Lewandowski hated the back and forth. He was a newcomer and an outsider and he resented the joking around.
“No elephants,” he yelled. “No circus. This is a presidential campaign launch.”
“Take it easy, tough guy,” I told him. “It’s a fucking joke. But if we do bring in elephants, and one takes a dump, it’s your job to clean it up.”
“C’mon, let’s finish this,” Trump interjected. “Let’s do it as a regular event. Down in the atrium. That way people can line up around all the floors to get a view. I don’t want balloons. We’ll save those for when we win.”
Trump smiled. He was joking, sort of, or was he? I couldn’t tell for sure. But one thing was clear: Trump wanted a big crowd. He was focused on how the event was going to look. He wanted the lobby rocking when he emerged to make the announcement and it fell to the attorney David Schwartz and me to start working social media to attract as many people as possible. David and I had done events for Trump in the past, including a press conference we staged when the Boss had been trying to set up a catering hall at Jones Beach on Long Island in 2011. We’d gotten 500 people to attend that rally and you could see how thrilled Trump had been with the turnout. David had given a speech, or more like a screed—Trump called him “the Screamer”—and then the Boss had addressed the crowd. It was the first time he’d given a political speech to a large group of people and it was obvious that he’d absolutely loved it. It was that rally, in 2011, when I first glimpsed that element of the sheer talent he possessed—what the world was soon going to get to see for themselves.
To ensure there would be a great crowd, David hired a local acting agency for a few dozen extras at fifty bucks apiece to provide a guaranteed background of people wearing Trump-branded t-shirts. But the truth was that we didn’t have to worry about attendance. When word circulated in the media and online that Trump was going to announce, people started signing up and the Trump t-shirt served as a form of a ticket to enter the lobby.
On the day of days, June 16, 2015, there was a crowd lined up along Fifth Avenue. I stepped outside to take a picture and then I went up to the 26th floor to show Trump. He was delighted.
“Wow,” he said. “This is huge. I’m putting the finishing touches on my bullet points. This is going to be great.”
“It sure is, Boss,” I said. “I have Stephanopoulos with me, and a few other journalists. I’m going to head downstairs to do one last run-through to make sure everything is perfect. I’ll schmooze the press so they write about the size and enthusiasm of the crowd.”
On the ground floor, the atrium was now packed and getting tighter by the minute. We’d placed people at different points around the lobby to hand out Trump placards and Trump t-shirts and other promotional materials we’d cooked up. I could tell it was going to be a shit show, for sure, which was what the Boss wanted: something big and unpredictable and sensational, like him, I thought, as I double-checked the microphones and made sure the cameras were all in place for the announcement. David Schwartz was circulating, urging on the excitement, telling them it was only ten more minutes.
“Let’s hear it when the elevator doors open,” Schwartz implored the crowd.
Finally, I took another photo of the now thronging crowd and took the elevator up to see Trump one last time. I told him I’d made sure the mics were working and I showed him the photo. He grinned.
“It’s show time,” Trump said. “See you down there in ten minutes.”
Downstairs, I made sure that the path from the elevator to the escalator was roped off and protected by security. We’d used the grand entrance down the escalator for press conferences in the past. The sight of Trump descending slowly, magisterially, like some kind of lord from on high, gave the scene the kind of dramatic flourish that he relished. Trump would look sternly forward, offering a thumbs up.
Then it happened: down the escalator came Trump and Melania, both tanning-booth bronzed, the Boss giving the crowd the thumbs up, the stereo cranking Neil Young’s “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World,” an admittedly unlikely use of the Canadian-born singer’s ironic tribute to the excesses of capitalism—a nuance totally lost on Trump. I stood to one side with George Stephanopoulos, the former aide to President Clinton and an anchor at ABC News, in the VIP section outside the Trump Grill.
Trump stepped up on the makeshift stage we’d installed and he let rip in an hour-long tirade that was breathtaking in its lack of structure, compassion, or coherence. It was literally a rant, with frequent awkward silences in the press corps like they weren’t entirely sure if this was a publicity stunt, or if Trump was perhaps joking, or out of his mind. Trump was spewing things that I found repulsive. Mexicans were rapists, he said, even though there was a very nice Mexican man working in Trump Ice Cream on the other side of the atrium no doubt listening in horror.
Stephanopoulos turned to me, a look of disbelief in his eyes as Trump’s nativist and reactionary views spewed forth: Mexicans are bringing drugs and crime to America, the American Dream is over, promising to self-fund his campaign, boasting about his wealth of $8.7 billion, lying about the size of the crowd. Trump was pure id.
“Did he really just say that?” Stephanopoulos asked.
“Well, so much for this campaign,” Stephanopoulos sighed a minute later.
“Did he ever really want to win?” he asked.
“Why would he say something like that?” Stephanopoulos finally said in disbelief.
For an hour I listened as I cringed, inwardly, but swelled outwardly at the sight of the crowd listening to Trump with real admiration, it seemed to me. That nascent political talent I’d witnessed at Jones Beach five years earlier—the way he could command a crowd, the way he reveled in the sound of his own voice, the way he seemed to naturally inhabit a permanent moving bully pulpit—was emerging. I didn’t know the contours that would come forth in the months and years ahead, but I could see that he wasn’t just a force to be reckoned with—he was a force of nature.
