Samantha felt like I had Stockholm Syndrome, and I’m ashamed to say she was correct; she was fifteen years old and she saw Trump much more clearly than I could, which I was unable to grasp, let alone act upon. That was the sorry truth. I can admit I was being an idiot, but what is far more painful to know in hindsight is that my daughter thought I was an idiot. In so many ways I was a hero to her; I provided for everything she wanted in life, and I would do anything for her, but this blind spot made me impervious to her pleading with me to stop working for Trump. The same was true for my wife and son, and even my mother and father and in-laws. Recognizing that reality is one of the most humbling things I have been forced to admit to myself, and confess in public, a true measure of the destructive nature of Trump’s cult.
I told Laura what Trump had said and done to Samantha as soon as I saw her at the pool. She shook her head, more in sadness than shock, as it seemed like par for the course for Trump. Like Samantha and my son Jake, she wished I would leave the Trump Organization and do virtually anything else with my life. I was stunned by the crassness of Trump, at the same time as I knew it was all routine for him and he wouldn’t pause for a second to think he’d acted out of line or done anything wrong. The concept was foreign to him. To Trump the narcissist, if he did something, it was by definition fine by virtue of the fact that he’d done it, an insane version of papal infallibility that would be on full display when he ascended to the Presidency.
“That’s disgusting,” my wife Laura said to me as I said he’d asked Samantha for a kiss. “He’s disgusting.”
Chapter Ten
How to Fix a Poll
By the beginning of 2014, it was apparent that Trump was seriously considering running for President, to my delight. As we prepared to make the announcement—a process I helped manage with microscopic precision—we ran into a bump in the road. The premise of Trump’s candidacy would be that he was famous as a highly respected real estate developer and billionaire businessman. That was a central proposition, along with his celebrity and willingness to say and do things that were politically incorrect.
But at the time, CNBC was conducting an online poll to determine the twenty-five most influential business people alive to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the network. Trump was one of the two hundred businessmen listed as contenders. I learned about the poll when I received an email from the Boss’s assistant, Rhona Graff, telling the staff of the Trump Organization that the vote was being conducted and requesting everyone to click on the hyperlink and vote for Mr. Trump. In any other business this would seem like a joke, the kind of thing David Brent would do on The Office, with the egomaniac boss looking like the self-aggrandizing fool he was. In Trumpland, however, this was not only perfectly normal, it was standard operating procedure. The two prime and coequal imperatives of the company were to protect Trump, usually from himself, and to feed his insatiable ego.
The CNBC poll seemed almost designed to challenge the self-regard of American business leaders. The criteria were a direct appeal—or attack—on the image of the two hundred candidates nominated for the competition, a list that included well-known moguls like T. Boone Pickens and Oprah and Steve Jobs. “The person must have been more than a good CEO,” the rules said. “He/she should have altered business, commerce, management or human behavior—in other words, the person should be responsible for ushering in meaningful change, with business being the primary sphere of influence.”
The premise was irresistible to Trump: he would kill to win that competition, I knew the second I read about the poll. I immediately voted on my desktop, and then I voted again on my tablet, followed by votes registered from both of my cell phones, using four different IP addresses to disguise the multiple clicks. I figured if everyone in the company did the same thing, Trump would at least make the top ten. But when I looked at the results, with the running totals available online, I discovered Trump was near the bottom of the list—around 187 out of 200. Word around the office was that Trump wasn’t happy—“pissed” was the exact term—which was confirmed when one of his assistants brought a note from Trump to me. It was early in the morning, before most others had turned up for work, but Trump often woke before dawn, particularly if he was mad about something, as he frequently was. I was always an early bird myself, turning up before eight most mornings, our shared habit of waking early likely a function of our bond as teetotalers. The note consisted of a printout of the poll rankings, with the humiliating place Trump occupied highlighted by a black Sharpie circle, and in the margin in his distinctive, manic, all uppercase handwriting, “SEE ME ASAP.”
I entered Trump’s office carrying a notepad and pen.
“You want to see me, Boss?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “What can we do about this poll? I’m at the bottom of the fucking list. Check into this immediately and let me know.”
“Of course, Boss, I’m on it,” I said.
This was the kind of project Trump assigned to me. Trump didn’t say what he wanted me to do, because he didn’t have to: I knew immediately he wanted me to find a way to put the fix on the poll to increase his ranking. This wouldn’t involve attracting more voters, or trying to convince others that Trump fit the criteria, because the people answering the poll obviously didn’t think he was the best candidate; to the contrary, the vote made him look ridiculous. But Trump knew he could count on me to figure out a way to cheat—a reality I take no pride in admitting.
Back in my office, I called my friend John Gauger, the chief information officer at Liberty University. I’d met John in 2012 when Trump had been invited by Jerry Falwell Jr. to address the school, and I’d accompanied him to Virginia. John also had a side business called RedFinch Solutions LLC, which provided services for search engine optimization and Internet reputational management. John was younger than me, in his early thirties, and I knew from past experience that he was a flexible thinker when it came to issues like the one I was confronting on Trump’s behalf.
