Disloyal

by Michael Cohen

  As I said at the start, I was in a cult of personality. And I loved it. I reveled in the intrigue and gamesmanship and manipulation, as terrible as that sounds. I had convinced myself I was in on the joke with the Boss, but, in truth, the real joke was on me.

  After every call, I’d go to Trump’s office and tell him about the network or publication that had reached out. Trump was thrilled.

  “I told you this would be a monster story,” Trump told me. “Fuck Obama. If you think he hates me now, just wait.”

  The lengths to which Trump would go to goad Obama had no bottom, as I saw when Trump started questioning his academic record, making it appear that the President had been the beneficiary of affirmative action instead of a brilliant student who had been the first black Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Law Review and graduated magna cum laude, especially as compared to the Boss’s mediocre record as a student. When cries emerged to see Trump’s academic record, it was obvious to the Boss that he was in real trouble. He’d called Obama a “terrible student” and demanded that he release his transcripts—but what if Trump’s grades at the New York Military Academy high school, Fordham, and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania were released?

  As the controversy erupted, Trump called me into his office and tasked me with putting out a fire of his own creation. He didn’t say why—he never did. He told me what he wanted done, even though it was as plain as the nose on my face that he wanted his academic record suppressed because he was a middling student, at best, but it remained unspoken. I was pretty sure there would also be a history of disciplinary action in the record, which would further embarrass the Boss, to the extent that was possible.

  To placate Trump, I contacted the upstate New York Military Academy, where he’d been sent by his parents as a teenager to instill some sense of discipline, and explained that all hell would break loose if they didn’t immediately provide me with all of the Boss’s high school academic records. I didn’t ask nicely: I was blunt and brutal, as usual when on a mission for the Boss. The pressure was jacked up by using wealthy alumni to pressure the school, forcing the headmaster to scurry into the basement and remove the documents—another unprecedented event. That was Trump when it came to Obama: competitive, but in many ways afraid of actually being compared—even though he would ridicule any suggestion that he was intimidated by the President.

  The White House Correspondents’ Dinner was held in late April of 2011, in Washington, DC. I chose not to go, but I watched from home as President Obama took to the podium in front of hundreds of reporters and celebrities to join in the annual political joke fest. I knew the Boss was in the crowd as the guest of Lally Weymouth, daughter of the legendary Washington Post owner Katharine Graham, and it was easy to spot Trump’s orange coif sticking out like a sore thumb in the sea of tuxedos and formal dresses, especially when Obama began to rip into the Celebrity Apprentice star by mocking his presidential aspirations.

  Obama had released his long-form birth certificate a few days before, telling supporters that he was trying to put the controversy to rest and remind voters that politics wasn’t a reality TV show—an obvious dig at Trump. But the Boss wasn’t going to let the show end that easily; life was indeed a reality TV show to Trump. The Boss had turned the spurious allegation into a real political force, with forty percent of Republican voters by then believing that Obama hadn’t been born in the United States, so the release of the birth certificate wasn’t going to deter him. Trump had identified his base, I knew, and he viewed the release of the birth certificates as a triumph, not the end of the matter.

  Unknown to the world, 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.

  “Now, I know that he’s taken some flak lately, but no one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than The Donald,” Obama said. “And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter—like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?”

  “But all kidding aside, obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. For example—no, seriously, just recently, in an episode of Celebrity Apprentice—at the steakhouse, the men’s cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so, ultimately, you didn’t blame Lil Jon or Meatloaf. You fired Gary Busey. And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir. Well handled.”

  The room exploded with laughter as the celebrities turned to catch a glimpse of the reddening face of Trump. 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. He hated Obama long before then; the hatred that would animate him in the years to come needed no further fire.

  But it did seal Trump’s resolve to run, I thought. To take the temperature in Iowa, the Boss and I agreed that I should fly out to Des Moines to meet with the leaders of the GOP, but because of my schedule, it wasn’t going to be possible for me to take commercial flights. For the first time ever, to my knowledge, including with Trump’s kids, the Boss suggested that I use his 727 for the one-man trip. Even that came with an asterisk, though, because the 727 was up for sale and the new 757 was going to be delivered soon, so I wasn’t getting the true gilded treatment he reserved for himself.

  The cost of the flight was likely a campaign contribution violation, even though we didn’t really even have a campaign at the time. We got around the pesky federal election laws as we usually did: by way of deceit. In this case, we used our go-to front, or beard, when Trump and I were hiding the true nature of our activities—a man by the name of Stewart Rahr. Universally known and loved as “Stewie Rah Rah” in wealthy New York circles, he was a pharmaceutical billionaire who’d divorced his wife of many years in the throes of a midlife crisis and turned himself into a party animal and big-time playboy, at least as much as a man in his late sixties could manage—and he managed very well.

