Disloyal

by Michael Cohen

  Evangelical leaders laying hands on Trump. © 2020 Michael Cohen

  The prayer over, Trump opened his eyes as if he had indeed been in deep meditation and conversation with God.

  “What do you think about me running for president?” Trump asked Pastor White in a reverent tone.

  Evangelical leaders laying hands on Trump. © 2020 Michael Cohen

  There was a silence in the room, as bowed heads were raised and eyes opened. This was no longer a question about the ambitions of a billionaire celebrity—it was about the soul of the nation; the Almighty was being summoned to guide the faithful. Paula White was very serious as she talked in a low voice, addressing the assembled in a passionate but measured way, Trump listening with yet more fake piety.

  “I don’t think the time is right,” she replied, slowly.

  “I don’t either,” Trump said, also slowly, carefully, and thoughtfully.

  As the two-hour session broke up, another event took place that would come to have a huge impact on the 2016 election, whether God wanted it or not. The genesis of this momentous moment, as you’ll see in the pages to come, was my first meeting with Jerry and Becki Falwell and the implications it would have on the future of America. With folks milling around in the hallway of Trump Tower, I fell into a conversation with the couple that would provide the first flutter of a wave to the butterfly wing flapping that rippled outward and led to the devout and undying devotion to Trump of millions of evangelicals that still mystifies so many Americans.

  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.

  “Oh, God, it’s going to be a complete madhouse,” Jerry said. “The things we do for our children.”

  “As I would do for mine,” I replied. My daughter Samantha was a little older, but I would have moved heaven and earth to give her the kind of thrill that the Falwells were seeking. This presented an ideal opening for a fixer, like me, I realized.

  “I’m not sure if I can pull it off, but a close friend of mine is an executive at Bieber’s record label,” I continued. “Let me call him and see if I can get you into the VIP area and possibly get a meet-and-greet.”

  Becki’s eyes lit up, like I’d offered her the chance to be a superstar in her daughter’s eyes—and who wouldn’t want to be that for their tween?

  “Michael, thank you for even offering to try,” she said.

  Becki offered me a hug and peck on the cheek, as we swapped cell numbers and I told them I’d call as soon as I had news. This was the kind of thing I was put on earth to do, to be honest about my real role in Trump’s circle, but also more broadly in my life. Doing favors, making connections, working my Rolodex—that was me, figuring out how to give the Falwells’ daughter a lifetime memory. Not knowing where it would lead, but knowing it was likely going to be somewhere.

  Back in my office, I called my buddy and asked for three tickets to the VIP area for the Bieber concert the next morning, along with the possible chance to actually meet the cherubic Canadian in person. My pal was good with the tickets, but said it would be harder to swing the personal introduction. He said he’d try. The notice was short, and the demand huge, and he didn’t want to get my hopes up, so I didn’t tell the Falwells about that possibility, instead calling them and saying they were good to go on the tickets. I knew my friend would be there to take great care of them, so that was all excellent, and the Falwells were beyond excited to tell their daughter she was going to have a first-class seat at the show, only a few feet from her idol—heady stuff.

  “I can’t thank you enough,” Jerry said as I gave him directions on where to report for the tickets. “You made this trip even better than it already was. We’re friends for life.”

  The impact this tiny favor would have on the world was the furthest thing from my mind—but it would indeed come to matter, in the way random events multiply to form a pattern that can be seen to have real importance in hindsight. Part of the art to being a fixer, doing small and big things for people, was never, ever asking for anything in return—for myself, that is. For others, I was more than happy to call in a chit or IOU or however you want to describe the sense of obligation that comes from granting your tween daughter her greatest wish in life, a moment in the presence of the Biebs. This particular favor and another of greater significance would come due in 2016, to the enormous benefit not of me, but the political prospects of candidate Donald Trump.

  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?”

  Me with the Falwells. © 2020 Michael Cohen

  * * *

  In the end, the real real reason Trump didn’t run in 2012 had nothing to do with prayer or other worldly guidance. He was ruled by worldly concerns, specifically money. He was making multi-millions (Trump would often bag as much as $65 million for each season) as the star of Celebrity Apprentice, and the producer, Mark Burnett, needed to know if Trump was going to sign up for the next season. Ratings were declining, but Trump was still making serious money, constituting a rare positive cash flow for the Boss with his other businesses not nearly as successful, and he said he wasn’t going to just quit the show.

  “You don’t leave Hollywood,” Trump told me, as he explained why he was dropping the presidential bid. “Hollywood leaves you.”

  In the never-ending swirl of chaos at the Trump Organization, in the middle of helping Trump figure out if he was going to run for president, I was also pursuing a deal in the Eurasian country of Georgia on behalf of the Boss. I’d been to Ukraine once, in 2002 with my brother, but this was my first foray into doing business in the former Soviet Union, an experience that would morph over time into a national scandal, allegations of espionage, and my imprisonment.

