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

by Michael Cohen

Watching Trump on the evening news in the prison rec room, I almost feel sorry for him. I know him so well and I know his facial tics and tells; I see the cornered look in his eyes as he flails and rants and raves, searching for a protector and advocate, someone willing to fight dirty and destroy his enemies. I see the men who have replaced me and continue to forfeit their reputations by doing the President’s bidding, no matter how dishonest or sleazy or unlawful. 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. Trump doesn’t want to hear this, and he will certainly deny it, but he’s lost without his original bulldog lawyer Roy Cohn, or his other former pit bull and personal attorney, Michael Cohen.

Hyperbole was his instinctual method of communication, exaggerating his own talents and wealth

Trump certainly fixated on my growing wealth from my real estate holdings and taxi medallions. He frequently commented on the amount of money I had as a way to throw it in my face that he was so much richer than me. It was like water off a duck’s back to me, but it fed his need to demean people around him who had the temerity to get ahead in life; success was always a zero-sum game for him, and he and he alone had to be the winner.

“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!”

“Fuck him,” Trump yelled at me, Obama on the screen before him calmly addressing untold millions of Germans thrilled to have a world leader ushering in the prospect of a twenty-first century where diversity and tolerance and peace and responsibility would become global aspirations, and maybe even realities. “He’s obviously very smart,” I said, knowing I was egging Trump on, but also honestly impressed by Obama’s speech and demeanor. “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.”

He screams about fake news and reporters being the enemies of the people, like a tin-pot dictator, but the truth was that the media’s psychotic fascination with Trump was one of the biggest—maybe the biggest—cause for his rise to power.

So how did the amoral Trump come to be beloved by evangelical voters, a question that remains one of the abiding mysteries to this day? Begin with the premise that Donald Trump hadn’t darkened the door of a church or chapel since the age of seven, as he would openly admit in his past incarnation. Places of religious worship held absolutely no interest to him, and he possessed precisely zero personal piety in his life—but he knew the power of religion, and that was a language he could speak.

As the evangelicals inhaled Trump’s Norman Peale horse shit, they solemnly asked to approach him to “lay hands” on him. I watched with bated breath. Trump was a massive germophobe, as I’ve noted, so the idea of dozens of sets of hands touching his clothing and skin would appall him, I knew. But even this didn’t faze the Boss: he closed his eyes, faking piety, and gave the appearance of feeling God’s presence as the assembled group called for guidance in determining the fate and fortune of Donald Trump, America, and the message of Jesus Christ.

Watching Trump, I could see that he knew exactly how to appeal to the evangelicals’ desires and vanities—who they wanted him to be, not who he really was. Everything he was telling them about himself was absolutely untrue. He was pro-abortion; he told me that Planned Parenthood was the way poor people paid for contraception. He didn’t care about religion. Homosexuals, divorce, the break-up of the nuclear family—he’d say whatever they wanted to hear, and they’d hear what they wanted to hear. This was the moment, for me: the split second when I knew Trump would be president one day. It was an intuition, but it was also based on the intangibles. Trump’s answers to their questions were compassionate, thoughtful, Godly, in a way that I knew in no way reflected his beliefs or way of seeing life. 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.

“Can you believe that bullshit?” Trump said, with incredulity, referring to the ritual and the evangelicals. “Can you believe people believe that bullshit?”

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. It was a huge part of a process that I fell victim to and know intimately. 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.

“Wait until you get backstage as these beauties are getting dressed and made up,” he said. “They are the finest pieces of ass from every state and country.”

Silence was often the best response to Trump, I had learned, especially when it came to lewd remarks. There was really nothing to say, I knew, unless you wanted to confront Trump with a politically correct remark, and that would only result in ridicule and disgust and, in all likelihood, a steep decline in his regard. In this way, I could relate to Billy Bush in the “grab them by the pussies” video in which Trump boasted about how his celebrity status afforded him the privilege of being able to sexually assault women. It was offensive, to say the least, but I knew what Bush was doing when he giggled nervously and went along with Trump. The sexist swagger was part of life inside Trump’s bubble, a juvenile redoubt that was proudly, defiantly, and most definitely Neanderthal about women.

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.

“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 way? All of the countless times I’d gone along with Trump’s crude comments swirled around my mind.

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. 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.

Trump’s net worth was ridiculously inflated and he wasn’t worth nearly that much money—perhaps $2 billion, absolute tops.

“He’s not qualified to be president,” Samantha said. “I’m a political science student and I know more about how the world works than he does. What does he know about the United Nations or NATO or nuclear weapons? Nothing is what he knows. I’m literally more qualified than him and I’m twenty-one-years old.”

“Plus, I will never get the Hispanic vote,” Trump said. “Like the blacks, they’re too stupid to vote for Trump. They’re not my people.”

“What a phony bullshit artist,” he said. “He and the whole Hispanic Chamber of Commerce thing is a fucking scam. Like Al Sharpton’s bullshit group. Who knows, who cares. No matter what, I’m not doing his fucking town hall. And did you hear in the middle when I asked him how the organization supports itself? Through donations and dues and advertising, he said. He was looking for me to become one of his suckers. Fuck him. I don’t regret what I said about Mexicans. What I said was fucking true.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Trump screamed at his namesake. “You think you’re a big man with a ten-thousand-dollar gun sitting on the rocks and then boom! You kill some fucking animal? Then you drag your brother into this bullshit? Why the fuck would you post photos like that? You think you’re a fucking big man? Get the fuck out of my office.”

As with evangelicals, the essence of the operation was to invert reality, to take an impious and vulgar man and make him appear god-fearing, and in turn magically transform Trump’s white nationalist impulses into the illusion of an open-minded and inclusive leader—putting lipstick on a racist, chauvinist pig would be another way to put it.

“Your rallies look like fucking Ku Klux Klan meetings,” I said. “All of your supporters are white. Instead of hoods, they are all wearing MAGA hats. You need some diversity in your audience. The optics are terrible.”

I was calculating what I could get for selling the Daniels story to the press, though not the National Enquirer, of course. I was the owner of her rights, after all, through my Delaware company Essential Consulting LLC, so the story of the newly elected President cheating on his wife with a porn star only weeks after she’d given birth to Barron was sure to fetch a pretty penny. Millions, I figured, maybe multiple millions, as I cursed inwardly and swore I wouldn’t allow myself to be treated in such a shabby way. Two can play this game, I thought, as I imagined the headlines that would turn the nightmare that constituted his transition to the White House into a biblical-level sex scandal.