  Rah Rah was the straw man I would use to buy a portrait of Mr. Trump that was up for sale at an art auction in the Hamptons a couple of years later. With Trump, everything had to be the biggest and the best, most especially his public profile, and that included a nine-foot tall portrait of Trump painted by the artist William Quigley. When the Trump portrait came up for auction, Rah Rah kept bidding the price up, with the final bang of the gavel coming in at $60,000, a ridiculously high price for the run-of-the-mill portrait, but it was the highest price paid at the event, giving the Boss bragging rights—and that was all he cared about.

  To reimburse Rah Rah for the painting, Trump arranged for his charity, the Trump Foundation, to cut him a check, using the charitable tax deduction as a way to reduce the cost of the portrait. This was typical of Trump’s method of accounting and evading taxes; he had no regard for the niceties of actually doing real charitable work or following tax laws. The giant, smiling image of self-regard was then hung in Trump’s Doral golf club, proving that it had exactly zero benefit for any charitable cause, but again, that was par for the course for the Boss: little people pay taxes, as Leona Helmsley, another wealthy New York real estate figure who committed the crime of telling the truth, once remarked. In the end, the Trumps would have to repay the back taxes on the painting, along with a substantial fine, and close the charity down when the New York Attorney General brought a case against the family for using the so-called foundation as a sham. But justice delayed was justice denied in this case, as he successfully hid the venal truth from the world long enough to become president.

  For the private flight on Trump’s plan
e, I had Rah Rah pay the cost, to be reimbursed by Trump eventually, a type of under-the-table back scratching common for the true elite. But when another candidate complained to the Federal Election Commission, the leading Republican lawyer governing the agency—an attorney named Don McGahn—cut off the investigation, proving his loyalty and usefulness to Trump, which would be rewarded when he was appointed White House Counsel after the Boss won the election of 2016.

  Landing in Des Moines in the Trump-branded jet, I was greeted by scores of reporters waiting in the hangar. I did a press conference, of course: the most dangerous place in America was in between me and a camera, especially if I was extolling the virtues of the Boss. The head of the Republican Party had arranged a tight schedule for me, with fifteen-minute meetings stacked on top of each other, but the universal response was enthusiasm for a Trump candidacy. There was a $100-a-head lunch fundraiser, which was packed, and I offered the keynote address—relishing the chance to speak in public. I raved about Trump’s love for the wide-open spaces of Middle America and the prairie states of Red America. But nothing could have been further from the truth: Trump couldn’t locate Iowa on a map any more than he could tell the difference between the locations of Kansas and Kansas City.

  I gave the Boss the download when I flew home and took his call late at night—as usual, his last call of the day.

  “Tell me, what was the reception like in Iowa?” he asked.

  “Off the charts,” I said. “You can’t imagine all the clamoring.”

  “Tell Melania,” Trump said, passing the phone to his wife.

  I gave her the whole spiel about the press and the lunch and the crowds, but I could tell she wasn’t interested. She wasn’t disrespectful, just disinterested, and eager to get off the phone so she wouldn’t have to listen to her husband’s chief enabler sing his praises.

  “That’s great,” she said, and click, she was gone.

  To promote Trump’s run in 2012, I set up a website called shouldtrumprun.com, and soon it was getting hits. This was when Roger Stone came into the picture. Trump and Stone had met years earlier, when both were moving in Roy Cohn’s libertine circles in the nightclubs of Manhattan. Stone was a longtime political consultant, or more like a political conspiracy monger, who’d worked for Richard Nixon and had a giant tattoo of the disgraced president on his back.

  Stone turned up at the office wearing tiny black sunglasses and a broad-shouldered suit, his hair slicked back, and affecting the strut of a cartoon character or a clown playing one. I was taking a crash course in political campaigns, with folks like Chris Ruddy at Newsmax and reporters at the Des Moines Register sharing their contacts and insights as I worked the phones. The vibe between Stone and me was instantly not good. Stone was a sycophant to Trump, but he and I had an instant dislike for each other. Part of it was personal style: Stone was a braggart and bully and he wanted to dominate Trump’s attention, traits in direct conflict with my role as the Boss’s tough guy, so part of it was also structural.

