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

by Michael Cohen

The Boss had no concern for the morality or sexual conduct of his acolytes or team members like Roger Stone, a swinger known for wearing ass-less chaps during the Gay Pride Parade in Manhattan.

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.

I lived in Trump Park Avenue and one of my neighbors was an evangelical pastor named Paula White. She had known Trump for more than a decade, after he’d seen her show on TV and he’d invited her to come to Atlantic City to give him private bible studies, her version of prosperity gospel the only conceivable version of Christianity

that could appeal to Trump. Self-interested, consumed by the lust for worldly wealth and rewards, with two divorces, one bankruptcy, and a Senate financial investig...

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.

Justin Bieber was the catalyst. Go figure. Jerry Falwell Jr. was a lot like me, in many ways, I thought: an attorney who didn’t practice law, a transaction-oriented person who lived in the real world even as he floated

through a kind of dreamy existence of wealth and power—in his case, evangelical royalty, in mine, the moneyed corridors of Trump’s Manhattan. Becki was beautiful and vivacious, with a ton of energy and life. Chatting, they told me that they were staying in New York for an extra day because their twelve-year-old daughter Caroline wanted to see Justin Bieber perform at a special show he was giving the next morning at Rockefeller Plaza for NBC’s Today Show.

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

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. All of the staff at the Trump Organization routinely joked about how any given day could be your last, pressure that you might think would drive us away but in fact made us all the more determined to defend Trump and do what he wanted, no matter how morally or legally dubious.

But that was the alchemy, and I see it traveling throughout the White House and beyond all the time. 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.

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.

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.

“A billionaire can’t ask people for five bucks. Maybe I’ll self-fund the primary but do it cheap. I don’t need to spend a lot of money because we’ll get all the free press we want.” Please pause over that final sentence and read it again. And again. And again. Because if you want to understand how Donald J. Trump became president, you have to grasp the essential fact that by far the most important

element wasn’t nationalism, or populism, or racism, or religion, or the rise of white supremacy, or strongman authoritarianism. It wasn’t Russia, or lying, or James Comey, though all of those forces were hugely influential. It wasn’t Hillary Clinton, though heaven knows she did all she could to lose the election. 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...

The leading lights in the Republican party all wanted to be paid $200,000 a month, with the added requirement that they be paid up front for a full year.

Don Jr. had often talked about how badly the kids had been scarred by the divorce and all the years when they’d not seen much of their father; for a period of time, Don Jr. had refused to speak to his father because of his fury and pain over how he’d treated his mother and siblings.

During this time, Sean said that his marriage was in serious trouble, with divorce looming in the air. “You don’t want to do that,” I said. “What about your kids? You want to lose half your money?” “You have a point there,” Hannity said. “Is there another woman involved?” I asked. “You been screwing around?” Sean sighed. Like Trump, he knew how to say something without actually saying it, which is how men of power and wealth actually are, in my experience: they want to confess to their peers, by way of bragging, but they don’t want to outright admit to cheating, finding a

way both to express their virility and retain plausible deniability. “There are so many women in the world,” Hannity sighed. “There are just so many women out there.”

Trump was always prone to listen to the last person who spoke to him, frequently the advisor floating the worst and most destructive idea, and in those days, Lewandowski was often that person. Appealing to Trump’s paranoia and rage was a surefire way to get him to take rash action.

Let me add this: there were three douchebags on that call, not two. I was enabling two fat, rich, old, disgusting creeps as surely as a drug dealer sliding a complimentary fix of heroin or Oxycodone across the bar to a drug addict would be.

As the election wore on, I began to believe that Trump secretly wanted Putin’s kind of power for himself, which is part of why

I’m convinced he won’t leave office voluntarily—but I will get to that subject in due course.

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 i...

If Trump claimed you cheated or lied or stole, you could be sure that he’d done those things himself; it was almost as if he had a compulsion to confess to his terrible actions by way of accusation.

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

that kind of effort a waste of time and beneath his stature. The last reason, improbably, was that Trump thought it would be a jinx to actually anticipate a victory, preferring not to tempt fate in a way that was beyond reckless.

The voters had decided to blow up the establishment—or drain the swamp, if you prefer—and suddenly Kushner, an aristocratic man-child possessed of supreme arrogance and a completely amoral will to power, like his father-in-law and wife, was going to simultaneously bring peace to the Middle East and somehow navigate a looming global trade war?

The cliché about sending a boy on a man’s errand had never been truer than in Trump Tower in the days after the election, as Prime Ministers and CEOs and diplomats tried to insinuate themselves with the simpering boy with the voice of Alvin Chipmunk.

A lot of the

guards disliked me intensely, because they were big Trump supporters, and they followed his words when he attacked me on TV and Twitter, giving them license to be unusually cruel to me. As I tried to sleep, they’d flash a light in my eyes every half hour; they’d kick my door; they wouldn’t let me get hot water from the machine for my coffee.