Once again, I had reached a fork in the road, and instead of trying to reconcile my moral compass with what I was enabling in Trump, I chose to look away and just keep rolling on, as if I wasn’t actually making a choice. Trump was now a presidential candidate and I was in the middle of the action. I had a VIP section pass to the greatest political show of all time. Even if Trump didn’t win, I’d won already, just by the association and the intoxicating rush of being inside a campaign for the highest office on the planet.
“Well, that was unusual,” Stephanopoulos sighed as he departed and the exhausted crowd dissipated. “I’ll speak to you later.”
I went up to the 26th floor, to Trump’s office, now filled with supplicants praising him as he ego surfed and wallowed in the fawning admiration—most of it faked, I figured, because it seemed like any sentient being who lived in New York City in 2015 would know that what he was saying was beyond the pale. But this was the onset of a phenomenon that continues to this day. No one ever tells Trump the truth about his behavior and beliefs, or the consequences of his conduct and ignorance and arrogance, in business or in his personal life and now in politics. Trump truly is the boy in the bubble, impervious to the thoughts and feelings or others, entirely and utterly focused on his own desires and ambitions.
Trump spotted me across the room.
“Michael!” he called. “What a crowd! What did you think?”
“Unbelievable,” I said.
That was it: unbelievable. I didn’t mean it the way he took it, as praise and astonishment at his performance. I meant it literally: it was unbelievable that any candidate would say the things that Trump said that day. But please take note of how truly, unbelievably cowardly and hypocritical my response was. If I told Trump what I really thought, if I critiqued even one element of the rant, I would be banished forever, I knew. Trump was beyond enthused: he was ecstatic, like he had discovered a new drug, a new hig
h, an entirely new thrill that he hadn’t expected to feel as incredibly good as this did.
I could relate to Trump, as I was snorting from the same metaphorical mountain of cocaine, like Tony Montana in Scarface, stoned out of my mind on power.
When I got home, Samantha was furious. She knew I was friends with people from all walks of life, including different ethnicities and religions. She knew I knew better. She said that I was friends with lots of Muslims and Hispanics and there I was, cheering on a racist pig. How could I support Trump when he said such terrible things about Mexicans?
“This is going to be really bad,” she said.
“Your grandmother was born in Buenos Aires, for God’s sake,” my son Jake said.
“It was taken out of context,” I told them, as always, making excuses for Trump, excusing the inexcusable.
“He’s not qualified to be president,” Samantha said. “I’m a political science student and I know more about how the world works than he does. What does he know about the United Nations or NATO or nuclear weapons? Nothing is what he knows. I’m literally more qualified than him and I’m twenty-one-years old.”
“I’m not going to discuss this again,” I said, as our dispute escalated into a screaming argument that left us unable to talk to each other for two months. That was my mantra with Samantha and Jake when they begged me to stop working for Trump. They had made their views clear, but I needed to be able to do what I wanted without having to answer to my children. That’s what I told myself. I wasn’t going to be bossed around by anyone—except the Boss.
Imagine how it feels now to know my daughter and son weren’t only right about Trump—they were right about me. I knew better, but I went along with the madness, thinking Trump was my ticket to the White House, or at least the best shot I’d ever have.
The news that night was relentlessly negative. Trump was condemned as a joke and a racist bully. But I knew that something else had been unleashed at that press conference. Trump was channeling the resentment of people labeled as racist during the Obama years: white folks, conservative and Christian men and women who were sick of political correctness and tolerating illegal immigration and having to pretend that they believed things they simply didn’t believe. Trump was their champion. The undereducated, the reactionary, the people who believe abortion is murder—here was a blunt and fearless businessman calling bullshit on the American political order.
Globalization, climate change, gay marriage, the loss of American jobs to Third World countries, immigration, the central role of God—all of those with resentments and grievances had found their advocate.
Dangerous forces were let loose on the land that day, and I was there, not just complicit, but an active and cynical participant in the game of Russian roulette the United States of America was about to play.
* * *
The days following Trump’s inglorious announcement were frantic inside the Trump Organization. I figured the Boss was going to stage the shortest political campaign in history, as he would inevitably be forced to withdraw and retract his rabid anti-Hispanic comments. The Trump kids were beside themselves with worry about the damage their father’s tirade was doing to the brand and businesses. A significant part of the revenue of Trump’s various golf clubs and resorts came from corporate events and large companies, all of which were cancelling events at an alarming rate. Univision, the Spanish-language broadcasting network, had its headquarters next to the Doral in Miami, and it simply ceased using that facility and then cancelled the contract to air the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants.
“I’m going to have to sue Univision now,” Trump said in reply. “They’ll have to pay me a lot of money.”
Like he was the victim. These were the early signs of the power dementia that would come to consume Trump during the campaign and then further as president. It was like he couldn’t stop himself from going lower and lower, seeking to outrage more and more, the thrill of the spotlight bleaching out his few redeeming virtues. Like his attack on Univision’s highly respected reporter Jorge Ramos, who stood up at a press conference and asked Trump to address his racist remarks about Hispanics. Trump ignored Ramos, then ordered him to sit down, then barked that he should “go back to Univision,” then sicced his bodyguard Keith Schiller on him.