  This proposed transaction was for Trump to sell his name and brand to a Georgian-American businessman I knew who was going to build hotels in the cities of Tbilisi and Batumi. My friend was connected to the CEO of a large Georgian company called Silk Road that would finance the deal, so it was decided I should travel to the country for a site inspection. I arrived to a military reception at the airport and a motorcade to the hotel, followed by a press conference with the media announcing that Donald Trump was coming to Georgia. This was my first glimpse of the power of the Trump brand in the former Soviet Union. I’d learned that Trump had a certain audience in the United States, mostly not at the higher levels of taste and society, but there were many who weren’t attracted to his gaudy blend of wealth, braggadocio, and machismo. Not so in Georgia, not by a long shot. The more boorish elements of Trump’s shtick were directly relatable to wealthy oligarchs ripping off the resources of their countries, as if he was a universal role model.

  Trump’s lack of scruples and conspicuous consumption had long attracted Russian investors to buy into his condo projects in New York and Florida, using numbered companies to hide the true ownership of the
properties. This dicey practice was hardly limited to the Trump Organization, though the Boss displayed a strange obsession with Russia, as I’ll discuss in due course, and the attitudes about foreign oligarchs and obviously corrupt officials from Third World countries were extremely lax for the Trumps.

  Learning how entwined business and government were in Georgia, that evening I found myself having a private dinner with President Mikheil Saakashvili. In the morning, I was given the use of a military helicopter for the ride to Batumi, courtesy of the President, to look at a gorgeous ten-acre site on the Black Sea. The following day, to my amazement, I was summoned to the capital of Kazakhstan, where the Prime Minister pitched me on the idea of developing a $300 million Trump-branded hotel project in anticipation of a G-7 summit that country was holding in three years. The Kazakh deal never came through, but it was another element of the pleasure of working for Trump—you never knew where you were going to go, or who you were going to meet, and there was rarely a dull moment.

  For Trump, everything was ultimately about making money and obtaining power, and he could see that his presidential odds were getting longer by the day. At the time, he was also in the process of acquiring two golf courses in Ireland and another in Scotland, and he was concerned about what would happen to his various businesses if he turned his attention full time to the 2012 campaign. A lot of the junky, fast-buck branding initiatives he’d gotten involved in—Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks—were starting to fail. Trump University was beginning to become a legal and publicity nightmare, with government investigations looming, and it was evident to me that I was going to be up to my neck in troubles that needed fixing.

  “The kids can’t handle all of the businesses on their own,” Trump finally said to me. “They’re not ready for it.”

  Then there was the inconvenient fact that Trump’s poll numbers had tanked. As a rising reporter from Politico named Maggie Haberman—who was a friend of mine and would go on to cover me and Trump in The New York Times to this day—wrote, “The Donald went up, and then The Donald melted down.” From the twenty-six percent number in April, Trump had played the birther story for millions of bucks in free press, as we’d anticipated, but Obama’s release of his birth certificate had taken the wind out of the sails of that story. Trump’s belligerence and refusal to let the matter drop weren’t wearing well, it appeared. By May he’d dropped to eight percent and fifth place, tied with Ron Paul, and far behind the eventual nominee, Mitt Romney, which amounted to a slap in the face for the Boss.

  Left unspoken was Trump’s true appetite for a showdown with a politician as popular and talented as Barack Obama, no matter how much Trump boasted about defeating him. Fear was an emotion Trump would never admit to, but it struck me as more than a little convenient to snipe from the sidelines about birther conspiracies—but another thing altogether to step into the arena and face the withering wit and soaring rhetoric and the real danger of humiliation at the hands of the 44th President of the United States.

  “I swear to you we’ll do this in 2015,” Trump said to me privately, as he prepared to announce he wasn’t going to run at the “up fronts” to promote the following season of The Apprentice, a way to try to monetize what had clearly been a publicity stunt—or so it seemed to the world.

  “If you do this, we’ll do it shoulder to shoulder,” I replied. “I swear to you. I’ll be at your side.”

  “I know you will,” Trump said.

  Chapter Seven

  Stormy Weather (Part One)

  During Trump’s flirtation with a presidential candidacy in 2011, I’d become his main spokesperson on cable news. I loved being on CNN and MSNBC and Fox, fighting in the Boss’s corner, for the fun of the combat and how it was raising my own public profile as well. Some didn’t like my pugnacious style, but my audience of one loved it when I went over the top in defending his latest racist or reactionary outbursts. In fact, I started to receive death threats, at the office and on my cell, with a level of frequency that made me apply for a license to carry a gun for self-protection. In New York City, that meant that I had to show the authorities that I had a “special need” to have a weapon on my person, so I was interviewed by an NYPD detective who came to my office to see evidence of the death threats I’d received. As we were talking, my cell phone rang and it was some lunatic ranting and raving and threatening to kill me, which was more than enough to convince the officer that I qualified. Now I was like the Boss and his son Don Jr. or any other self-respecting New York tough guy: packing heat.

