“The meeting is all set,” Don Jr. said.
“Okay, good, let me know,” Trump replied.
I didn’t think much of this exchange at the time.
As the world found out after the election, at the time, a Russian lawyer was offering “dirt” on Hillary Clinton to Jared, Don Jr., and the genius Paul Manafort, all courtesy of Trump’s golden shower nightclub buddy from Las Vegas and Moscow, Russian pop star and oligarch Emin Agalarov.
Chapter Fourteen
Hurricane Stormy (Part Two)
The late great crime writer Elmore Leonard, a personal favorite of mine, once advised aspiring writers to leave out the parts of a book that people tend to skip, so in that spirit I’m not going to recite each and every ridiculous story and headline that occurred during the 2016 cycle. I’ll spare you the grim details of all the people I screamed at, threatened, and lied to, but suffice it to say that I went on a tear during the election.
One of my central tasks was raising money for the campaign, and I was constantly working the phones on Trump’s behalf, raising millions upon millions. Another initiative I came up with was outreach to minority voters. Watching commentators on CNN casually call Trump a racist and a bigot and an Islamophobe wore out my last nerve, as I figured this political attack needed to be resisted. Trump was being pilloried in the press for his racist remarks about Hispanic people, and for good reason, but I knew that his message would resonate with voters who weren’t only white. The problem was figuring out how to go about the business of forming an organization. So I called my friend, the pastor Darrell Scott, a leading African American religious figure from Cleveland, Ohio I’d come to know, and explained that I wanted to create a coalition of minorities who support Trump, with Pastor Scott as the founder.
“Let me pray on it tonight,” Darrell said. “I’ll get back to you tomorrow.”
The next day I was at a baseball training facility in New York City, watching my son working with his hitting and pitching coach, when my phone rang. It was Darrell. He said he’d work with me to form a group dedicated to issues related to race and culture focused on Trump and the Republican Party, but he had one condition: the group had to be called the National Diversity Coalition, dropping the word minority.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because if I’m doing it, I want you with me,” he replied. “You’re white. You don’t fit under the definition of a minority.
“I’m a minority,” I said. “I’m Jewish.”
“That’s not going to work,” Darrell said. “If you’re in, I’m in.”
I was all in for Trump, and I eagerly set about proving the case that he wasn’t racist by finding folks from different racial and ethnic and religious groups to speak in his defense. This was the kind of soft power that I could wield for the Boss. As with evangelicals, the essence of the operation was to invert reality, to take an impious and vulgar man and make him appear god-fearing, and in turn magically transform Trump’s white nationalist impulses into the illusion of an open-minded and inclusive leader—putting lipstick on a racist, chauvinist pig would be another way to put it. The task wasn’t made easier by Trump’s incessant, impulsive, self-destructive habit of picking fights with folks like the parents of a Gold Star family whose deceased son happened to have been Muslim, enraging his mourning parents. It was a low that I figured had to be the nadir of the Boss’s rhetoric—but, of course, it wasn’t.
Sure enough, Hispanics, Muslims, African Americans, the calls started to come in from all corners of the country as Trump campaigned and his rallies grew in size and intensity—always with a few token minorities in the background as he spoke to avoid the KKK appearance lurking just below the surface. In this way, I turned obscure bloggers and social media posters into celebrities, as with the online sensations Diamond and Silk. That connection began when I put out my statement of apology to the Daily Beast reporter Tim Mak about my over the top Trump-like reaction to the Ivana rape story. Two black women had posted a video on YouTube defending me in the kindest possible way, I was told, and it was going viral. When I watched what they’d said, I immediately reached out and we had a long conversation about the Diversity Coalition. They sent me t-shirts with their faces on them, so I sent them a bunch of red MAGA hats, supposedly signed by Trump (his secretaries signed the vast majority on his behalf). I was soon helping them get booked on shows on Fox, which caught Trump’s attention when he saw them one evening.
