Disloyal: A Memoir

by Michael Cohen

  Trump with Faux-Bama.© 2020 Michael Cohen

  Trump didn’t despise Obama. It was much, much stronger than that. I figured that Obama was the only person on the planet whom Trump actually envied—truly, madly, deeply. Air Force One, walking the carpet to deliver the State of the Union, the way Angela Merkel and other world leaders obviously admired and listened to Obama—it drove Trump out of his mind. Then came The Speech: Obama was invited to address the German nation in front of the Brandenburg Gate, in the same place as John F. Kennedy in the early ’60s, one of the indelible images of American history in the twentieth century. Trump went from incandescent to sputtering, spittle-flecked fury as he watched Obama talk about freedom and ridding the world of nuclear weapons and turning back the rising seas by fighting global warming.

  “You’ve got to admit he’s a great orator,” I said.

  “Fuck him,” Trump yelled at me, Obama on the screen before him calmly addressing untold millions of Germans thrilled to have a world leader ushering in the prospect of a twenty-first century where diversity and tolerance and peace and responsibility would become global aspirations, and maybe even realities.

  “He’s obviously very smart,” I said, knowing I was egging Trump on, but also honestly impressed by Obama’s speech and demeanor.

  “Obama is a fucking phony,” Trump screamed. “He’s a Manchurian Candidate. He’s not even fucking American. The only reason he got into fucking Harvard Law School and Columbia was fucking affirmative action. He could never get into those schools on his fucking grades. Fuck him.”

  * * *

  Here is the true story behind Trump’s first serious attempt to run for president and avenge the cosmic injustice that Barack Obama represented to him. In 2011, as always, part of my daily duties was to scour the newspapers for mentions of Trump, in large part to satiate his insatiable ego, and I undertook this responsibility with real pleasure and energy, especially hunting for signs that Trump’s political fortunes might be making news or causing speculation about the Boss running for higher office. The prospect of a Trump candidacy was being promoted by the ever-eager and ingratiating David Pecker in the National Enquirer, but there were very few signs that the mainstream media was taking the idea seriously.

  Then, in mid-April of 2011, Public Policy Polling released an opinion survey that stunned me as I read it sitting at my desk first thing in the morning. Barack Obama was up for reelection the following year and speculation was circulating about potential candidates for the Republican nomination. The obvious leading contenders were Mitt Romney and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, but both seemed like lame choices to me. I thought Trump could eat them for breakfast, if he really committed to the campaign.

  The Public Policy Poll that day had the amazing result that twenty-six percent of GOP primary voters said they would support Trump from among a slate of Republican candidates that included his name. I immediately grasped the implications as I clipped the story from the newspaper and readied it to bring it to the Boss’s attention the moment he arrived at work. I knew that Trump would want to discuss the poll, not just with me and his kids but with anyone who entered his office or spoke to him on the phone; when Trump was ego-surfing, no one was exempt from his need for praise and admiration.

  Trump arrived in the office soon after and I instantly walked the short distance to his office. I knocked on the door and entered.

  “Hey, Boss, you have to see this,” I said.

  I proudly handed him the clip and took a seat in my usual middle Egg chair.

  “No shit,” Trump said, scanning the article, his face forming into a priceless expression, partly amazement, partly delight, partly disbelief, but mostly a kind of transcendent vindication as if he’d known the truth all along. “Wow,” he said, reading on. “Michael, what do you make of this?”

  “It’s tremendous, Boss,” I said. “Twenty-six percent is unprecedented. You aren’t even a politician or even someone with political inclinations.”

  Trump finished the article and leaned back in his oversized, overstuffed burgundy executive chair, contemplating.

  “What do you think about doing it?” he asked.

  “Doing what?” I asked.

  “Let’s do it,” Trump said. “Shit, I’ve done everything else. Why not? I’m bored with buildings, golf, and television. Being president would be very cool.”

