What part of Michael Cohen’s longtime role as Donald Trump’s fixer seems more humiliating? The part where he paid an adult film actress hush money right before the 2016 election, or his 2015 failure to negotiate a Trump appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers:
Meyers had invited Trump after running into him at the “Saturday Night Live” 40th anniversary special in February 2015, a few months before the real estate developer’s presidential campaign launched.
Trump, Meyers told me in an interview for POLITICO’s Off Message podcast, started out receptive to appearing on “Late Night,” but the conversation ended once Meyers refused a demand Cohen relayed that was non-negotiable to Trump: He wanted Meyers to go on air and publicly apologize for making fun of Trump at the [White House Correspondents Dinner] four years earlier.
Actually, this one is too easy: paying off women is the kind of thing that would make a guy like Cohen feel like a bad-ass, whereas trying to get a comedian to apologize? Ticky tacky and he failed. Meyers had at that point been mocking Trump for years, but sure, he was going to grovel and apologize for an old joke just to get Trump on his show. And this makes you wonder—never mind how many other women Cohen paid off (and don’t get me wrong, we want the answer to that question, too), how many fruitless errands for Trump’s ego, along the lines of the Meyers negotiation, did Cohen run over the years?