The older Trump kids were mortified, and horrified, but of course, as always, silent. Racist, reactionary, anti-Hispanic weren’t exactly the terms that Ivanka Trump wanted associated with her clothing line. But she wasn’t going to stand up to her father any more than her brothers were; fear radiated outward from Trump, but it also sent its radioactive waves inwardly into the family. Finally, in desperation, the three older kids came to my office on the 26th floor to ask me to talk to the Boss and convince him to drop out of the campaign before it totally destroyed the family’s reputation, name, and brand. Their social position and legacy were being flushed down the drain, they knew, but there was nothing they could do to stop their father. Ivanka led the charge.
“MC, you’ve got to get Dad to stop the campaign,” Ivanka said. “It’s killing the company.”
“If he keeps this up, you’ll be named the CEO of the Rump Organization,” Don Jr. said to me, only half joking. “We’re losing millions.”
The concern was evident, but I knew I couldn’t help. I truly felt for the kids, with their future lying in the balance. The stakes for me were much lower: I could just go work with Mark Cuban, or sell my taxi medallions and retire.
“This is your Dad’s company,” I said. “No one can change his mind on anything. I certainly don’t like his position on Hispanics, either, but what can be done?”
Calls of protest from Univision executives began to flow in to myself and Larry Glick, who ran the golf operation. Hispanic executives were dismayed and disgusted by Trump’s comments and his ongoing assaults on Jorge Ramos, which perfectly combined his disdain for the media and Spanish-speaking people. As it continued to get worse, I finally decided I really did need to talk to Trump and try to get him to ease up and not permanently and perhaps fatally harm his company over a candidacy that looked not just doomed but delusional.
“I don’t care,” Trump said, when I told him how concerned for the business his children were about all the cancellations. “Let them cancel the events. This is more important than all the events.”
I was stunned. Something was more important than money? Since when? Maybe he really was ready to make a commitment to running for president, regardless of the consequences?
“Plus, I will never get the Hispanic vote,” Trump said. “Like the blacks, they’re too stupid to vote for Trump. They’re not my people.”
Trying to figure a way to moderate Trump, I leapt at a call from Javier Palomarez, the head of the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, asking the Boss to attend a forthcoming town hall he was holding. I hoped that Javier would provide some cover for Trump as a way to disguise or at least muddy the waters around the Boss’s rampant anti-Hispanic and anti-immigrant language, as if it were a matter of public relations or a misunderstanding of some sort—not substance. This was another form of catch and twist I practiced, distorting Trump’s distortions so that common sense and basic perceptions like your eyes and ears couldn’t be trusted, a tactic that worked to a terrible extent, especially with those who enjoyed Trump’s nativism and privately agreed with his racism but needed a fig leaf to hide behind. It was in that spirit that I told Palomarez that I would talk to Trump about him attending a forum to discuss issues important to the Hispanic community.
“It’s a set up,” Trump told me when I raised the idea. “They will only attack me. Plus, no matter what I say, they’ll never vote for Trump.”
“I agree,” I toadied, if that’s a word. “But before you reject the forum, let me see if I can get Javier to come here to see you. One-on-one. If you win him over, his organization and coalition could be a big boost. H
e’s got a ton of members and they’re a huge voting bloc.”
“OK,” Trump huffed. “Do it and then we can decide.”
After a lot of convincing, Palomarez agreed to come to Trump Tower, but only if it was done privately, because his members were furious at Trump and he didn’t want to be seen as someone currying favor with the man engaged in an ongoing onslaught against Hispanics, the very people he was supposed to represent. The meeting would be strictly confidential, I reassured him, a sit down with only Trump and I in attendance and the conversation entirely off the record.
As soon as Palomarez walked into Trump’s office with a couple of colleagues, I could tell from the Boss’s face that he didn’t like the look of him. Palomarez had slicked-back grey hair and a tailored suit and he looked every bit the part of a talented and smooth salesman—a type Trump held in disdain. Rising from his desk and offering his hand, Trump disguised his disdain as he greeted Palomarez and the two other officials; I was the only other person present.
Trump with Palomarez. © 2020 Michael Cohen
The meeting began with Trump’s obligatory introductory lie. I’d told Trump a few small details about Palomarez and Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, but he’d done no preparation for the simple reason that he never prepares for anything, ever. Reading reports, taking briefings, seeking context and background for professional encounters—Trump does none of that, trusting that he can fake his way through life. More than that, he preferred to be ignorant, as it allowed him to rely on his gut instincts.
“So, Javier, tell me about your organization,” Trump said. “I hear unbelievable things about what you’ve built.”
Palomarez described his organization and all the town halls and rallies it staged, making it sound like a formidable political force with influence over millions of Hispanic voters. The endorsement of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce would be invaluable for any politician, he said, and many had sought his support over the years. They were holding a town hall in the coming weeks, he said, and he would like Trump to attend.
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