  Trump didn’t take sides in our feud, but he ridiculed Stone behind his back, as he did most everyone, including me, no doubt. 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. Trump joked about Stone and what a crazy person he was, devoid of moral purpose and willing to do anything in service of himself or a politician he supported, always and only because it would benefit him personally. To Trump, those were good qualities to possess.

  “Roger’s a fucking pervert,” Trump said to me. “But he can help me. He’s the dirty trickster. He’s the best trickster money can buy.”

  * * *

  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 investigation—she was a preacher after Trump’s heart. The fact that she was beautiful and blonde didn’t hurt, either.

  As part of the division of labor in the campaign, I was assigned to lead the outreach to faith communities on behalf of Trump, mostly because having Roger Stone attempt to make those connections would be a farce. It was at this time that Paula White called me and said that she wanted to put together a group of evangelical leaders to meet with Trump to discuss his potential candidacy and the spiritual and political dimensions of his campaign. The idea was for Trump to solicit their support, so I readily agreed to help put the session together. More than fifty religious leaders came to Trump Tower to meet the Boss in a conference room on the 25th floor. Some of the most famous evangelicals in the country were there, like Jerry Falwell Jr., Pastor Darrell Scott, and Dr. Creflo Dollar, an Atlanta preacher who would later be charged with choking his daughter and ridiculed for soliciting contributions from his parishioners so he could purchase a $65 million Falcon 7X private jet to “safely and swiftly share the Good News of the Gospel worldwide.”

  As an organizer, I went to watch the proceedings, and what I saw was amazing, to put it mildly. Sitting around the long conference room table, the group started to discuss Trump’s three marriages, his views on abortion, homosexuality, family values, America’s role in the world, and God’s place in the Boss’s heart. As a little kid, Trump’s family had attended Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, where he listened to the sermons of Norman Vincent Peale. The Protestant preacher was the author of The Power of Positive Thinking and an early radio and television star, sermonizing about the materialistic advantages of American conservative religion, making him a hero to the folks meeting with Trump as a pioneer in blending or conflating wealth and Jesus in a way that somehow found the Son of God was all about the bling.

  Trump milked the Norman Peale connection like a dairy farmer at dawn, not letting one drop spill. Peale’s version of God’s word revolved around tall tales he told that were completely unverifiable and calling for the banishment of thoughts or emotions that were negative, which must have penetrated young Donny Trump’s consciousness as a boy. Trump always lived in the present tense. He never looked backwards, except in anger or to blame others, which was part of Peale’s appeal to his followers. When Trump was sitting in the pews as a boy, Peale was one of the most famous pastors in the world, which had to impress the kid, but it was likely the cult-like egomania that he urged Christians to follow that seemed to have penetrated the little Donny’s impressionable brain, no doubt reinforced by his taskmaster father and hyper-ambitious mother.

  As the evangelicals inhaled Trump’s Norman Peale horse shit, they solemnly asked to approach him to “lay hands” on him. I watched with bated breath. Trump was a massive germophobe, as I’ve noted, so the idea of dozens of sets of hands touching his clothing and skin would appall him, I knew. But even this didn’t faze the Boss: he closed his eyes, faking piety, and gave the appearance of feeling God’s presence as the assembled group called for guidance in determining the fate and fortune of Donald Trump, America, and the message of Jesus Christ.

  If you knew Trump, as I did, the vulgarian salivating over beauty contestants or mocking Roger Stone’s propensity for desiring the male sexual organ in his mouth, as he would say less politely,
you would have a hard time keeping a straight face at the sight of him affecting the serious and pious mien of a man of faith. I know I could hardly believe the performance, or the fact that these folks were buying it.

  Watching Trump, I could see that he knew exactly how to appeal to the evangelicals’ desires and vanities—who they wanted him to be, not who he really was. 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. This was the moment, for me: the split second when I knew Trump would be president one day. It was an intuition, but it was also based on the intangibles. Trump’s answers to their questions were compassionate, thoughtful, Godly, in a way that I knew in no way reflected his beliefs or way of seeing life. He could lie directly to the faces of some of the most powerful religious leaders in the country and they believed him—or decided to believe him, a distinction with a real difference. Trump was imperfect, they knew, with his multiple marriages and carefully cultivated reputation as a womanizer. But he knew what they really cared about—the core, core, core beliefs. Anti-abortion laws, Supreme Court justices, opposition to gay marriage and civil rights, and the cultural war-like rhetoric aimed at godless liberals. That was Trump’s rat-like cunning, and it was a talent I knew then that he would ride all the way to the White House.