That was my relationship with Donald Trump.
The volume of incoming calls I was getting was soon insane and overwhelming. I juggled three different conversations, putting reporters on hold on different lines, all the calls on speakerphone, just like Trump. I told them we were forming an internal exploratory committee, which at first basically meant me, and I said we were examining the opportunity, given Trump’s unique position as a multi-billionaire plutocrat celebrity entering politics. I talked about how we had to figure out how to potentially transfer the Trump Organization’s vast enterprises to a trust, to be run by his children, and I said we were engaged in gauging the level of interest in his candidacy.
The quotes were all the same, more or less, but every reporter wanted their own quote because they didn’t like citing other publications, so I just rattled off the lines over and over again. I had friends at liberal and conservative outlets, in television and print, and by the end of the day the story that Trump was going to run had gone viral.
I knew that Trump would want to be updated on the smallest of details, as he measured how much free press he was going to be able to command, as well as soaking up the sensation of ego stroking that he craved constantly, and in the coming weeks I wound up in his office offering detailed reports more than a dozen times a day.
“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.”
Please pause over that final sentence and read it again. And again. And again. Because if you want to understand how Donald J. Trump became president, you have to grasp the essential fact that by far the most important element wasn’t nationalism, or populism, or racism, or religion, or the rise of white supremacy, or strongman authoritarianism. It wasn’t Russia, or lying, or James Comey, though all of those forces were hugely influential. It wasn’t Hillary Clinton, though heaven knows she did all she could to lose the election.
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.
The underlying reasons were both obvious and hard to discern, and it continues to amaze me that this phenomenon isn’t a central part of the conversation about the current plight of the United States of America.
Start with the proposition that Trump was great for ratings. If you’re a right-wing AM radio commentator, or a lefty Brooklyn political podcaster, you were making bank talking about Trump. It’s like a car crash, with people unable to avert their gaze. The Boss knew this and he knew how to exploit the greed and venality of journalists because he was (and is) an expert on the subjects. But there was something deeper and more primal in the way the media obsessed over Trump, as I did. Trump was a great story. He was chaos all the time. By five a.m. every day, he’d created the news cycle with his stubby fingers sending out bile-flecked tweets attacking anyone or everyone. In this way, as in so many others, he was the absolute opposite of Obama. Instead of No Drama, it was Drama All the Time.
The thing that astounded me, and still does to this day, was that the media didn’t see that they were being played for suckers. They didn’t realize the damage they were inflicting on the country by following Trump around like supplicants. What Trump did was transparent, once you identified it, and this remained a central fact of the campaign. If interest in Trump was waning, even just a little bit, he’d yank the chain of the media with an insult or racist slur or reactionary outrage—and there would be CNN and the Times and Fox News dutifully eating out of his hands. Like so much about Trump, if it weren’t tragic, you’d laugh—or cry.
In the frantic days after I’d first floated the coming Trump candidacy, I started to feel myself change. The transformation wasn’t obvious to me, at first, as I just seemed like a harder and more determined version of my prior self—ready, willing, and able to please Trump no matter what. But there was a new variety of shamelessness that was emerging, a personality that seemed disembodied and disordered and floating in the ether—like a cartoon character bullyboy I was creating.
In short, I was becoming Trump.
Perhaps I can best explain this by way of analogy. In simple terms, I looked at Trump as a blank canvas that I could paint any way I wanted. For me, that meant portraying him in the most flattering light possible, with all of his flaws and weaknesses not just hidden but turned into virtues and strengths. When Forbes said his net worth was “only” $4.1 billion I went ballistic. The truth, I well knew, was that Trump’s net worth was ridiculously inflated and he wasn’t worth nearly that much money—perhaps $2 billion, absolute tops. I’d personally pumped in the helium into his balloon-like net worth to the tune of billions by adding ridiculously high estimates to his holdings. To give but one example, consider the valuation I put on the four floors of retail space in the Gucci building adjacent to Trump Tower. The revenue from the building was approximately $28 million per year, a nice earner, but to value the property I used as a comparable property the commercial space at the nearby St. Regis, which had just sold for $700M. The St. Regis had 28,000 square feet, while the Gucci building had 50,000 square feet, so I pegged the price at $1 billion—and the press bit. But here’s the thing: the St. Regis retail space was all at street level, thus much, much more valuable than the four-story Gucci property. The real value of Trump’s Gucci space was maybe, just maybe, $300M, but who cared?