  Trump was now in a reverie, imagining the possibilities in a way I’d never seen before. His enthusiasm was infectious, and my mind was also racing as I imagined a real Trump campaign, with me as a central part of the operation.

  “Take a look at how to make this happen,” Trump said to me. “I’m serious. I want to do this. It’s perfect timing. I’ve got age, wealth, notoriety. I can do the job much better than Barack Hussein Obama, that’s for fucking sure. Michael, go figure this out. What’s the worst that happens? We lose? So what. This can be the greatest infomercial in the history of politics.”

  Trump smiled at the thought of the win-win proposition he uniquely possessed: the inevitable wall-to-wall ink and air time his candidacy would command would translate into one giant, free, ongoing advertisement. The logic was genius, he and I both knew, our grins spreading.

  “And the best result is that we win,” Trump said. “Now that would be something.”

  The “we” Trump was referring to was himself, of course, as he drifted into a reverie, his eyes taking on the thousand-yard-stare that I would see in action four years hence. I could see he was imagining walking into the White House, sitting down in the Oval Office, taking over as Commander in Chief.

  “I would have the Marine Corps band play Hail to the Chief every morning as I got out of bed,” Trump said.

  * * *

  How did Donald Trump come to command twenty-six percent of Republican voters in the spring of 2011? The short answer—the only honest response to that question—was one word: Birtherism. I know because I witnessed it unfold from the inside. As a way to test the waters, in the weeks before the poll, the Boss gave a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in February of 2011, and that was his coming-out party. In the address, Trump ticked off all of the conservative boxes: pro-gun, anti-abortion, low taxes, ready to wage a trade war with China, but his signature credential was his promise to make America great again. The room was packed for the speech as he received huge applause, and it was well-received in the right-leaning press, the media restless with an uninspiring list of candidates like Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich. Trump was a fresh face, a reality TV celebrity with a bombastic reputation. A matchup with his archnemesis Barack Obama would be epic, it was obvious, and killer for ratings.

  To liberals at the time, the idea of Trump running for president was literally a joke, and leading pollsters and pundits said so again and again in magazines like the Atlantic. But Trump was five steps ahead of the mainstream media, I knew, as the Trump Organization engaged with the producers of the forthcoming Comedy Central “Roast of Donald Trump.” The Boss had approval over all the jokes for the roast, and he didn’t really care how he was made fun of, with a few specific and very important provisos: no one was to mock his wealth, his various bankruptcies, or his hair; those subjects were strictly out of bounds, I knew, as I parsed the script on his behalf—and a script it was, with every joke vetted and requiring final approval by me.

  The Trump roast was the perfect vehicle for his campaign, a judo-like way for the Boss to both embrace and deflect the supposedly hilarious idea that he would become Commander in Chief. By sitting on a stage while he was being ridiculed, Trump would prove that he could take a joke, even if he very rarely laughed—in fact, he almost never laughed, unless it was at a crude sexual comment, or at someone else’s misfortune. After reviewing the proposed gags, I’d sit and watch him work over the material with his giant Sharpie, essentially dictating how the evening would play out.

&n
bsp; Trump had been roasted before, at the Friar’s Club in New York City in 2004, a comedy club I belonged to—but I didn’t attend that event. I knew there had been some great zingers at that roast. “The reason Trump puts his name on all his buildings is so the banks know which ones to take back,” said a comedian named Rich Vos. The comic Stewie Stone said he’d read Trump’s book on how to become a billionaire and he enjoyed it. “But if your father wasn’t one first, you’d be a waiter in this hotel,” he said. At the time, Trump was engaged to Melania Knauss, as she was then-known, prompting the President of NBC, Jeff Zucker, to apologize for not being able to make it to the wedding. “But I’ll catch the next one,” he said.

