Cruz lost in Indiana, 53-37.
If that’s not gangster, I don’t know what is.
In the aftermath, Trump praised the excellent reporting by the Enquirer, as if it had actually engaged in journalism instead of conspiring to deceive the American people. But Trump couldn’t let things stand at that: he had to rub it in, and mock the real news and even reality. “I mean, if it was in The New York Times, they would have gotten Pulitzer Prizes for their reporting,” Trump said.
Apart from efforts like the Cruz lie, my role in the campaign was limited, and deliberately so; I was more useful to Trump as a resource he could use quietly, without having to tell the campaign staff. I’d see Trump around the office and we’d talk politics. I did television hits often, as I loved the whole process. My contributions were intermittent but occasionally I offered my assistance or opinion. I’ll never know the full truth on this matter, but I know that I was watching one of Trump’s rallies on television one night during the spring when it struck me that every single person in the stands in the background was white. All the grinning rednecks in red MAGA hats, the Moms in MAGA t-shirts, the gap-tooth kids waving to the camera—the Trump-heads were all lily white. I told Trump about this observation.
“Your rallies look like fucking Ku Klux Klan meetings,” I said. “All of your supporters are white. Instead of hoods, they are all wearing MAGA hats. You need some diversity in your audience. The optics are terrible.”
“You’re right,” Trump agreed. He didn’t care about racial justice, needless to say, and his only real goal with black voters was suppression, especially aiming his efforts at African American women in swing states like Michigan and Wisconsin and Ohio, trying to convince them that Hillary Clinton was so awful that they shouldn’t bother to turn out. “What do you have to lose by supporting Trump?” he asked, but the real question he posed was why they should support the Clintons and their criminal justice and welfare reforms, which proved so catastrophic for minorities.
From the time I mentioned the racial component of his rallies, I noticed there were always at least one or two black or brown men or women positioned directly behind Trump’s head when he spoke, minorities I’m sure were identified and recruited by the campaign team and carefully placed to appear directly in the middle of the cable news shots. The gesture wasn’t aimed at minority voters so much as his base. It was a form of subliminal communication that it wasn’t racist to support a politician employing transparently racist rhetoric, the kind of reassurance that appealed to white suburban moms turned off by Trump but willing to hold their noses and vote for him, partly out of dislike for Clinton’s sense of entitlement but also because of the promise of Supreme Court justices who would make abortion illegal.
Throughout the campaign, rumors of Trump’s past sexual encounters circulated from time to time, but the real impetus for the oncoming tsunami was Trump’s trouncing of Cruz. The Boss was no longer the frontrunner, nor was he the presumptive nominee; he was the candidate.
I had been at Trump headquarters the night he beat Cruz as the Boss strutted up to the podium in front of a sea of reporters and cameras and entered an entirely new dimension of the race for the Presidency. We had all been delirious, feeling vindicated but also amazed; what had started as a lark and a PR stunt had turned into a triumph.
“I won with women,” Trump said. “I love winning with women.”
I laughed and so did everyone in attendance, including the press. Trump had the world eating out of his hands—and, even better, his enemies were howling in outrage.
But Trump was taunting the gods, or fate, or kismet, when he bragged about his success with women, because of course it would be women who would come to define the 2016 campaign, in a myriad of ways. I knew the risks Trump was running by gloating over his appeal to women, and the threat of a sexual scandal was real, for sure. As Trump’s political fortunes rose, stories about women claiming to have had sexual relationships with him while he was married to Melania were circulating. This was my territory: the filth and muck of politics, the assignment the Boss gave to his most trusted lawyer and consigliore and fall guy.
In June of 2016, Dylan Howard from the Enquirer called to tell me about a former Playboy centerfold named Karen McDougal who was alleging that she’d been in an intimate and ongoing sexual relationship with Trump for nine months in 2006 and 2007. This overlapped with the Stormy Daniels affair from years earlier, I knew, and it was a particularly sensitive timeframe because Mrs. Trump had just given birth to their son Barron at the time. I’m not a woman, of course, but I’m smart enough to know that cheating on your wife while she’s breastfeeding your newborn son was not going to please your wife.
Listening to Howard’s account of the Playboy centerfold, I didn’t know if McDougal was telling the truth—but I did know the truth didn’t matter. Howard told me he’d flown to LA to meet with McDougal, a beautiful brunette who’d been one of the most popular Playboy centerfolds of all time. In other words, exactly Trump’s type: a conquest that he no doubt viewed as extra prestigious because of her sex-symbol status, like sleeping with a porn star. Dylan said McDougal was believable, but that he’d managed to get her lawyer to agree to twelve-hour period of silence when they wouldn’t talk to other media outlets. Keith Davidson was back in the frame, Howard told me; the attorney who’d represented Stormy Daniels in 2011 was once again trying to get American Media to buy off his client in return for her story—and silence.
I went to Trump’s office on June 27 to tell him about McDougal’s claim. He immediately called Pecker, as I knew he would. . . .
By late July, Davidson was pitting ABC News and American Media against each other. McDougal was trying to parlay her affair with Trump into a way to revive her career, or what tiny bit of it might be left, an understandable ambition, but the last thing on anyone else’s mind. When I heard about the ABC initiative, I knew it was time to act.