A better way to understand what I was doing was to liken it to acting. Method acting, to be specific. I was inhabiting the character I was playing for the press, repeating lines from a script. Lying for Trump became nothing to me. In my mind, I was an actor speaking lines written for me by someone else—in this case, Donald 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. Trump had mocked Obama’s education and demanded to see his academic transcripts, but when reporters began to seek the Boss’s grades from the New York Military Academy, Fordham, and Wharton, I went ballistic. I threatened officials with “jail time” and forced the institutions to keep their records confidential, and I mean sealed . . . a nice piece of hypocrisy I pulled off without a second thought.
A threatening letter to the President of Fordham University. © 2020 Michael Cohen
A note from Trump with the P.S. to add to my threat letter. © 2020 Michael Cohen
Before long, I started to believe my own lies, just like Trump, a measure of how deeply I was invested in creating the narrative. Trump was a self-made man, I told the press, a statement so ridiculous I can’t believe I kept a straight face. I said that the other Republicans were right to be “afraid” of Trump, implying physical peril, as I inflated the achievements of the “mega-billionaire” celebrity, author, TV star, and business icon.
Paradoxically, I didn’t officially join the campaign, in order to keep my title of Executive Vice President and Special Counsel to Donald Trump. I didn’t talk about Trump the candidate, I talked about Trump the man, or the made-up version I touted. I wasn’t a surrogate for Trump; I was speaking for myself as an extreme loyalist, as
his dependable alter ego.
“Why do you give a shit about him?” my kids would ask.
“It’s his deal, not yours,” they’d say.
“I’m not going to talk about this anymore,” I would reply. “It’s repetitive.”
So the subject would be dropped because my family didn’t have the wherewithal to resist me—or to save me. It wasn’t just as if I was an alcoholic or a drug addict refusing to get help. It was exactly that. I was an addict unable to stop myself from drinking or popping pills or shooting heroin into my veins. Worse, I brought my addiction home, constantly shouting on the phone to reporters and publishers when I should have been having a quiet breakfast with my children or a walk in the park. I never, ever, ever got through an entire meal in a restaurant with my wife without being interrupted by Trump. He’d call to ask a favor, or have me make a call on his behalf, or just to complain and rant.
My family hated it when I picked up his calls, as I always did, no matter the hour or the circumstances. I was always pressing his message, always pressing his message, always pressing his message. What I really needed was an intervention, but my wife and kids and parents and friends didn’t know how to stage such a scene, or how I would react. “Badly,” was the short answer, in hindsight, as it would likely have provoked me to go further and further into the madness, as I gradually and then rapidly took leave of my senses.
In the early days, I was running a one-man show for Trump, and that was no way to sustain a presidential campaign. I had my own freelance advisors I could lean on when the Drudge Report announced that it was going to conduct an online poll. I called my old pal John Gauger from Liberty University and got him to buy bots to cheat on the poll, just as we’d done with the CNBC poll the year before. This time we managed to land Trump in fifth place, with 24,000 votes, a spot that I thought of as the Goldilocks solution: not too high, not too low, just right.
But we needed a more formal and structured approach to have an effective team—or at least Trump’s version of form and structure. What came next reminded me of the bar scene from Star Wars, with strange and unlikely characters from faraway galaxies turning up on the 26th floor in a seemingly endless stream over the next eighteen months. The first was the self-styled ultra-villain Roger Stone, back with his black sunglasses and flamboyant bad boy act, assless cowboy chaps at the ready. This time Stone was accompanied by his sidekick, Sam Nunberg. Sam was a talented and smart guy with substance-abuse issues and a propensity for getting in ridiculous feuds and sending idiotic tweets, no doubt while under the influence, including one using the N-word when referring to the Reverend Al Sharpton’s daughter—the final straw that led Trump to fire Sam. But that wasn’t entirely true, either, as Sam covertly continued to develop policy positions for Trump, conveyed via Stone—if something could be done secretly or dishonestly, that was always Stone’s preferred way of operating, as if it proved he was dastardly and ruthless; the same was true for Trump. I wound up having to call Reverend Sharpton to apologize on Sam’s behalf and explain that his views weren’t a reflection of the Trump campaign, which wasn’t entirely true, and the Reverend was gracious in response, to my relief, as we’d known each other for years.
Hope Hicks was another early recruit, an aide taken from Ivanka’s clothing company, and she proved to be extremely good at keeping track of Trump’s calls and activities, which was no mean feat for a young women in her mid-twenties. I took a real shine to her as she reported to Trump and kept the trains running on time—or as close as possible.
Now we had to find a campaign manager. It soon became apparent that Trump wouldn’t be able to engage any of the more experienced political handlers. The leading lights in the Republican party all wanted to be paid $200,000 a month, with the added requirement that they be paid up front for a full year. The reason was simple: they were convinced that Trump’s candidacy was a publicity stunt and he’d withdraw after the initial rush of free press.