  Comedy Central aired the Trump roast on March 8, 2011, with Trump entering on a gilded gold golf cart, and taking to the dais with a mostly B-List group of celebrities, including Snoop Dog, Larry King, and the usual comedians hired to skewer celebrities. Finding stars willing to participate had proven difficult, even among some of Trump’s supposed friends, like Mike Tyson and Don King; I guess they didn’t want to associate themselves with a man pushing a conspiracy theory about President Obama’s place of birth.

  The term Birtherism didn’t exist in the mainstream media in 2011—not until the Boss took it up. For years, conspiracy theorists had speculated about Obama’s birthplace, claiming it was Kenya, not Hawaii, despite the absence of evidence to support the allegation. The idea that the President of the United States wasn’t American was unprecedented, the kind of scurrilous insinuation that was transparently racist and nativist in nature.

  But Donald Trump recognized a great marketing opportunity when he saw one. I don’t know how he picked up on the idea, other than browsing in the press as he always did, but like an old-time carnival barker—really, like the greatest showman and promoter of all time, P. T. Barnum—Trump recognized the potential instinctively. No matter what anyone says, including Trump, I know for a fact that he didn’t care if the conspiracy theory was true or not. He didn’t care where Obama had been born, or the insult it was to the President and his family, let alone the crude racism lurking barely below the surface. What he cared about was identifying an issue that he could exploit to his advantage, no matter how divisive—in fact, the more divisive, the better, because it would arouse strong feelings for those who took his side.

  The same was true for Trump’s preposterous claim that he had seen Arabs in New Jersey celebrating on September 11, 2001, as the World Trade Centers collapsed after the terror attack masterminded by Osama Bin Laden. Trump didn’t see any such celebration, obviously, nor did such a ghoulish and disgusting spectacle ever occur, it goes without saying. But Trump had the innate ability to access the deepest prejudices and fears of people and exploit them for his benefit. He divided the world into Us vs. Them, mainlining the most emotional and irrational impulses of the masses, with Arabs and Syrian refugees and the slaughter of the Kurds. He abandoned the truth in favor of falsehoods—which he knew perfectly well were false—in exchange for news-cycle soundbites, and the media has fallen for it over and over and over, to this day and beyond.

  Birtherism was one of Trump’s most successful early Big Lie gambits. The pattern I had witnessed so many times began to emerge, as his mind quickly traveled from naked and shameless exploitation of the birther conspiracy theory to the conviction that it was true. If Trump wanted to believe something because it served his purposes, he decided to begin to believe, a leap of the imagination that was effortless to him, even second nature. What started as a ratings extravaganza morphed into self-delusion before my eyes. The first step along the path was accumulating positive reinforcement, and Trump accomplished this by calling in executives and friends and asking them a simple question: You don’t think Barack Hussein Obama was born in America, do you? It was obvious from the way Trump asked the question what answer he wanted, and I was stunned to see how many people were willing to feed into the Boss’s personal animosity for Obama.

  To spread his new marketing ploy, Trump appeared on Good Morning America in March of 2011, and that was when his name really entered the national conversation about the presidency. He said he was skeptical about Obama’s citizenship and birthplace, hence legitimacy as president, and they gave him the air time to spread that nastiness. Even better: for free. This was quickly followed by appearances on The View and CNN Newsroom, and then in April on NBC. The polls started to register Trump as a potential candidate and I started to clip newspaper stories to show him, culminating in the Public Policy result with the Boss at twenty-six percent.

  But that wasn’t all there was to it. As events moved along, the story Trump was pushing took on another dimension: Not only was Obama not American, he wasn’t even Christian, the Boss told me. By then, Trump was reading what he called the “populist” publications, like Breitbart and World News, every day, as he lectured me about the truth of world affairs, the tales getting taller all the time.

  “Do you think Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii?” Trump asked me one day that spring. “Bullshit. There is no record of his birth in a Hawaiian hospital. You know he’s not even fucking Christian. He’s a Muslim. He admitted it.”

  I was sitting in my red Egg chair when Trump handed me a document purporting to be from the Harvard Law Review stating in a biography that he had been born in Kenya.

