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

by Michael Cohen

Trump had colluded with the Russians, but not in the sophisticated ways imagined by his detractors.

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.

If you only read stories written by people you like, you will never be able to understand Donald Trump or the current state of the American soul.

He understood that even the least of us deserve the opportunity to seek penance, redemption and a second chance in life. Cummings was the lone politician I encountered in all my travails who took an interest in me as a human being.

two of everything arranged before me on my desk, a function of my obsessive nature: two staplers, two tape dispensers, two phones, two cups with sharpened pencils.

she let me go my own way, but I wasn’t going to be admired at home for the things I was doing for Donald Trump, and I knew it.

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.

The situation seemed dire—as might be expected for a company that had clearly been run into the ground by years of what seemed to be bad leadership and poor decision-making.

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.

Trump Entertainment Resorts would fail to find a buyer. Despite Trump’s histrionics, it ended up in bankruptcy again in 2009, owing in excess of $1 billion. In 2014, the company would file for bankruptcy yet again, turning union members into another class of stiffed debtors.

I was one of the most loyal friends he had ever seen—but that I was also the worst enemy to those who didn’t repay my loyalty. The teacher meant it as an insult, I knew, but I took it as a compliment.

I was like Groucho Marx—I didn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.

Scalping tickets was one way I learned to earn serious cash. The business was simplicity itself: buy seats at face value and sell high, the higher the better.

For law school, I chose the Thomas Cooley Law School—or I really should say it chose me, as it was the easiest school to get into in the entire nation, so I qualified.

As with my investment properties, where I always wanted to join the board of the condos to keep an eye on how the business was being run, I wanted to be on the board of the school, as my most precious assets were in the school’s hands.

conspiracy is literally “to breathe together,” and that was precisely what rich men and publications like the National Enquirer did to hide the truth about exploiting and abusing women.

Pecker’s considerable power emanated from a virtually complete lack of morality or basic decency or shame,

The rejection was weirdly a kind of compliment from Trump, in that he was treating me just as he treated his children: badly.

Trump likes to pretend he’d foreseen the disaster, much as he liked to lie about opposing the Iraq invasion of 2003 from the start, twenty-twenty hindsight being a specialty of his,

“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!”

Trump was a big man, 6’3”, easily 275 pounds,

chasing deals was a tricky and uncertain matter with many more failures than successes, no matter what Trump claims about winning all the time,

the Trump brand having no earthly relevance to a health-based product,

I was willing to literally physically fight and punch another man in the face on behalf of Mr. Trump should give you a sense of the lengths that I was willing to go to please the Boss, much to the ongoing and growing disgust of my wife and kids.

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.

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.

If Trump wanted to believe something because it served his purposes, he decided to begin to believe, a leap of the imagination that was effortless to him, even second nature.

The question of whether I would knowingly participate in a lie and a fraud had long ago been asked and answered; this was what Trump meant by loyalty,

only a few hours earlier, Obama had ordered the operation to kill Osama bin Laden, so the fact that the President had such incredible comedic chops was amazing to me.

Many in the media have speculated that his animus for Obama came from that night—the humiliation in front of a room of power players—and was what made Trump want to run for the presidency. I can tell you with absolute certainty that wasn’t true. Not even in the slightest.

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.

I fell into a conversation with the couple that would provide the first flutter of a wave to the butterfly wing flapping that rippled outward and led to the devout and undying devotion to Trump of millions of evangelicals that still mystifies so many Americans. Justin Bieber was the catalyst. Go figure.

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

it struck me as more than a little convenient to snipe from the sidelines about birther conspiracies—but another thing altogether to step into the arena and face the withering wit and soaring rhetoric and the real danger of humiliation at the hands of the 44th President of the United States.

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,

Trump was constantly making errors, large and small, like pretty much any human being. The difference was that Trump would never acknowledge his errors.

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.

In defending the indefensible, you can’t resort to reason or facts or good business practices; you can’t appeal to conscience or justice or fairness. All that is left is what I resorted to, and what Trump displays so often: rage.

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.

I always told him that I didn’t fool around on Laura, but he didn’t believe me; he would say I had to be lying because, of course, everyone cheats in his world.

I can admit I was being an idiot, but what is far more painful to know in hindsight is that my daughter thought I was an idiot.

The two prime and coequal imperatives of the company were to protect Trump, usually from himself, and to feed his insatiable ego.

I was summoned once more to see Trump. “Do you know the poll closes at three today?” he asked, acting like he thought he knew something I didn’t.

If something didn’t work out for Trump to his satisfaction, he dropped the whole project instantaneously, or at least after he’d wallowed in his outrage and anger. The same went for people. Or debts. Or promises.

I’d stayed in steady contact with the Falwells, meeting them for dinner when they were in New York. I knew their children and shared in family news, as a close friend, much closer than Trump ever was to two of the most powerful evangelicals in the nation.

After chickening out in 2012, afraid of staring down Barack Obama, I knew in my gut that Trump would enter the race for this cycle.

I knew that no publication mattered more to Trump than the Times, no matter what he said to the contrary. He cared more about what the Times said than the opinion of his wife or children.

In this way, as in so many others, he was the absolute opposite of Obama. Instead of No Drama, it was Drama All the Time.

if something could be done secretly or dishonestly, that was always Stone’s preferred way of operating, as if it proved he was dastardly and ruthless; the same was true for Trump.

For the new campaign manager, that meant bending and scraping and praising Trump to an extent that embarrassed even me, and that’s saying something, because I was one of the worst sycophants.