“Do me a favor,” I said, sending him a link to the CNBC site. “Check into this online poll for me. The Boss is unhappy with his current standing and I need to know if there is something we can do.”
Gauger asked for half an hour, promising he’d work on a solution. I went back to Trump’s office to give him an update, knowing that if something was eating at him—and the poll clearly was—he wanted to be constantly updated. I told him I had a technology consultant looking for solutions.
“Get it done,” he growled.
When Gauger called back he had a plan.
“Try to follow me on this,” Gauger said, rattling off a bunch of numbers and tech terms that made no sense to me.
“Stop,” I said. “Please, in English.”
“I can do this very easily,” John said. “The algorithmic code they’re using is very basic. My team and I have already cracked it. We can manipulate the voting by inserting IP addresses casting votes for Mr. Trump based on the overall number of total votes, so the votes aren’t visible. That way, we will be totally undetected while we move Mr. Trump higher in the rankings. But we need to buy IP addresses since we don’t own enough to make a dent in the rankings. At the same time, we’ll perfect the algorithm to ensure a seamless strategy.”
“How much does all that cost?” I asked.
“They aren’t expensive,” Gauger said. “It depends on how many we buy. Let’s purchase a hundred thousand and see how that moves the needle. It’ll cost $7,500.”
“Give me a few minutes and I’ll get back to you,” I said.
When I returned to Trump’s office it was evident that he had been impatiently waiting to hear from me. When he wanted something done, he wanted it done yesterday, I knew, and what could be more important than fostering his reputation as a transcendental business figure and tycoon?
“What do you have for me?” Trump asked.
“Good news,” I sa
id. “A friend of mine has already cracked the algorithm being used by the polling company. Now we need to insert votes favorable to you.”
“Really?” Trump asked. “Can we get caught?”
“Not according to my friend. What we need to do is purchase IP addresses. It’ll cost $7,500. We will need more but that will give us a gauge on getting the job done.”
“Wow,” Trump said. “Go do it. I want to be number one.”
“Boss, you don’t want to be number one,” I said. “That will potentially attract unwanted attention. Let’s go for, say number nine. Then you’re in the top ten.”
“Good,” Trump said, looking very pleased that he was going to be able to manipulate the poll.
All morning, I obsessively checked the poll results as Trump’s ranking began to rise. I was supposed to wait until three in the afternoon to check in with John Gauger, but I couldn’t stand the suspense as I watched Trump rise into the top thirty. I had other projects that I was working on—actual business matters that weren’t purely throwing red meat at the caged-tiger-like ego of Donald J. Trump—but when I went to see the Boss on an unrelated and actually consequential subject, I discovered that he too was fixated on the CNBC poll.
“How are we doing?” Trump asked, without having to specify what he meant.
“We’re at number twenty-nine and climbing,” I said. “I have a status call with my friend at three. I will update you then.”
“Man, your friend is great,” Trump said. “Who is he?”
“You don’t want to know,” I said. “It’s better that you don’t even know his name. Let’s just call it plausible deniability if something happens.”
“Something could happen?” Trump asked, now alarmed. “I thought you said it was undetectable.”
“It is,” I said. “But even if there’s a one percent chance that something happens, you are able to truthfully state that you don’t know who was involved.”
“Good,” said Trump. “But one day you’ll tell me who it is.”
“Sure, Boss,” I said.
When three rolled around, Trump was still gradually but inexorably rising in the rankings. I called Gauger excitedly.
“Holy shit,” I said. “Trump is at twenty.”
“It won’t be moving much more tonight,” he said. “We’ve been tracking the voting quantity over the day and it really slowed a lot, so we need to start again when the level of activity increases. We also need to buy more IP addresses so we have enough in reserve to make sure Mr. Trump gets to number nine.”
“Perfect,” I said. “Let’s talk tomorrow.”
The next morning, I was in Trump’s office by 8:30 talking to the Boss about nothing but the most pressing question of the day: his fake ranking. By then he had moved up to eighteen and the volume of the voting was increasing, exactly as Gauger had said.
“We need more IP addresses to get back in the game today,” I told Trump.
“Go do it,” Trump said. “Keep me informed.”
“I’m authorized for another $7,500?” I asked.
“Yes,” Trump said. “Just make sure I make it to the top ten.”
All that day, Gauger and his team of techies fed the fake IP “votes” into the poll, and all day, Trump continued his manufactured ranking rise. The poll closed at three that day, I knew, so I was constantly refreshing my search engine to monitor the results. Gauger had promised a top ten finish, predicting confidently the final result exactly at number nine.
As three o’clock neared, my intercom rang and I was summoned once more to see Trump.
“Do you know the poll closes at three today?” he asked, acting like he thought he knew something I didn’t.
“Yes, I do,” I said. “You are currently at number eleven. My friend has assured me that you will be number nine at closing time. He altered the algorithm and more votes will be cast for you.”
“Really great,” Trump said. “Good job . . . no, great job!”