“Holy shit, who are those two?” Trump asked me, so I told him the story.
Me with Diamond and Silk. © 2020 Michael Cohen
In the Alice in Wonderland upside-down world I was helping create, to my eternal shame, I once addressed a gathering at Darrell Scott’s New Spirit Revival Center in Cleveland, Ohio, in a way that captured how lost I had become in the will to power that went from a frenzy to outright insanity. “I’ve long lost track of how many times the disgusting liberal mainstream media have attempted to label Mr. Donald Trump as a racist, a xenophobe, and a bigot,” I told the congregation. “And let’s not forget sexist, narcissist, Islamophobic, anti-Hispanic, anti-Semitic, a demagogue, and countless others. It’s disgraceful.”
Me and Trump at the New Spirit Revival Center Gathering.© 2020 Michael Cohen
An ad for Trump’s appearance at the New Spirit Revival Center. © 2020 Michael Cohen
The mostly African Ameri-can crowd laughed in delight. At that moment, Trump was sitting on the dais behind me with more than a dozen pastors and political supporters, includ-ing Mike Pence and Michael Flynn, nodding his head and smirking and mouthing to others the words “he’s right, he’s right.” The Boss loved it when I got on my high horse on his behalf. The crowd was murmuring in delight and agreement, and I reveled in Trump’s approval as I gave sycophancy a new definition.
“As the son of a Holocaust survivor, it’s morally wrong to sit back and do nothing when someone you know, someone you hold in great esteem, and truly care about, is being so viciously attacked day in and day out. Not only is Donald Trump not a racist, he believes that all people are part of one race—the human race.”
Pass the Kool-Aid, right. But here’s the thing that I never hear mentioned, but is fundamental to understanding the cult thinking that envelopes Trump’s world: Jim Jones drank the Kool-Aid in Guyana too. Jones believed his own apocalyptic bullshit, just as Trump nodded in agreement and looked around for approval as I spoke that day in church; the reason cults exist is because the cult leader has manifested his own crazy way of seeing the world.
Jared Kushner personifies this illness. As the grandson of a Holocaust survivor who was forced to hide in the woods in the family’s village in Poland from the Nazis during the Second World War, he now stood silently to the side while Trump demeaned and dehumanized immigrants.
Remember when I said in the foreword that you’re not going to like me, or the things I did? Well, this is an example. I praised Trump in ways that I knew were not only untrue but downright dishonest, stooping so low as to invoke the plight of my own ancestors in Eastern Europe during the Second World War. Hard to think of a way I could have topped that particular load of horseshit, except to say that I actually believed myself at the time, at least on some level, as I willfully turned a blind eye to all the red-alert signals I had witnessed.
At the end of this event, there was the laying on of hands, wherein religious leaders surrounded Trump, closed their eyes and prayed for his victory, as they do so often these days. I participated in this charade, laying my hands on Trump as if he were some deity or demigod.
Bullshit, as Trump himself would say, but please understand that I was totally out of my mind and unable to have any perspective on what I was doing.
* * *
By the spring of 2016, the GOP campaign narrowed to Trump and Ted Cruz as the last candidates standing. It was then that I took yet another master lesson at the Trump Universit
y of sleaze and deception and participated in manufacturing what really amounted to actual fake news. Whatever else the National Enquirer was, it most definitely wasn’t a legitimate media outlet, as Trump well knew, despite his repeated claim that it should win the Pulitzer Prize for exposing the sexual escapades of then-candidate for president John Edwards in 2008. To call this hypocrisy doesn’t begin to describe how dishonest and disingenuous Trump’s statements really were. David Pecker wasn’t just a friend and supporter of Trump—he was a sycophant and supplicant and propagandist. Trump’s opponents have long obsessed about Russian interference in the 2016 election, while overlooking the incredible disinformation campaign run by Americans like Pecker, by far the more insidious and dangerous development of the last cycle—and the most threatening for 2020.