On August 6th, McDougal signed the contract. The deal included $150,000, with $25,000 allocated for payment for her appearance on the cover of two magazines owned by American Media. That meant Trump was on the hook for $125,000 to be repaid to Pecker’s company. How this was all going to work wasn’t clear to me. Trump and his CFO Allen Weisselberg were past masters at allocating expenses that related to non-business matters and finding a way to categorize them so they weren’t taxed. The plane rides, the lavish dinners, even purchasing clothes—Trump’s entire life was one giant, or huuuuggggeeee tax deduction, I knew.
Pecker also needed to find another, non-obvious way to pay McDougal. To that end, Pecker reached out to a trusted former employee named Daniel Rotstein and got him to use his consulting company in Florida as the front for the transaction; Rotstein’s company would execute the agreement and send the money to Davidson’s trust account to be held on behalf of McDougal. All the details seemed to have been satisfactorily resolved.
But I was still antsy and uneasy. Trump’s poll numbers were rising during the summer. He was reckless. He had long accused others of doing the very things he did; that was a central element of his modus operandi. If Trump claimed you cheated or lied or stole, you could be sure that he’d done those things himself; it was almost as if he had a compulsion to confess to his terrible actions by way of accusation. My biggest and growing fear was what would happen if all this conniving ever emerged. For months, it had amazed me that the national press investigated every accusation made against Hillary Clinton, as if she were the most devious and corrupt politician in history, while Trump’s long history of bankruptcies and infidelities and dubious business practices received relatively little scrutiny. I knew it was because no one really believed he would win, so the presumptive president deserved more attention, but giving Trump that kind of leeway seemed like lazy journalism.
By early September, I was starting to feel hinky about the entire McDougal affair. Pecker paid the $150,000 and repeatedly asked me about the rep
ayment. Would Trump really stiff him? What if the deal leaked to the press? I decided I needed to record a conversation with Trump about the payment for two reasons. First, to show Pecker that I was asking Trump to repay the obligation, and second, to have a record of his participation if the conspiracy ever came out. I was certain that Trump would throw me under the bus in that event, claiming ignorance and laying all the blame on a rogue lawyer, namely me. I had no idea how prescient I was, but at the time, I could sense the stakes were getting higher and higher as I explained the details of the transaction with McDougal to Trump. As a precaution, my iPhone was digitally memorializing our exchange.
“I need to open up a company for the transfer of all that info regarding our friend, David, you know, so that—I’m going to do that right away,” I said.
That was how we talked: euphemistically, circling a subject carefully, choosing words that might allow for some ambiguity.
“So what do we got to pay for this?” Trump asked. “One-fifty?”
I told Trump that the amount we’re paying should include all the “stuff” that Pecker had on him. By “stuff” I meant any and all other salacious Trump stories we believed he possessed.
“Yeah, I was thinking about that,” Trump said.
“All the stuff,” I said. “Because—here, you never know where that company—you never know what he’s—”
“Maybe he gets hit by a truck,” Trump said, addressing the point I was making.
“Correct,” I said. “So I’m all over that.”
Trump was surrounded by newly famous political advisors writing speeches and running get out the vote operations, not to mention disinformation campaigns on social media, but I was dealing with the personal and extremely confidential matters that could make or break the Boss. I may not have looked like I had a lot of power in Trump’s world, but I knew my place and role and how central I was to Trump’s life, in politics and business.
To facilitate the payment, I incorporated an LLC in Delaware. I called the company Resolutions Consultants, but changed it to Essential Consultants soon after. Delaware had strict secrecy laws, and it was the jurisdiction long used by wealthy men to hide their assets during messy divorces, so I felt confident that all of this would remain secret and that I had a reliable conduit for Trump’s covert payments.
There was only one problem: Trump was having another “cheap attack.” This was like faking the CNBC poll, or any of the other countless times he welched on his obligations. But this situation was more complicated, I knew, because the money was one thing—the risk of the transaction becoming public was another. 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.
Gradually, by way of evasion and obfuscation, it became clear that Trump wasn’t going to reimburse Pecker and the Enquirer for the payment to McDougal. When Pecker figured out that Trump wasn’t going to keep his word, he blamed me. When I explained that it was out my hands, he called and insisted that we meet for lunch to discuss, specifying we meet at a place called Il Postino, an upscale midtown Italian restaurant he frequented. American Media had taken significant investment from a hedge fund called Chatham Asset Management, which was run by a hard-charging trader named Anthony Melchiorre, effectively making him Pecker’s boss. Pecker told me he was hoping to move up the management chain with Chatham, and that meant keeping in the good graces of Melchiorre, so it followed that if word got out that the Enquirer had spent $150,000 to silence a former Playboy centerfold on behalf of Donald Trump, Pecker’s boss would go berserk. Pecker could hide a small amount of money on his books, around $10,000, say, but a hundred and fifty thousand dollars was just too big to disguise or explain away. I sympathized, but told him that my hands were tied, and that was where the matter sat, a festering wound waiting to become infected.