  In hindsight, this was another milestone along my road to the madness of true Trump mania. Instead of wondering about the wisdom of facing the wrath of Trump haters uttering threats and risking my life, or pausing to think of the fact that I was doing all this in the service of a pathological liar, or more generally putting my increasingly crazy work duties in context as a sane person might, I purchased two Glock pistols, an ankle holster, and a waist holster that attached to my belt. Walking the streets of Manhattan with my hidden weapons giving an extra strut to my stride, I really had become what I wanted to be as a kid: a gangster lawyer, working for a New York organized crime don and Donald.

  With the election ruled out, I was back in the saddle, back to the usual insanity of the Trump Organization. But I had no clue of the nature or extent of the storm, or whirlwind, heading in my direction when I received a call in October of 2011 from a lawyer in LA who identified himself as Keith Davidson, asking if I was Special Counsel to Donald Trump. I replied that I was.

  “I represent an individual named Stormy Daniels,” Davidson said. “Her real name is Stephanie Clifford. She’s an adult entertainer.”

  “Okay,” I said, Googling her stage name and seeing my computer screen fill with images of an extremely busty blonde. “Are you referring to the Stormy Daniels who’s a porn star?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Do you know her work?”

  Her “work”, I thought?

  “No, I just Googled her,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

  “I need your assistance,” Davidson said. “There’s currently a story on a website called thedirty.com that depicts an alleged sexual encounter between our clients.”

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “Do you know that Mr. Trump is a germaphobe? Where and when was this supposed to have happened?”

  By then I was looking at thedirty.com and an anonymous story detailing a sexual encounter between Trump and Stormy Daniels at a “golfing event,” without offering details or corroboration. This was not good, I could see, as I waited for Davidson to get to the point of his call.

  “The alleged encounter took place in 2006, at a charity golf event in Utah,” Davidson said. “But that’s not why I’m calling.”

  “So what can I do for you?”

  “Ms. Daniels is equally upset about the story,” he said. “She has retained me in part to file a cease-and-desist order forcing the website to remove the story. What I need from you is a statement from Mr. Trump denying the allegation, similar to what I already have from Ms. Daniels. With the two statements, I can accomplish this.”

  “Wow,” I said, actually amazed that the conversation was taking this turn. I was waiting for a shakedown, of some kind, but this attorney from LA was offering to do a favor for the Boss. “Let me go in to Mr. Trump and get you the statement you need. I will call you back shortly.”

  I printed the article and walked down the hall to see Trump. He was on a call, as usual, so I sat in my regular middle Egg and waited patiently until he finished.

  “What’s up, Michael?” Trump asked.

  “I just received a call from a lawyer in Los Angeles about this,” I said, standing and handing him the article.

  Trump leaned back in his burgundy chair and read the article, and I swear he started to chuckle.

  “Not good, Michael,” he said. “Not good. Is this getting any attention? I’m sure Melania i
sn’t going to take this well. So what’s this about the lawyer?”

  “He represents Stormy Daniels,” I said. “And she’s denied the allegation. He wants you to do the same so he can file a cease-and-desist and force the site to remove the article.”

  “So she’s denying the story?” Trump asked, his curiosity now piqued, as was mine, but for a different reason—I wondered if it was really true. I knew it wasn’t the right time to ask, but I also figured he wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to brag about his conquest of a porn star if it was true; he was in his late sixties at the time and he’d want me to know, even with a wink and a nudge, that he still had game.

  “Yes,” I said. “And with your permission I will issue a statement on your behalf emphatically denying the allegation.

  “Good, good, Michael,” he said. “Are you sure she also denies the affair?”

  “Yes, Boss. I’ll be getting a copy of her denial for my file.”

  Back in my office, I called Davidson back, on the cell number he’d given me.

  “Mr. Trump denies any affair with Ms. Daniels, in Utah or anywhere else,” I said, even though I hadn’t actually asked that question. “On behalf of Mr. Trump I will be issuing you a statement of denial. Does that work?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Can you please send Ms. Daniels’s denial for my file and in the event any reporters jump on this story,” I asked. “I don’t believe it’s going to just disappear.”

  “Absolutely,” Keith said. “Give me a few minutes and I’ll send it to your email. Thanks for your help.”

  “No, Keith, thank you, for all you’re doing,” I said. “I’m sure we’ll be talking further about this. I’ll get you my statement after receiving yours.”