Seated dead center in the auditorium, front row in the audience as the contestants rehearsed their choreographed dance sequence, Trump was rapt, as he leaned over and whispered to me.
“Holy shit, look at Miss Brazil,” Trump said. “She’s fucking gorgeous. Look at that face and body. Man, I would like a piece of that.”
“She’s definitely gorgeous,” I replied, scanning the stage filled with beauties in bathing suits.
“Which one do you like?” Trump asked.
“Miss Germany,” I said. “She’s the full complete package. Beautiful, and man, can she dance. She’s definitely professionally trained.”
“Shit, you’re right,” Trump said. “Good call. I wonder what your parents would say if you brought her home?”
This was Trump’s idea of humor, because my father was a survivor of the Holocaust and she was German. Get it? Ha, ha. Silence from me again, as Trump continued to inventory the merchandise on display as we watched the women. After an hour, he stood and announced that he was going to go on stage to greet the contestants. It was amazing to see how these young beautiful women from all over the globe blushed and giggled in the presence of Donald Trump; his power and charisma were undeniable. He took photos with the beauty queens as they clapped in excitement at getting a picture with a reality TV star and proprietor of the pageant. Then Trump called out for me and the others in his entourage to join him on stage.
“Girls, these are my executives,” Trump said. “This is Michael, my killer lawyer. But sorry, girls, he’s happily married, so he’s out of bounds.”
The women laughed, and so did I.
Back at the hotel, in the restaurant named DJT in honor of his initials, Trump was ebullient about the pageant that night.
“After the show, we have an after-party,” Trump said to me. “It’s crazy. I want you to bring the girls by to see me, especially Miss Germany and Miss Brazil.”
“Of course, Boss,” I said. “That’s easy. They love you.”
With Trump, flattery gets you everywhere.
“Did you see their faces when I took the pictures?” he asked. “One of them was rubbing my back and squeezing into me. You know I can have any of them, if I want. In fact, I could have all of them.”
“I’m sure,” I replied. “I’m sure you can, Boss.”
Miss USA, Olivia Culpo, won that year, not his favorites from Brazil and Germany, but that didn’t impact Trump’s mood at the after party. The arrangements for the event at a club in the hotel followed the usual pattern. The place was throbbing with music and sex as scores of beautiful young women danced and drank champagne and oversexed middle-aged men tried to catch their eye. There was a cordoned off VIP section, where I sat, and inside that there was another, even more private area, also marked by a red velvet rope, guarded by Trump’s bodyguard Keith Schiller and reserved for the Boss alone. As instructed, I delivered Miss Brazil and Germany’s Alicia Endemann to Trump’s lair, where I was thanked and dismissed. That was how things worked with Trump. I knew that there was a real likelihood that he would at least try to hook up with one of the beauty contestants, and I knew there was a decent chance he would succeed, but, as with his shady business dealings and dirty deeds, he had a preternatural way of hiding the truth of his activities. Plausible deniability wasn’t just a strategy for Trump—it was his way of life.
Trump and me with Miss Germany. © 2020 Michael Cohen
I should stop here to comment on the common perception of Trump as a sleazy womanizer, constantly having sex with strangers as some kind of sex addict. That wasn’t how the Boss operated, no matter the popular view he encouraged. As you will see in the pages to come, Trump did have affairs with people like a porn star and a former Playboy centerfold, and I was assigned the task of hiding those trysts from his wife and the public. But he wasn’t a lothario and many, many women weren’t attracted to him at all—in fact, in my experience, the most attractive and intelligent women were often both repulsed and, in a strange way, pulled towards his money and power and prestige.
When he told Billy Bush that he would grab women by their genitals, I have no doubt he literally meant what he said—that was always true of Trump—but I never saw him do such an awful thing. I did see him corner pretty women in his office and forcibly kiss them as they recoiled; he would grab the women by their cheeks and pull them towards him and kiss them plum on their lips.