When the poll closed, Trump was, as promised, number nine. I printed a copy of the poll and delivered it to Trump’s office. He was on the speakerphone when I entered, so he motioned me to sit. I dropped the poll on his desk and he smiled devilishly, with delight.
“Whoa,” he said to the person he was talking with on the phone. “I just got a CNBC poll that shows I’m the ninth-most-important businessman of the past twenty-five years. Not bad, huh?”
For the rest of the day the calls flooded in, praising Trump as he told everyone he talked to about his position in the polls. Like so much else with Trump, on one level he had to know the entire “accomplishment” was nothing more than a lie. He’d paid to push the poll, as any sane person would have appreciated, but Trump was unhinged in reveling in the ranking, as if it was a real achievement and a real reflection of his standing in the business community and with the general public. If Trump’s insistence weren’t such a dangerous delusion—if all of this rampaging egomania hadn’t come to have such dire consequences for the United States and the world—it would be funny. As people repeatedly told him that he deserved the recognition and that of course the result was predictable—“What would you expect,” was the sentiment, “you’re Donald Trump”—his grip on reality appeared to vanish. Before long, Trump believed he really was rated in the top ten and was regarded as a profoundly important business figure. I not only enabled that belief, I actively and eagerly participated in perpetrating the myth.
The feeling was euphoric—until the following day, when the bottom fell out of the scam. During the day, Trump discovered that CNBC claimed to have reserved the right to remove anyone they wanted from the list and that they had unilaterally removed his name from the list. The network didn’t say why—they didn’t have to, as written in very small print on the launch page of the poll.
Trump was incandescent. “What the hell!” he screamed at me. “Michael, I want you to call the president of CNBC and tell him we will sue them if they don’t restore me to my rightful slot!”
I duly did as instructed, leaving a long and very strongly worded message with the president of CNBC’s secretary explaining that I was Special Counsel and Executive Vice President to the Trump Organization and that legal action would be taken if the network didn’t immediately reverse their outrageous and unfounded and capricious decision. The voters had spoken, I told her in my blunt and harsh tone, and Donald Trump absolutely insisted that his right to retain his ranking was of paramount importance. The poor secretary took my dictation and promised my call would be returned, in due course. I walked thirty paces down the hall to Trump’s office and reported what I had done. By then, Trump was figuring out who else had been removed from the list and it appeared that T. Boone Pickens, the Texan magnate and a Trump acquaintance, had also been dropped. There was no indication why Pickens had been removed, but given the famously gargantuan ego of the oil tycoon and corporate raider, he was as infuriated as Trump. The only difference was that he had made the list, to the best of my knowledge, fair and square.
The email from T. Boone Pickens’s assistant to Rhona Graff. © 2020 Michael Cohen
Pickens sent an email to Rhona Graff, Trump’s assistant, suggesting the two businessmen talk, so Trump instructed me to call him about starting a lawsuit or issuing a press release. I soon had Pickens on the line, as he told me in his Texas drawl how outraged he was by CNBC’s high-handed attitude; we didn’t discuss the reason he’d been taken off the list. Like Trump, he was furious and insulted and he intended to do something about it, so I suggested I get Trump on the line. I patched Trump in and soon we were having a three-sided conversation bemoaning the terrible injustice of the poll. Both men praised the other, stoking and stroking each other’s egos, as they considered their options.
The call was certifiably insane, but I played along, offering my advice and counsel. A lawsuit would be expensive, it was agreed, without addin
g that the likely outcome would be the discovery of the fraud and the humiliation of their ego trips being exposed to the public. That was a story I knew my journalist connections would eat up; nothing was quite as exciting for the press as stories revealing the egomania of self-aggrandizing rich white men.
After the Pickens call, I was summoned to Trump’s office and instructed to call the reporters I knew to try to get them interested in a story about the terrible treatment Trump had received at the hands of CNBC. Trump wanted me to emphasize his ranking and make sure it was prominently discussed in any coverage.
“Do I discuss T. Boone Pickens as well?” I asked.
“No,” Trump said. “Make it about just me. He will do his own. He’s not my concern.”
I wasn’t surprised when there were no takers in the press. No one wanted to be treated like Trump’s PR flak, at least not in the legitimate press; corrupt tabloids like the National Enquirer or biased broadcasters like Fox were another story. The general counsel for CNBC eventually called me and pointed out that there was a disclaimer on the website of the poll explicitly providing that any candidate could be removed, without cause and for any reason. When I protested loudly, channeling Trump’s fury, the lawyer calmly said the Boss had been taken off the list and there would be no explanation given or apology forthcoming. It went without saying that the network might have figured out that Trump had cheated, and so I didn’t push the matter further. In the end, the poll came and went and barely registered in the public consciousness. The important thing, for Trump, was the printout he had of the poll showing him at number nine. He had hundreds of copies made and he added the poll to the pile of newspaper clippings and magazine profiles of himself on his desk that he would give to visitors. That was one of the supposedly big treats about gaining entry to Trump’s 26th floor office: a gift of a stack of stories about him, whether real or fantasy, with the lucky few getting a complimentary Trump Gold Chocolate Bar Bullion.
Disloyal: A Memoir Page 17