One thing I knew from long experience was that Trump didn’t want to pay retail, and he would never agree to pay for services he might not actually require. This was even truer when it came to politics, I was learning, despite Trump’s repeated brag that he would spend hundreds of millions of dollars to win the Presidency. In truth, he didn’t want to spend a dime of his own money, if at all possible, and any and all expenditures had to be the absolute rock-bottom minimum.
Which was how a political operative and charmer named Corey Lewandowski walked into the Trump campaign and my life. He came recommended by David Bossie, the head of the right-leaning political group Citizens United, with Lewandowski boasting an inflated resume and an exaggerated sense of himself.
The real reason Trump went with Lewandowski was cost: he wanted ten percent of what the others commanded, and he didn’t demand to be paid in advance. Like the cheap paint at Doral, Trump was going to get what he paid for—or didn’t pay for. The reason Lewandowski came dirt-cheap should have been obvious with a simple Google check—but Trump didn’t bother with such trivialities. Lewandowski was forty-one and worked as an executive at the Koch-funded group Americans for Prosperity, but he’d claimed to run the entire outfit when he was really only in charge of voter registration.
Within a day or two I didn’t like the look of Lewandowski, walking around the office with a Red Bull in each hand bossing people around. As I quietly did my due diligence on him, I could see that Lewandowski’s calling card was his propensity for absurd behavior and a long history of associating with unethical politicians. As an undergraduate, he’d run for the Massachusetts House of Representatives, receiving, at best, a grand total of seven votes, only to bounce around working for various lower-level state politicians and then wind up as an aide to Representative Bob Ney of Ohio, who’d become a surrogate father—before he was locked up for a wide range of fraudulent and corrupt behavior in the Jack Abramoff scandal of the 2000s.
Lewandowski liked to carry himself with an ex-cop swagger, but the reality was that he’d been a trainee officer at a marina in New Hampshire handing out lifejackets, and he was the kind of genius who carried a loaded handgun in a bag of dirty laundry into a federal building, only to be caught by the metal detector. To say that Corey and I didn’t get along from the very start would be a massive understatement. I hated him, and he hated me. It was that simple, as we both contended for Trump’s attention and praise.
Let Trump Be Trump was Lewandowski’s motto, written on a blackboard on the fifth floor of Trump Tower, where the campaign headquarters was established on the former set of The Apprentice, an apt setting for the reality TV show that was about to unfold. For the new campaign manager, that meant bending and scraping and praising Trump to an extent that embarrassed even me, and that’s saying something, because I was one of the worst sycophants.
One thing that Lewandowski wanted to achieve was to keep me off TV and on the margins of the campaign, which pissed me off, and did nothing to stop me from regularly showing up on CNN and Fox to shill for the Boss. I was the only person Trump allowed to speak on TV without his prior notice and permission, and he refused to concede to Lewandowski on this front, to my delight.
“He’s an asshole,” I once said to Trump, with Lewandowski standing right there. “He treats everyone badly. He’s a wannabe bully.”
Funny, coming from me, right?
In the spring of 2015, I wanted Trump to launch the campaign as soon as possible, but the Boss wanted to delay for as long as possible, mostly because it postponed the day he would have to start spending real money. To Trump, the odds of winning the nomination were so long, he considered it almost certainly wasted money, so best to avoid expenses as long as he could.
Lewandowski was fine with moving slowly, likely not grasping the underlying rationale, but when he went away with his family for a long-planned vacation in Aruba, I pounced on the opportunity to corner Trump and get him to set a date. Lewandowski was on the phone day aft
er day from his vacation trying to convince Trump to push the date back, in order to properly stage manage the event, while I urged the Boss to move quickly and get the campaign rolling at long last.
Finally, a summit meeting was called in Trump’s office, with Lewandowski, Hope Hicks, a lawyer named David Schwartz, and me convening to decide the timing and how to attract the greatest amount of attention and press. Everyone was in a great mood, joking around and throwing out ideas, but for me it was personal. I had been waiting for this day for five years and I wanted it to be even bigger and more sensational than Trump did, which would be no small feat.
The setting was going to be the lobby of Trump Tower, it was universally agreed. The atrium had grandeur and tying the campaign to the brand was the essential point of the entire campaign: running for president was going to be a long free informercial for the Trump Organization, and so the iconic pink marble womb in the mother ship of the brand had to be featured.
“Let’s make it a proverbial circus,” I told the group. “Hey, Boss, what about people on stilts, a few fire breathers, and some elephants?”
Trump looked at me quizzically, trying to decide if I was serious, as I laughed.
“Could you imagine if an elephant dropped a load on your marble floor?” I said.
Disloyal Page 19