  “I can’t explain why the bio states that,” I said. “But I’m certain he was born in Hawaii. There is no way the Clinton machine would not have uncovered that if it was true because—”

  Trump interrupted me mid-sentence. “Bullshit,” he said. “He’s a fraud. He’s a Manchurian Candidate. You’ll see.”

  “Well, if you’re right, that would create the most difficult situation in American history,” I replied. “Every bill passed and signed by him would have to be repealed as invalid and unlawful. It would be a complete clusterfuck.”

  As he listened, Trump’s eyes lit up: he’d come up with an idea. He looked at me with glee as he picked up the phone and dialed one of his favorite reporters. I knew he was going to drop a headline-making bombshell and the gullible reporter would have no clue that he or she was being played. This is a little-appreciated fact about his path to power. He screams about fake news and reporters being the enemies of the people, like a tin-pot dictator, but the truth was that the media’s psychotic fascination with Trump was one of the biggest—maybe the biggest—cause for his rise to power.

  “I have a team of investigators in Hawaii and elsewhere obtaining proof of Obama’s birth in Kenya,” Trump told the reporter from the National Enquirer.

  The journalist was like a moth to the flame—and I knew what that felt like. The conversation was on speakerphone, so I heard him beg for more sensational leads, all the better to please his boss at the National Enquirer, David Pecker.

  “Tell me more,” the reporter said. “What agency are you using? What have they found? Are they in Hawaii and Kenya? What can you share?”

  “Nothing yet,” Trump said. “But soon I will make a major announcement of the findings and, trust me, you will be shocked.”

  “Can I get an exclusive on this when you’re ready?” the reporter asked.

  “Sure,” Trump said. “You have been good to me. Just keep reporting that way and I will give it to you.”

  Trump hung up.

  “We don’t have anyone in Hawaii that I know of,” I said. “Do you want me to put someone on that?”

  “No,” Trump replied. “Who fucking cares? Wait until the headlines come out. This story is going to be huuuuuge!”

  He then gave me an earnest stare and exhorted me to handle the press with caution. I was his partner in crime, metaphorically speaking, and he wanted to ensure that I understood what to do next. The question of whether I would knowingly participate in a lie and a fraud had long ago been asked and answered; this was what Trump meant by loyalty, and what is still playing out nightly on the news as th
e Vice President and cabinet members repeat things that they know not to be true.

  “Make sure that you stay on message when we get calls from other media outlets,” Trump said. “We have a team of people in Hawaii and soon Trump will be making a statement on the results. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  Within days, my phone was lit up with calls from The New York Times, Washington Post, the networks, Fox, CNN, you name it, all the free publicity we wanted, courtesy of the free press. The reporters begged me for a scoop, no matter how small, a way to advance the story even an inch, to own a tiny piece of the news cycle. On background, they pled, off the record, off-off the record, please tell me more, anything at all, please, please, please . . .

  As instructed by the Boss, I replied as I’d been told to: Mr. Trump will release the findings from his investigative team very soon.

  The headlines were soon bannered across the nation, along with op-eds condemning Trump’s allegations—just more publicity, as far as the Boss was concerned. Why did I go along with this ridiculous and racist attack? Why did the press? The truth was that I didn’t just passively not protest Trump’s transparently false accusations against Obama; I actively, rabidly, incessantly, insistently repeated the lies and innuendo, knowing in my heart that it was wrong—but unable to stop myself. I know that’s not much of an explanation. I know it sounds like a cop out, and hardly the most likable trait a man might offer in his defense. But that is what it feels like to lose control of your mind—you actually give up your common sense, sense of decency, sensitivity, even your grip on reality. It was like having a mental illness: the reality was hard for outsiders to grasp, in all of its dimensions. The fact that I’d departed from reality, in my desire to please the Boss, meant that I really and truly had actually taken leave of my senses.