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

by Michael Cohen

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, as he has started to joke about—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.

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? But I knew the real answer, for me and others in Trump’s world, and eventually for a significant percentage of the citizens of the United States. The answer, I was coming to see, included something deeper than the obvious lures of money and power, though those were crucial factors. It was physical,

emotional, not quite spiritual, but a deep longing and need that Trump filled for me. Around Trump I felt excited, alive, like he possessed the urgent and only truth, the chance for my salvation and success in life. It was only the beginning of my tenure with Trump, but this day was etched on my soul—even as I gave that soul over to the man I worshipped, a word that wasn’t too extreme to describe the devotion I was starting to feel. Trump could have quietly exited the building through a rear entrance, or in a car from the parking lot below, but he thrived on the attention the tourists and passers-by heaped on him. What was a cheap jolt of adrenaline for Trump, and a way of showing off to his new acolyte attorney, for me represented something mystical.

Never apologize, and never admit to error or

weakness. Never. Ever.

Because here’s the thing: When you sell your soul, you do exactly that: sell your soul.

There were really no words to describe Trump’s hatred and contempt for Barack Hussein Obama—always all three names and always with a disdainful emphasis on the middle. This was when I started to witness the increasingly reactionary and unhinged Archie Bunker racism that defined Trump and his views on modern America.

“Tell me one country run by a black person that isn’t a shithole,” he would challenge me as he cursed out the stupidity of Obama. “They are all complete fucking toilets.”

Watching Obama’s Inauguration in 2008 with Trump, with the massive, adoring, joyful crowd on the Mall, incensed the Boss in a way I’d never seen before—he was literally losing his mind watching a handsome and self-evidently brilliant young black man take over, not only as Commander in Chief, but also as a moral world leader and guiding light. It was just too much for Trump. I thought I’d seen the worst of Trump

then, but when Obama won the Nobel Prize, Trump went ballistic, as if the universe were playing some kind of trick on him to drive him out of his mind. It was almost like he was hearing voices, the way he ranted and raved about the idiotic Obama and how he was beloved by so many Americans. Trump mocked the way Obama talked, walked, even appeared, as if acting presidential was just that: an act. The shtick you see him pull at his rallies, when he mocks the idea of being “presidential” and says how easy it is to pretend to be a serious leader, walking like a robot and marching around like a fool and a phony, was first performed for yours truly in Trump’s office while I sat quietly listening to him go on and on and on about Obama and caricature his mannerisms.

Trump didn’t despise Obama. It was much, much stronger than that. I figured that Obama was the only person on the planet whom Trump actually envied—truly, madly, deeply. Air Force One, walking the carpet

to deliver the State of the Union, the way Angela Merkel and other world leaders obviously admired and listened to Obama—it drove Trump out of his mind. Then came The Speech: Obama was invited to address the German nation in front of the Brandenburg Gate, in the same place as John F. Kennedy in the early ’60s, one of the indelible images of American history in the twentieth century. Trump went from incandescent to sputtering, spittle-flecked fury as he watched Obama talk about freedom and ridding the world of nuclear weapons and turning back the rising seas by fighting global warming.

“Obama is a fucking phony,” Trump screamed. “He’s a Manchurian Candidate. He’s not even fucking American. The only reason he got into fucking Harvard Law School and Columbia was fucking affirmative action. He could never get into those schools on his fucking grades. Fuck him.” * * *

But that is what it feels like to lose control of your mind—you actually give up your common sense, sense of decency, sensitivity, even your grip on reality. It was like having a mental illness: the reality was hard for outsiders to grasp, in all of its dimensions. The fact that I’d departed from reality, in my desire to please the Boss,

meant that I really and truly had actually taken leave of my senses.

As I said at the start, I was in a cult of personality. And I loved it. I reveled in the intrigue and gamesmanship and manipulation, as terrible as that sounds. I had convinced myself I was in on the joke...

We got around the pesky federal election laws as we usually did: by way of deceit.

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, as displayed daily in the news, terrified of facing a primary or a tweet or a tantrum.

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 that best resembled a Mexican standoff that left everyone pointing their guns at each other—but never Trump.

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.

you can recognize in the news today, with the likes of Lindsey Graham and Jim Jordan and Mike Pompeo and the other people surrounding Trump. The Boss had an unerring eye for sycophants: yes men, loyal soldiers, call them what you will.

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.

To Trump, Putin was like the Saudi royal family, or Kim Jong-un in North Korea: the incarnation of dynastic wealth and the real ruling class of the planet. Everyone other than the ruling class on the earth was like an ant, to his way of thinking, their lives meaningless and always subject to the whims of the true rulers of the world.

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 was a stone-cold fact during the 2016 campaign and throughout Trump’s presidency to this very day. To Trump, his voters are his audience, his chumps, his patsies, his base. Guns, criminalizing abortion—Trump took up those conservative positions not because he believed in them but because they were his path to power. That was what I meant when I told Congress that Trump is a con man.

Here is what Mueller and his team said about my cooperation after I agreed to proffer evidence to them, in particular regarding the Trump-Russia nexus and the Moscow Tower, buried in footnote 909 in Volume Two of the report—not exactly the front page of The New York Times. “The Office found Cohen’s testimony in

these subsequent proffer sessions to be consistent with and corroborated by other information obtained in the course of the Office’s investigation. The Office sentencing submission in Cohen’s criminal case stated: ‘Starting with his second meeting with [the Special Counsel’s Office] in September, 2018, the defendant accepted responsibility not only for his false statements concerning the [Trump Tower] Moscow Project, but also in his broader efforts through false statement and testimony before Congress to minimize his role and what he knew about contacts between the [Trump Organization] and Russian interests during the course of the campaign . . . The defendant, without prompting by the [Special Counsel’s Office], also corrected other false and misleading

statements that he had made concerning his outreach in and contacts with Russian officials during the course of the campaign.” Compare and contrast that with Trump’s insistent refrain that collusion with Russia was a “hoax” and he had “no business in Russia.” Who do you think you should believe? Remember, I was talking to Mueller’s lawyers under oath and on pain of perjury, perhaps an ironic statement given my present circumstances, but I can assure you that I was not going to lie or shade the truth when ...

but the truth in this country is that if federal prosecutors want to get you, they will.

No matter who you are. No one reading this book should think for a second that they’re immune to these gangster tactics that have been so widely publicized, but continue unabated and unapologetically.

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.