Welcome back to the rest of the story. When last we visited our intrepid book reader, he was just finishing Chapter 6 — tRump for President (Part 1). He’s now finished the book and has come general thoughts to share before we get into the juicy quotes.
Ultimately, tRump betrayed Cohen’s loyalty and Cohen hasn’t forgiven tRump for that. By trying to paint Cohen as another coffee boy, tRump managed to push Cohen out from under his control. Cohen is clearly angling for tRump to share the blame for many of Cohen’s transgressions. Whether or not Cohen’s motives are pure and his accepting personal blame for his crimes is authentic is beside the point. We can’t see inside his soul to determine if this is an act of duplicity or contrition. The portrait he paints of tRump is damning either way.
Is this book worth reading? For me, it’s a qualified yes. I wanted to get more dirt to throw at tRump and Cohen came through for me. I found myself reaching new levels of disgust with tRump’s behavior as Cohen related minor and major episodes of pure sleaze. My takeaway from the book is that tRump is both more cunning and more stupid than I thought he was.
One odd point was that Cohen admits to still having some kind thoughts about tRump even while describing him as a monster. I guess it's not easy to shrug off 10 years as the monster’s apprentice.
Disloyal: A Memoir by Michael Cohen — A Book Report (Part 2)
Cohen taking some blame:
But here’s the ugly truth—a motive I share with deep and abiding regret and shame, and one only unearthed after much soul searching and reflection as I painted the walls in prison and stared at the ceiling from my bunk. The real real truth about why I wanted Trump to be president was because I wanted the power that he would bring to me. I wanted to be able to crush my enemies and rule the world.
On evangelical support:
Not that Trump deserved the admiration and support of the devout folks he’d just met. Trump’s true feelings about the encounter with the evangelicals, and the laying on of hands, a supposedly sincere and pious summoning of the will of God, were revealed as I entered Trump’s office at the end of the day to have a final recap of his thoughts on the laying on of hands ceremony.
“Can you believe that bullshit?” Trump said, with incredulity, referring to the ritual and the evangelicals. “Can you believe people believe that bullshit?”
Cohen explains how tRump screwed Patricia Kluge out of her $100 million estate by buying up surrounding property and letting it run down to lower the value of her home. He acquired the entire site of the current tRump Winery for less than $13 million. I think the only “good deals” tRump ever made were when he was taking advantage of vulnerable people.
“What a deal,” Trump said to me. “I just stole the property. In this case someone else’s loss is Trump’s gain.”
Cohen gives details about tRump stiffing contractors during the “done on the cheap” renovation of Doral and the dissolution of tRump University.
And then there tRump at the Miss Universe pageant:
[In Vegas] “Holy shit, look at Miss Brazil,” Trump said. “She’s fucking gorgeous. Look at that face and body. Man, I would like a piece of that.”
[Preparing for Moscow] … This was followed by an after-party at a nightclub in the Palazzo known as The Act. … Lavish debauchery was the promise of the Vegas club, which was part of chain of strip joints known as the Box that aimed to push the boundaries of decency to the breaking point and beyond. At The Act, that meant the appearance on stage of sex dolls, dildos, strap-on penises, strippers pretending to snort coke, pretending to actually take a crap on the stage—the place was truly lewd and disgusting and infantile.
On tRump’s hair:
I called his plane Hair Force One, for good reason. Trump doesn’t have a simple combover, as it would appear. The operation was much more involved than a simple throw-over of what was left of his hair: the three-step procedure required a flop up of the hair from the back of his head, followed by the flip of the resulting overhang on his face back on his pate, and then the flap of his combover on the right side, providing three layers of thinly disguised balding-male insecurity. The concoction was held in place by a fog of TREsemme TRES Two, not a high-end salon product. Flip, flop, flap, and there was the most famous combover in the world.
How crass can one man be?
“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?”
Here’s a story I hadn’t heard before. tRump had Cohen fix an online poll for most influential businessman in the last 25 years so tRump appeared in the top 10. After the poll closed, CNBC, who ran the poll, removed tRump from his spot at #9 in the list and tRump threatened to sue to regain the place he had fraudulently acquired. He then stiffed the programmer who fixed it for Cohen.
Comparing Jared and Rudy:
Jared will do as he’s told, with discretion, in a way that Trump can’t find in other advisors. If you doubt my word, just look at what happened when the maniac Rudy Giuliani started to freelance foreign policy in Ukraine. There were two Rudys—one batshit crazy and one clear-headed—and if you wanted to get anything sensible out of him it was like rolling the dice. By that measure, Jared Kushner was Dag Hammarskjold incarnate.
I found this depressing. tRump knew the media would keep him going without him having to spend any money. Cohen agrees that one of the biggest reasons we are stuck with tRump is the our national media DID NOT DO THEIR DAMN JOBS!
“What about self-funding the campaign,” Trump said to me one afternoon.
I knew there was no way he was going to spend his own money on politics. He was far too cheap, to begin with, and he was far less liquid than was understood by outsiders, but he appeared to be seriously contemplating the idea.
“I don’t want to take money from a super PAC,” Trump said. “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.”
...
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.