In 2013, the Miss Universe pageant was to be held in Moscow, it was announced in Vegas, and thus began the sequence of events that would unravel in front of the nation over the years to come. I was there at the very beginning, and I was at the heart of the unfolding events all along, so I know the central role played by Aras and Emin Agalarov, a Russian father-and-son team. The Agalarovs were classic Russian billionaires: connected to Putin, and self-evidently able to get things done in the former Soviet Union, qualities that mattered greatly to Trump. For decades, Trump had been chasing his personal great white whale—a Trump hotel in the center of Moscow—with no success until an initiative was begun in the months leading up to the 2016 election, a potential deal that I was in charge of and that would cause a nation-shattering controversy—but that was still years away.
In June of 2013, Trump and I traveled to Las Vegas together once more to meet again with the Agalarovs for that year’s Miss USA pageant and the release party of the pop star Emin’s new single, the two events tied together for the promotion, with Trump appearing as himself in the video for the song. The Agalarovs were part of the promotion for the 2013 Moscow Miss Universe pageant—yes, the pee tape party, as you’ll see.
Trump at the Miss USA Pageant with business associates. © 2020 Michael Cohen
Checking into the Vegas Trump Tower, I was summoned up to his suite to discuss the day’s events. Trump was in his underwear, white Hanes briefs, and a white short-sleeve undershirt, watching cable news on television. He barely seemed to register that it was unusual for a grown man to be in a state of undress in front of an employee, but there it was. On this occasion, Trump was fresh from the shower and he hadn’t done his hair yet, as it was still air-drying. When his hair wasn’t done, his strands of dyed-golden hair reached below his shoulders along the right side of his head and on his back, like a balding Allman Brother or strung out old ’60s hippie.
I called his plane Hair Force One, for good reason. Trump doesn’t have a simple combover, as it would appear. The operation was much more involved than a simple throw-over of what was left of his hair: the three-step procedure required a flop up of the hair from the back of his head, followed by the flip of the resulting overhang on his face back on his pate, and then the flap of his combover on the right side, providing three layers of thinly disguised balding-male insecurity. The concoction was held in place by a fog of TREsemme TRES Two, not a high-end salon product. Flip, flop, flap, and there was the most famous combover in the world.
The real reason for the extravagant and obvious overcompensation for his baldness was vanity, and the desire to appear younger and more vigorous than he was. But there was another unknown reason: he was hiding unsightly scars on his scalp from a failed hair-implant operation in the 1980s. That was the disfiguring operation that resulted in his furious “emotional rape” of his first wife Ivana, as she documented in a lawsuit in the early ’90s; like Samson, Trump believed his virility and image were harmed if he was seen to be losing his hair, or, even worse, injuring himself in an attempt to disguise male-pattern balding. If Trump let strangers see the red sores on his scalp, he would appear to be vulnerable, even pitiable, not the unstoppable sex-god alpha-male billionaire he wanted to present to the world—and himself.
With Trump ready for the night’s festivities in Vegas, we made our way to the party 2012 Miss Universe winner Olivia Culpo was hosting to celebrate the release of Emin’s latest single, and then we all went to dinner. This was followed by an after-party at a nightclub
in the Palazzo known as The Act. The location for the party was selected by the Russian oligarchs the Agalarovs, an opportunity for them to show us the kind of entertainment they found amusing or arousing. Lavish debauchery was the promise of the Vegas club, which was part of chain of strip joints known as the Box that aimed to push the boundaries of decency to the breaking point and beyond. At The Act, that meant the appearance on stage of sex dolls, dildos, strap-on penises, strippers pretending to snort coke, pretending to actually take a crap on the stage—the place was truly lewd and disgusting and infantile. In a skit called “Hot for the Teacher,” a man dressed as a college lecturer wrote filthy titles for his forthcoming classes on a blackboard while strippers dressed as coeds took off their clothes and stood over him, pretending to urinate. Another jewel of an act at The Act involved two strippers drinking champagne and pretending to snort coke as they undressed, while one of them simulated giving the other a golden shower as the other caught the fake urine and drank it.