Consider the story about Ted Cruz’s father’s alleged involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. I know exactly how this story developed because I was present at the birth of the slander. The story begins with an email and call from Pecker in April of 2016. We were winning primary after primary by this time, and the last real threat to the Boss was the Texas Senator and his evangelical base. We needed a scandal of some sort to harm Cruz and help our candidate, and there was no question of scruples or truth or political norms when it came to the Trump campaign. In this, we truly did resemble the worst political extremists of the twentieth century; Trump warped reality to fit his needs with no remorse or conscience. That was the atmosphere at Trump headquarters the day I picked up the call from Pecker.
“We have a picture of Ted Cruz’s father with Lee Harvey Oswald,” Pecker said, with glee.
“What are you talking about?”
“Someone is trying to sell us a picture of Rafael Cruz in Dallas, Texas, on the day Kennedy was assassinated. He’s with Oswald.”
“Get the fuck out of here!” I exclaimed.
“Check your email,” Pecker said.
I opened my email and clicked on the attached PDF from Pecker, revealing a grainy photograph of two men. One was clearly Oswald, I could see, but the other face was less easy to identify.
“Do you know that’s Cruz’s father?” I asked.
“Does it matter?” Pecker said. “All we have to do is allege that it is.”
I shook my head in amazement, whistling as the possibilities and implications cascaded through my mind. This was like a neutron bomb, I thought, a thermonuclear explosion that would send wave after wave of toxic radiation into the primary season. How could the Cruz campaign counter such an allegation and dignify it with a response? Just engaging with the idea that his Cuban-born father was acquainted with Oswald was in itself very bad; the idea that he might have been a co-conspirator in the murder of one of America’s most beloved presidents was a blood libel of mindboggling audacity.
“Give me half an hour,” Pecker said. “I’ll do a mock-up of the story—how it will look.”
“Sounds good,” I said. “Let’s see what it looks like.”
The story was ridiculous, of course. But I knew the Boss would love it. The tale was right up his alley, the kind of scurrilous and unanswerable lie that would cast doubt on Cruz by association with his father, a Cuban who had been involved in fighting Fidel Castro’s revolution in the early ’60s. Just putting the words assassination and Cruz and Oswald and President Kennedy in the same sentence would cast doubt on the Texan’s family history. To say it would be a low blow would be an insult to low blows; can you think of another American politician, ever, who would stoop this low?
During the campaign, the Enquirer had tied hit pieces on Trump’s opponents to the polls, slamming every candidate that appeared to be rising and threatening the Boss. There was the “bungling surgeon” Ben Carson leaving a sponge inside the brain of a patient he’d operated on, or Marco Rubio’s “Cocaine Connection,” or Carly Fiorina’s “druggie daughter,” each article published to counter their momentum and suppress their poll numbers, with the so-called media outlet operating as an unpaid propaganda wing for Trump.
And here’s the thing: it worked. It really, really worked. The journalists at the Enquirer delighted in taking the worst rumors or bullshit conspiracy theories circulating online and turning them into ridiculous headlines sitting at the cash register of almost every grocery store in the country and seen by 100 million Americans—a formidable form of attack advertising for us. For free, of course, because that was what the free press was to Trump. The mainstream media would then write disapproving articles about the made-up story, but they’d always repeated the slander, providing yet more free press as the news cycle started to best resemble the eddy of a flushed toilet.
The Enquirer’s “Rubio takedown plan” document. © 2020 Michael Cohen
The most talented character assassin was a young Australian named Dylan Howard, and he and I talked regularly. Dylan would come up with crazy story lines, pulled directly out of his backside, so I figured he had a hand in this latest Cruz attack. He’d already been behind stories about Cruz’s alleged marital infidelity, with no proof whatsoever, and that seemed true for this new JFK gambit. In recent weeks, I learned, a website trafficking in conspiracy theories had floated the Cruz-Oswald connection, along with two blurry photographs, but it had largely gone unnoticed; Pecker, Howard, the Enquirer, Trump, and I were going to change that.
