Michael Cohen calls Trump ‘a racist, a predator, a con man’ in new book
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump allegedly wanted to install a new U.S. attorney in the southern district of New York over fears he would be indicted and needed to be in a position to pardon himself if necessary, according to his former self-described fixer and personal attorney Michael Cohen.
Cohen joined a long list of authors to pen a book about his former boss in “Disloyal, a Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump,” which was released Tuesday.
“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,” Cohen wrote.
“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.”
Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to lying to Congress about plans to build a Trump Tower in Russia and, in a separate case, to paying off an adult film star and a former Playboy model, who both said they had sexual affairs with Trump before he was elected.
He insisted he acted at the direction of Trump, who has denied both affairs. The former personal attorney is serving the remainder of a three-year sentence in home confinement after he was released because of the coronavirus pandemic.
White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany dismissed Cohen’s allegations.
“Michael Cohen is a disgraced felon and disbarred lawyer, who lied to Congress. He has lost all credibility, and it’s unsurprising to see his latest attempt to profit off of lies,” she said.
In the book, Cohen said he knew Trump “better than even his family did,” and was able to bear witness “to the real man, in strip clubs, shady business meetings, and 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.”
Cohen outlines a series of anecdotes of his own upbringing, how he came to work for Trump as a young lawyer, his work to suppress media stories about his boss and women, the former businessman’s habits and Trump’s growing interest in presidential politics over the years.
Here are some other highlights from the book:
More:Former ‘fixer’ Michael Cohen: Donald Trump will ‘do anything’ to keep power
The Stormy Daniels payoff
Cohen confirmed he put up the money to pay ex-porn star Stormy Daniels and buy her silence about a past dalliance with Trump right before the 2016 election.
The president reimbursed Cohen via monthly payments disguised as “legal fees,” according to the book.
Cohen alleged Trump told him: “It never pays to settle these things, but many, many friends have advised me to pay. If it comes out, I’m not sure how it would play with my supporters. But I bet they’d think it’s cool that I slept with a porn star.”
The initial plan was to keep Trump’s role in the payments secret, he said: “I wasn’t going to reveal the fact that I had been repaid the money by Trump, in the form of fake legal fees, or that I had done everything at the direction of the President of the United States, needless to say.”
‘Like the Blacks, they’re too stupid to vote for Trump’
After his 2015 speech announcing his candidacy, Trump dismissed his family’s concerns over his harsh denunciation of migrants from Mexico, according to the book.
“I will never get the Hispanic vote,” Cohen quoted Trump as saying. “Like the blacks, they’re too stupid to vote for Trump.”
Cohen also said the president expressed disdain Black people.
“As a rule, Trump expressed low opinions of all Black folks, from music to culture and politics,” Cohen wrote.
In his diatribes against former President Barack Obama, the nation’s first African American president, Trump would say he got into Columbia University and Harvard Law School because of “f—-ing affirmative action.”
Trump’s contempt extended to Black foreign leaders, according to the book. Cohen quotes him as saying, “tell me one country run by a Black person that isn’t a shithole.”
Barack Obama
Trump’s most venomous comments were reserved for his predecessor.
“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,” Cohen wrote.
“This was when I started to witness the increasingly reactionary and unhinged Archie Bunker racism that defined Trump and his views on modern America.”
Cohen claims he even hired an Obama impersonator during the 2016 campaign so the former host of “The Apprentice” could “fire” the commander-in-chief.
“We even hired a Faux-Bama, or fake Obama, to record a video where Trump ritualistically belittled the first black president and then fired him, a kind of fantasy fulfillment that it was hard to imagine any adult would spend serious money living out,” Cohen wrote.
Trump embraced the conspiracy theory that Obama was not born in the United States in order to attack him and promote his own political standing with conservatives.
Trump never cared if the conspiracy theory was true, Cohen writes: “What he cared about was identifying an issue that he could exploit to his advantage, no matter how divisive – in fact, the more divisive, the better, because it would arouse strong feelings for those who took his side.”
Cohen also writes: “Birtherism was one of Trump’s most successful early Big Lie gambits.”
Cohen and Trump
Cohen acknowledges he did little to confront Trump about his racism and other behavior he outlines throughout the book.
“Don’t ask me how I squared this kind of racism with his qualifications to be president. I wanted power, as I’ve confessed, and that blinded me to just about everything awful and true and dangerous about Trump,” Cohen said.
He noted the president is reinforced by the people around him (including, at one time, Cohen).
“No one ever tells Trump the truth about his behavior and beliefs, or the consequences of his conduct and ignorance and arrogance, in business or in his personal life and now in politics,” he wrote.
“Trump truly is the boy in the bubble, impervious to the thoughts and feelings or others, entirely and utterly focused on his own desires and ambitions.”
Russia and Vladimir Putin
Trump admires Putin for his wealth and power, Cohen writes, and didn’t mind at all if the Russians wanted to help him win election.
“Trump loved Putin because the Russian had the balls to take over an entire nation and run it like it was his personal company – like the Trump Organization, in fact,” Cohen wrote in the book.
“An entire society and civilization bent to the will of a single man was how Trump viewed the ideal historical form of government — with him as the man in charge, of course,” Cohen said.
Trump, Cohen wrote, also figured he was setting himself up for business opportunities in Russia if he lost the 2016 election.
There was no formal cooperation between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia, Cohen writes – for one thing, the Trump campaign was too disorganized.
“What appeared to be collusion was really a confluence of shared interests in harming Hillary Clinton in any way possible, up to and including interfering in the American election – a subject that caused Trump precisely zero unease,” Cohen writes.
Strzok book out Tuesday as well
Cohen’s tome is not the only book about Trump out Tuesday.
Peter Strzok, the former FBI deputy in charge of its Counterintelligence Division, describes Trump as a national security danger in a book called “Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump.”
Strzok writes that Trump’s claims during the campaign that he had no business interests in Russia put him in a compromised situation and made him vulnerable to pressure from Putin.
“Putin knew he had lied,” the former FBI agent says. “And Trump knew that Putin knew – a shared understanding that provided the framework for a potentially coercive relationship between the president of the United States and the leader of one of our greatest adversaries.”
Trump has described Strzok as one of the architects of the “witch hunt” against him over Russia.
Strzok was removed from the Russia investigation in the summer of 2017 after the Justice Department discovered texts between him and then-FBI attorney Lisa Page criticizing Trump during the 2016 campaign.
The FBI fired Strzok in 2018. He has sued the Justice Department, claiming his termination came because of political pressure from Trump.
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