Classy stuff. I have no idea what might have happened with the Boss the following year in Russia, when the Miss Universe pageant was held in Moscow, and according to the Steele Dossier, Trump allegedly had a group of prostitutes urinate on the bed in his hotel suite as a kind of symbolic insult to the Obamas, who had previously slept in that bed. I had my nephew’s bar mitzvah in Florida to attend that week, and so I was spared the delights of the louche Moscow nights hanging out with the Agalarovs. But I do know that the decision to go to The Act in Vegas in 2012 was made by the Agalarovs and the Russian men certainly seemed hugely entertained in a venue that boasted golden showers and fairly bristled with the energy of sex for sale. They were the same men who hosted Trump in Moscow in 2013, so it doesn’t seem entirely impossible that the amusements of a golden shower were again part of the Boss’s festivities. Trump’s hatred for Obama was on a level that might provoke some sort of perverse and perverted ritualistic humiliation in a hotel suite. Like the Faux-Bama he hired to express his hatred and contempt for Obama in symbolic ways, I can attest that he was entirely capable of being entertained by such an act, even if he is a germaphobe, as he claims to be. However, this claim never occurred, to the best of my knowledge and investigations, and as verified to me by the Boss’s longtime head of security and attaché, Keith Schiller.
In Vegas, our gang was like a frat-bro party that night, charged with testosterone and aiming to live out the cliché: what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Jostling through the drunken late-night crowd at The Act, we were shown to the VIP section by security, as always, stationed front and center of the stage to fully appreciate the club’s offerings. The atmosphere was electric as the club goers pointed and stared and took out their phones to take pictures of the celebrity Donald Trump in their midst, the kind of improbable turn of events that Vegas specializes in. The lights were dimmed and a short middle-aged white man came on stage wearing a gold jumpsuit. As the stage lights came up, it was revealed that he appeared to be handicapped; he seemed to be blind, and one of his arms was malformed and his hands appeared the size of a four-year-old boy’s. But that wasn’t what stood out. The bulge in his pants was, well, enormous, like he’d stuffed his groin with tube socks.
I was sitting next to Trump when he turned to me and the Agalarovs and said, “Now that guy is packing a missile.”
Then a female emerged on stage. She was heavily overweight, perhaps 300 pounds, bleached blonde and wearing a postage stamp-sized American flag bikini. She started to do cartwheels across the stage, landing the routine in a full split at the center of the stage directly in front of the short man in the gold tracksuit. Within seconds, his pants were pulled off and he was wearing what is known in porn circles as a “cock sock.” Yeah, I know: not exactly the Lincoln vs. Douglas debates.
As I watched in amazement, things took an even weirder turn. The man in the gold tracksuit began to sing into a microphone. The tune he belted out was God Bless America. As he sang the famous paean to national pride and fealty, in a voice that sounded like a professional opera singer, Trump’s face was rapt in delight.
“Holy shit,” Trump said to me. “This freak can really sing.”
The woman in the bikini began to grind on the man’s outsized penis, stroking and caressing it, stimulating a giant erection as the obese stripper acted like they were having sex on the stage.
“Holy shit,” Trump said again, in disbelief and delight.
The room was now pounding with laughter and astonishment, the atmosphere rip-roaring and rudely raw. No one was going more wild than the men in our cordoned-off VIP section, with Trump and the Agalarovs and others in our Hangover-like posse howling as the lights came up and we all looked around in disbelief: did we just see what we think we saw?
“That’s one hell of a way to make a buck,” Trump declared to all.
The Act’s Facebook page reported on Trump’s attendance the next day, a fact that no reporter has ever discovered, to my amazement: “Even Mr. YOU’RE FIRED got caught in the Act,” the post on Facebook said, with a photograph of Trump at the club.
“Did the pissing into wine glasses duo perform that night?” a poster on Facebook asked in the same post. The golden shower pair had performed, The Act’s Facebook page confirmed, though I didn’t catch that part of the show.
While this event has remained unknown, I was there and can tell you that Trump loved that night at The Act: there was an essential boyishness to his attitudes about sex and pornography and places like that night club. His followers imagine this to be part of his willingness to be politically incorrect, but there was something far more licentious and lurid about Trump’s attitudes about women. His attitudes came from a different era, more like the Rat Pack of the 1950s, and he never took seriously the need to respect women. If he ever got caught cheating and Melania threatened to leave him, Trump told me, he wouldn’t be upset or hurt at the loss, and I suspect she knew it. The relationship was just another deal, plain and simple.