Within minutes another email hit my inbox and I clicked on the PDF attached and gasped in horror and delight. Pecker called as I stared at the mocked-up story, the layout, and the banner headline: Ted Cruz’s Dad Tied to JFK Murder Plot! There were quotes from a “court certified witness,” whatever that meant, and references to “secret US government files,” and the bald factual assertion that Cruz’s father had indeed been involved with Oswald at the time of the murder.
“This is amazing,” I said, as Pecker chuckled. “I’ve got to show the Boss. I’ll call you from his office in a minute.”
I printed a copy of the article and took it to Trump. He was on the phone with a reporter, so I listened quietly as he bad-mouthed Cruz and his wife, especially taking delight in comparing Cruz’s wife’s looks to Melania. Predictably, this form of juvenile competition caused a stir, with Trump haters aghast at yet another indication of his inability to behave in a way that was remotely presidential, while his supporters reveled in precisely that quality. Cruz was left sputtering in outrage, but the damage was done.
Trump was truly shameless in his verbal attacks on Cruz, alleging an impending divorce, along with substance abuse and financial wrongdoing. Whatever somebody thought of the unctuous Cruz, in Trump’s telling, he was an awful human being, and all good Christians should run a million miles away from him—which, of course, was Trump projecting his worst qualities onto Cruz, as he now does onto the world.
In recent weeks, Cruz’s Protestant preacher father had been getting under Trump’s skin in a way that was very effective, I thought, using his pulpit to exhort Christians to vote according to the word of God—and support his evangelical son.
“The alternative could be the destruction of America,” Pastor Cruz claimed, enraging Trump.
“I think it’s horrible,” Trump told the press in response. “I think it’s absolutely horrible that a man can go and do that, what he’s saying there.”
Walking into Trump’s office with my Enquirer mock up, I knew I was bearing Trump’s best chance for revenge, handing him the document and explaining that Pecker had just sent it to me.
“Jesus Christ, what is this?” Trump asked, looking at the blaring headline and blurred photograph.
“It’s Ted Cruz’s father with Lee Harvey Oswald,” I said.
“No shit?” Trump asked.
“On the day Kennedy was shot,” I said. “Having lunch.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Trump said. “It’s not real, right?”
I shrugged, grinning. “Looks real t
o me,” I said.
“Holy fuck,” Trump said, bursting out laughing. “Is David going to run this story? I’ve got to call him.”
“Of course he is,” I said.
“Story like this, it has to be the front page,” Trump said. “Holy fuck.”
Trump hollered to Rhona to get Pecker on the line and soon the three of us were laughing and joking about what a great story it was going to be. The Indiana primary was coming up in a couple of weeks for Cruz and we were excited to see how this latest piece of agitprop would play.
Then something strange happened. The story ran on the front page of the Enquirer, but no one picked it up. The tale was just too preposterous, it seemed, and maybe the mainstream media was wising up to the racket Trump was running with the connivance of Pecker (and me). We waited and waited. The Indiana primary was looming and the polls showed Cruz surging, a trend that unnerved Trump, as the Republican Party appeared to be reconsidering the headlong rush to nominate the Boss. Our strategy was coming from the same playbook as birtherism, only this time, it appeared not to be working; that would be good news for political discourse and the future of the country, but bad news for Trump, and I was keenly aware of which was more important for us.
Finally, fed up, Trump took to one of his other trusty lackey propaganda outlets, Fox and Friends. Appearing on the morning of May 3, the day of the vote in Indiana, Trump complained that the story about Cruz’s father wasn’t getting enough attention in the press. He said it was horrible that Cruz’s father had been with Oswald right before Kennedy’s death and he insisted that the fake news media should be covering what was actually fake news—how’s that for deception?
And it worked, like a charm, or a curse, with the story going viral, like a deadly poison injected into the body politic.
Disloyal Page 25