As has become a regular occurrence for ex-staffers of President Trump, Michael Cohen, the President’s former personal lawyer, has released an unflattering tell-all memoir about his time in Trump’s inner circle.
Cohen, who is serving the remainder of a three-year prison sentence under house arrest, was charged for lying to Congress about Trump’s business holdings in Russia, as well as for paying-off two porn stars who claimed they had affairs with Trump. Since his sentencing, Cohen has not held back in blasting Trump for racist, sexist, and corrupt behavior. After all, Cohen claims he had a front-row view of the President’s ugliest behavior, and that he knew Trump “better than even his family did.” The President, meanwhile, has shunned Cohen, insisting that he is and will forever be a “convicted liar.”
Still, Cohen regards his memoir as a testimony to the “real” Donald Trump, “in strip clubs, shady business meetings, and in the unguarded moments when he revealed who he really was: a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.” Fact or fiction, here are a few revelations from Cohen’s newly-released memoir, Disloyal.
Trump the Racist
Cohen alleges that Trump has a low opinion of all Black people, and doesn’t hold much more regard for Latinos. In fact, the lawyer writes in his memoir that Trump told him that Black and Latino Americans were “too stupid” to vote for him. Additionally, Cohen claims that Trump called any country run by a Black leader a “s**thole.” In another instance, after the death of South African President and human rights icon Nelson Mandela, Trump allegedly told Cohen that Apartheid-era South Africa was “beautiful,” but Mandela had “f**ked the whole country up.”
Trump the Authoritarian
Cohen dives deep into Trump’s fascination with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The lawyer claims that Trump idolizes Putin for his vast personal wealth, as well as his tight control over his country’s government. “An entire society and civilization bent to the will of a single man was how Trump viewed the ideal historical form of government,” Cohen writes. “With him as the man in charge, of course.”
Stormy Daniels
Cohen confirms that he personally paid ex-porn star Stormy Daniels for her silence about a bygone affair she had with a pre-political Donald Trump. But Cohen only paid out of his own pocket at Trump’s behest. Subsequently, Trump paid Cohen back through monthly payments masked as “legal fees.”
Cohen claims that Trump was eager to put the story to bed, even though he was not embarrassed of having slept with an adult entertainer. “It never pays to settle these things,” Trump allegedly told Cohen. “But many, many friends have advised me to pay. If it comes out, I’m not sure how it would play with my supporters. But I bet they’d think it’s cool that I slept with a porn star.” In the end, however, Cohen went to prison for making the payment, while Trump got to be President.
“Faux-Bama“
Cohen writes that he really “started to witness the increasingly reactionary and unhinged Archie Bunker racism that defined Trump” during the presidency of Barack Obama. He says that Trump had a venomous “hatred and contempt for Barack Hussein Obama—always all three names and always with a disdainful emphasis on the middle.”
With photographic evidence, Cohen claims that Trump hired a Barack Obama lookalike in 2016 to engage in a role-playing activity wherein Trump “fired” Obama a la The Apprentice.
“We even hired a Faux-Bama, or fake Obama, to record a video where Trump ritualistically belittled the first black president and then fired him,” Cohen wrote. He deemed the activity “a kind of fantasy fulfillment that it was hard to imagine any adult would spend serious money living out.”