In early October, I flew to London with Laura and two other couples who were also visiting their college kids studying abroad for a semester; Samantha had left the University of Pennsylvania to study at Queen Mary College. This was a real treat for our family, a chance to see Samantha thriving in a foreign country and to catch up with some folks we knew who lived in the United Kingdom, including former PM Tony Blair. Everything was going well, and I was relaxing and taking a break from the constant chaos of Trump’s campaign and business, when my phone rang in the middle of dinner, as it so often did.
It was Saturday night in London and I was in a noisy bistro with friends. I excused myself to find a quiet place to talk, retreating to a corner by the washrooms. Hope Hicks was on the line from New York and she gave me a download on the Access Hollywood tape and Trump being recorded boasting about grabbing women by the pussy and kissing them without their consent, advocating sexual assault as the entitled right of celebrities.
I could hear the panic in Hope’s voice. She was a nice kid, and a quick study, and she’d been an important part of the campaign, but that was what she was: a kid. Her low self-esteem had led her into an extramarital affair with Corey Lewandowski, of all losers, and she had a very poor appreciation of how to take the measure of people, especially men. In other words, she was way, way, way over her head in dealing with a scandal like this.
Me with Tony Blair. © 2020 Michael Cohen
My dinner party was now officially over and I had to dedicate myself to figuring out how to play this latest sex scandal, which had the appearance of killing Trump’s campaign as the Speaker of the House Paul Ryan denounced the Boss and the Republican mice started to run for the life boats on the rapidly sinking USS Trump.
The Access Hollywood tape had another ripple effect, suddenly potentially putting Stormy Daniels and her porn star story back in play. With Trump’s campaign teetering, the Stormy story became far more marketable, but also far more dangerous politically, or at least that was the calculation Daniels and her advisors apparently made. I discovered this as soon as I returned from London and I received another call from Pecker; it was like he and I were engaged in a parallel campaign, with the outcome of the 2016 election being decided in secret. That was really how it felt, on the inside: everything that I knew had to remain far from the public’s knowledge or Trump would lose in a landslide. This knowledge was a burden, in many ways, and I knew that the deceptions I was engaging in were designed to hide the true nature of Trump’s character, and some deeply buried part of my psyche had to be able to understand that I was doing truly undemocratic and dangerous and dirty deeds—but all I was focused on was accomplishing my goal: helping Trump to win the Presidency.
“We have a real problem,” Pecker said. “Stormy is back and with her manager Gina Rodriguez. She’s out shopping the story.”
“What story?” I asked.
“C’mon,” Pecker said. “The sexual encounter in Utah.”
“But I thought that was already dealt with,” I said. “I have a statement in my files with her denying the allegation.”
“This is me you’re talking to,” Pecker said. “Knowing you have this denial, she took a polygraph and guess what—the test said she’s telling the truth.”
Pecker told me he was sending Dylan Howard to LA that day to review the polygraph and begin talks with Daniels’s representatives.
“Of course she will bring this up now,” I said. “Its value only exists until the election because there’s no way the Boss beats the Clinton machine.”
Pecker agreed, I knew, and so did Trump.
“Remind me of the name of the Los Angeles lawyer again,” I said. “Keith?”
“Davidson. You should call him right away.”
I hunted in my Outlook Express for his contact information while we were speaking. I told Pecker I’d call him back as soo
n as I spoke to Davidson, dialing as I hung up, and getting an answer right away; like any good fixer dealing in the world as he and I did, Keith was very attentive to his cell phone.
“Keith, it’s Michael Cohen from Trump,” I said. “I hear your client and her manager are out shopping the 2011 story. Are you aware of this?”
“I am,” Davidson said. “Look, she needs the money and Gina convinced her that the story is worth some money. To prove her case, she took a lie-detector test. That’s part of what she’s selling. ABC TV is interested.”
I was trying to calculate my next move when Davidson offered a suggestion.
“What I think you should do is buy the story,” he said. “We can write up an NDA together and stop the story again.”
“How much is she looking for?” I asked. “I will need to discuss this with Mr. Trump before agreeing to anything.”
“Let me go speak to her and get back to you with a number,” Davidson said. “I’m sorry, Michael, I thought this matter was killed.”
“But obviously since he’s the nominee, the story can be exploited,” I said.
As soon as we hung up, I raced to Trump’s office, a pit forming in my stomach. The room was filled with political operatives, along with executives from the business side of Trump Org, the atmosphere like a bazaar, with people shoving and pushing to get the Boss’s attention.
Trump saw me peering in through the crowd, and he called out.
“Hey, Michael, what’s up?”
“Need to talk to you, sir,” I replied. “But privately.”
“Is thirty minutes from now okay?” he asked.
“Yes, of course. I need five minutes, max.”
Hope Hicks consulted Trump’s schedule, reminding him of interview commitments, and the chaos rose back to a roar, so I departed to tell his assistant Rhona Graff that I needed five minutes of Trump’s time. She sighed and said she’d long since lost control of his schedule; it was like Grand Central Station at rush hour in his office. She suggested I just come back in half an hour and kick everyone out of Trump’s office, as I’d done in the past.
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