“I can always get another wife,” Trump told me. “That’s no problem for me, if she wants to go, so be it.”
Trump’s grandiose sense of self-importance, his need for constant praise, his exploitation of others without guilt or shame was the classic definition of a narcissistic sociopath. One morning a friend called me with a joke that I found very funny. Later I was in Trump’s office and decided to try it out on the Boss and gauge his reaction. The joke went as follows:
“Donald Trump is coming down the elevator from the 26th floor. It stops on the 20th floor and in enters a gorgeous buxom blond in a miniskirt. She takes one look at him and squeals, ‘Oh my G-d. You’re Donald Trump.’ Trump nods his head. She continues: ‘I have this recurring dream where I’m alone in an elevator with you and I pull off your pants and give you the greatest blow job of all time.” Trump says: ‘What’s in it for me?’”
After telling him the joke, the Boss asked: “Is that a real joke?”
“I didn’t make it up,” I replied.
“Write it up for me.”
I went back to my office, typed it up, made a few copies, and placed it on his desk.
Later that day when I went into his office, he was on the phone reading the joke to the person on the other end of the call.
As if he needed confirmation that other men were just as bad as he was, as he constantly projected his worst traits onto others, Trump often kidded me about fooling around on my wife. He wanted to know how often I cheated, and if I’d ever been caught, and all the lurid details. I always told him that I didn’t fool around on Laura, but he didn’t believe me; he would say I had to be lying because, of course, everyone cheats in his world.
It was around the time of the Vegas trip in the summer of 2012 that I took my wife, daughter Samantha, and son Jake to Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, for an afternoon playing tennis and hanging out by the pool. This was one of the perks of working for the Trump Organization: acce
ss to his clubs and restaurants and spas was complimentary for a senior executive like me. This was a really hot and sticky summer day, and I was standing with Trump outside the pool area, discussing some pressing business matter, like the size of the breasts of a woman sunbathing on a lounge chair, when he whistled and pointed in the direction of the tennis courts.
“Look at that piece of ass,” Trump said. “I would love some of that.”
I looked over and stopped cold. My fifteen-year-old daughter had just finished a tennis lesson with the club pro and she was walking off the court. She was wearing a white tennis skirt and a tank top, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail.
I turned to Trump, incredulous. “That’s my daughter,” I said.
Trump turned to me, now surprised. “That’s your daughter? When did she get so hot?”
I said nothing, thinking to myself, or I should say allowing myself to think: What a fucking creep. Who talks about a man’s daughter in that way? All of the countless times I’d gone along with Trump’s crude comments swirled around my mind.
Samantha waved and walked over, giving me a kiss.
“Give me a kiss, too,” Trump said, and she complied with a tiny peck, glancing in my direction with unease.
“When did you get such a beautiful figure?” Trump asked Samantha. “You’re really grown up.”
Samantha blushed and said nothing.
Trump offered me a bro-like bumped fist, which I reluctantly accepted, as usual, not knowing how to extricate myself from the situation and spare my sweet daughter any more of this unwanted and inappropriate attention.
“You better watch out because in a few years I’ll be dating one of your friends,” Trump said to her.
I’m sorry to report that Samantha was used to creepy rich men behaving in sketchy ways around her, but this was going too far. When we were alone, she told me with disgust that if you’re an attractive female the first thing Trump commented on was your appearance, as if he had the right to offer an opinion in your presence. Samantha said she was sick and tired of the way Trump demeaned and degraded me, as if he needed to keep me in my place. She wanted me to quit working for Trump because he was constantly doing things like threatening to cut my pay in half, as he actually did, or withhold my bonus or fire me. Our family had money independent of Trump, which he didn’t like, Samantha believed, because the Boss wanted me to be subservient to him in all ways, so when I bought a nice car or had a fun vacation Trump would use it as an excuse to ridicule me and make me feel small—again, as if an insignificant speck like me had no right to enjoy the good life he led. This was part of his cult-leader persona—his slow, incremental, relentless way of saying nasty things to me about my abilities and intelligence, things that weren’t true, until some part of me started to believe him.
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