On lying for tRump:
I was reciting the agreed-upon line of nonsense, in the most realistic and convincing way I could, with complete and total commitment to the role, like Robert DeNiro in Raging Bull, and what I was merchandizing was indeed raging bullshit.
Cohen confirmed the paid actors at the tRump campaign rollout in 2015
To ensure there would be a great crowd, David hired a local acting agency for a few dozen extras at fifty bucks apiece to provide a guaranteed background of people wearing Trump-branded t-shirts.
These are three of the most important reasons why tRump is unfit to be president.
...but he’d done no preparation for the simple reason that he never prepares for anything, ever. Reading reports, taking briefings, seeking context and background for professional encounters—Trump does none of that, trusting that he can fake his way through life. More than that, he preferred to be ignorant, as it allowed him to rely on his gut instincts.
“Javier, let me tell you, I am not anti-Hispanic or anti-immigrant,” Trump said, adopting his best political mien, exactly as he’d done with the evangelicals back in 2011 when they laid hands on him—the spectacle that convinced me the Boss could become president because he was so adept at being deceptive and disingenuous.
Trump was always prone to listen to the last person who spoke to him, frequently the advisor floating the worst and most destructive idea,
Cohen taking responsibility again:
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. Complicity doesn’t really convey my role because I wasn’t passively observing events, I was shaping them.
Rachel Maddow’s favorite chapters were all about Russia and tRump Tower Moscow. Cohen talked a lot about trying to push the Russia deal at the same time tRump was claiming he had no ties to Russia (and sucking up to Putin). tRump appears to believe that all the oligarchs buying tRump properties were actually fronting for Putin. Cohen thinks tRump adores Putin. So do I.
On Don Jr, big game hunter:
“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.”
Cohen tells us how tRump, Cohen and David Pecker colluded to smear any republican candidate rising in the polls. When the story about Cruz’s father hanging out with Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t get much initial attention, tRump went on Fox & Friends to give it a boost.
On not paying David Pecker back for catching and killing the Karen McDougal story:
If Trump could avoid payment, especially if it would look bad if he was directly connected to an underhanded financial transaction, he would try to do it. It was a shortsighted way of conducting himself, as we would all come to learn, but it was an example of how Trump truly and sincerely didn’t believe the rules or law applied to him.
If Trump could screw a law firm, or a paint vendor, or a salesperson, he’d do it almost as a matter of principle.
On Jared:
Kushner was suddenly the global dauphin, an inexperienced and totally unqualified figure acting as the gatekeeper to the president-elect, who was equally inexperienced and unqualified. 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.
Cohen spends a good deal of time denying he was in Prague to set up a back channel deal with Russia as detailed in the Steele Dossiers. I think he’s made a fairly strong case and Mueller didn’t find any evidence either.
Back to the Stormy situation which was becoming very much a public issue:
Trump’s mind was so permeated with deception and delusion—of others, but also of himself—that I had to be prepared to literally depart from reality and enter a kind of fantasyland when I spoke with the President.
As I talked, it seemed to me that it was almost like Trump believed the lies himself—as if he might actually believe that he hadn’t had sex with Stormy Daniels in 2006 and that he hadn’t repaid me the hush money. At the very least Trump didn’t care about the truth. If facts didn’t suit him, he denied them, changed them, invented them, and then seemingly believed them—to hell with reality—and I willingly played along.
Cohen skims over the Avenatti feud a quickly moves to the raid. Cohen spoke to tRump right after the raid. They haven’t spoken since. tRump’s distancing and betrayal of Cohen are what I think drove Cohen from that point forward. The we move on to Cohen telling us he was strong-armed into pleading guilty because the SDNY threatened to charge his wife, Laura, as well. He pled, but claims some of the charges were bogus.
After he went to prison and the pandemic hit he was scheduled to be released to house arrest because of pre-existing medical conditions:
As the date for my release neared, though, Bill Barr changed the criteria for release and seventy inmates were returned to the camp, leaving a dozen of us in solitary. It felt like Barr’s sudden amendment of the rules was aimed at me, at the direction of President Trump, which speaks volumes about the nature of the rule of law in this age.
Cohen’s almost closing thoughts (written around the time tRump & Barr were trying desperately to silence him and had him sent back to prison).
The reason the President wanted a new head prosecutor in the Southern District, I knew better than anyone, was so that while in office, he could arrange to be federally indicted. In the event he loses the election in November, he could then pardon himself, as he’s long claimed to be his right. The reason behind that unprecedented and serpentine thinking was that Trump knows perfectly well that he is guilty of the same crimes that resulted in my conviction and incarceration. He also knows that I would be a star witness in that case, and my book a fundamental piece of evidence for his guilt.
Without the immunity from prosecution granted to the president, Trump will also almost certainly face New York State criminal charges. He would likely be convicted on both the Federal and State charges and face serious prison time. That is Donald Trump’s greatest fear in life, believe me, and if he fails to get reelected, that will be his fate—and he knows it—so silencing me was an essential part of his overall plan to evade the law and avoid that outcome.
Be afraid Donny, be very afraid.
Sic semper tyrannis
Up the Resistance!
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