decade as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer. The lie turned into a delusion turned into a supposed reality and then a grievance, followed by more lies, more bullying, and ultimately the ruthlessness of New York real estate—where lying and cheating and stealing are the order of the day—unleashed on folks with no clue about the depravity and dishonesty of the TV star and self-styled mogul.
Scores of small contractors have had to sue Trump over the years to try to get justice against a billionaire who has absolutely no compunction about screwing the little guy.
But loyalty to Trump means the willingness to do things you know to be wrong and that are harming others.
Not that Trump would have cared. That was the whole point of the Trump legal strategy: to make it impossible for the little guy to stand up for his rights. And make no mistake, the lack of ethics applied equally to his three children, despite Ivanka’s carefully tended image—all them are like jackals when it comes to harming innocent businesspeople.
it. I took a weird kind of pleasure in harming others in the service of Donald Trump, to my eternal shame.
As you will see in the pages to come, Trump did have affairs with people like a porn star and a former Playboy centerfold, and I was assigned the task of hiding those trysts from his wife and the public.
he wasn’t a lothario and many, many women weren’t attracted to him at all—in fact, in my experience, the most attractive and intelligent women were often both repulsed and, in a strange way, pulled towards his money and power and prestige. When he told Billy Bush that
His attitudes came from a different era, more like the Rat Pack of the 1950s, and he never took seriously the need to respect women. If he ever got caught cheating and Melania threatened to leave him, Trump told me, he wouldn’t be upset or hurt at the loss, and I suspect she knew it. The relationship was just another deal, plain and simple.
“Look at that piece of ass,” Trump said. “I would love some of that.” I looked over and stopped cold. My fifteen-year-old daughter had just finished a tennis lesson with the club pro and she was walking off the court. She was wearing a white tennis skirt and a tank top, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. I turned to Trump, incredulous. “That’s my daughter,” I said. Trump turned to me, now surprised. “That’s your daughter? When did she get so hot?” I said nothing, thinking to myself, or I should say allowing myself to think: What a fucking creep. Who talks about a man’s daughter in that
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By this time, my daughter Samantha was beyond desperate for me to quit working for Trump. She was tired of the entire Trump clan and all the intrigue that surrounded them. Ivanka shunned her in the lobby of Trump Park Avenue, a petty slight signifying that Trump’s daughter believed the Cohen family was beneath her social stature. In this way, in the constant measure of status and snobbery, the Trumps were actually tiresome and conceited bores—something you’d never hear said about that family, but it was true.
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.
“What about self-funding the campaign,” Trump said to me one afternoon. I knew there was no way he was going to spend his own money on politics. He was far too cheap, to begin with, and he was far less liquid than was understood by outsiders, but he appeared to be seriously contemplating the idea.
No. The biggest influence by far—by a country mile—was the media. Donald Trump’s presidency is a product of the free press. Not free as in freedom of expression, I mean free as unpaid for. Rallies broadcast live, tweets, press conferences, idiotic interviews, 24-7 wall-to-wall coverage, all without spending a penny. The free press gave America Trump. Right, left, moderate, tabloid, broadsheet, television, radio, Internet, Facebook—that is who elected Trump and might well elect him again.
The thing that astounded me, and still does to this day, was that the media didn’t see that they were being played for suckers. They didn’t realize the damage they were inflicting on the country by following Trump around like supplicants. What Trump did was transparent, once you identified it, and this remained a central fact of the campaign.
