Cohen Disloyal Quotes

I know where the skeletons are buried because I was the one who buried them.

Trump would say so many things that were illogical or just plain bullshit, as we consciously would know, but we would stay on his message, even though we knew it was nonsense. We would repeat what he said, as if it were true, and then we’d repeat the message to one another so often that we would actually begin to believe the distortions ourselves.

From golden showers in a sex club in Vegas, to tax fraud, to deals with corrupt officials from the former Soviet Union, to catch-and-kill conspiracies to silence Trump’s clandestine lovers, I wasn’t just a witness to the President’s rise—I was an active and eager participant.

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, a kind of fantasy fulfillment that it was hard to imagine any adult would spend serious money living out—until he did the functional equivalent in the real world.

He frequently commented on the amount of money I had as a way to throw it in my face that he was so much richer than me. It was like water off a duck’s back to me, but it fed his need to demean people around him who had the temerity to get ahead in life; success was always a zero-sum game for him, and he and he alone had to be the winner.

But loyalty to Trump means the willingness to do things you know to be wrong and that are harming others.

Wait until you get backstage as these beauties are getting dressed and made up,” he said. “They are the finest pieces of ass from every state and country.

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.

Rudy Giuliani, William Barr, Jared Kushner, and Mike Pompeo are Trump’s new wannabe fixers, sycophants willing to distort the truth and break the law in the service of the Boss.

he was hiding unsightly scars on his scalp from a failed hair-implant operation in the 1980s.

It wasn’t just as if I was an alcoholic or a drug addict refusing to get help. It was exactly that.

Representative Cummings concluded by saying, “We are better than this.

You now have all the information you need to decide for yourself in November.

the whole country up. Now it’s a shithole. Fuck Mandela.

he’s lost without his original bulldog lawyer Roy Cohn, or his other former pit bull and personal attorney, Michael Cohen.

graduate of the University of Western Michigan’s Thomas M. Cooley Law School, perhaps the least-prestigious institution in the nation from which to receive a legal education,

Maybe I’ll self-fund the primary but do it cheap. I don’t need to spend a lot of money because we’ll get all the free press we want.

dangerous

He is capable of behaving kindly, but he is not kind. He is capable of committing acts of generosity, but he is not generous. He is capable of being loyal, but he is fundamentally disloyal.

When his hair wasn’t done, his strands of dyed-golden hair reached below his shoulders along the right side of his head and on his back, like a balding Allman Brother or strung out old ’60s hippie.

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.

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.

Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power,” I concluded. “This is why I agreed to appear before you today.

He projects his own sins and crimes onto others, partly to distract and confuse, but mostly because he thinks everyone is as corrupt and shameless and ruthless as he is; a poisonous mindset I know all too well. Whoever

Trump wins another four years, these scandals will prove to be only the tip of the iceberg. I’m certain that Trump knows he will face prison time if he leaves office, the inevitable cold Karma to the notorious chants of

Whoever follows Trump into the White House, if the President doesn’t manage to make himself the leader for life, as he has started to joke about—and Trump never actually jokes—will discover a tangle of frauds and scams and lawlessness.

The thing that astounded me, and still does to this day, was that the media didn’t see that they were being played for suckers. They didn’t realize the damage they were inflicting on the country by following Trump around like supplicants.

Don has the worst fucking judgment of anyone I have ever met,” Trump would often tell me, adding that he’d been reluctant to bestow his first name on his first-born son. He didn’t want to share his name with a “loser,” if that was what his son turned out to be.

There is a serious danger that Donald Trump will not leave office easily, and there is a real chance of not having a peaceful transition. When he jokes about running again in 2024 and gets a crowd of thousands to chant “Trump 2024,” he’s not joking. Trump never jokes.

President doesn’t manage to make himself the leader for life, as he has started to joke about—and Trump never actually jokes—will discover a tangle of frauds and scams and lawlessness. Trump and his minions will do anything to cover up that reality, and I mean anything.

One of the worst was cleaning up the mess in the aftermath of a clusterfuck known as the Trump Network. This brilliant idea started soon after I began to work for Trump, and essentially involved a couple of operators who sold vitamins and supposed health pills and supplements who approached the Boss about a multi-level marketing scheme.

Apart from his wife and children, I knew Trump better than anyone else did. In some ways, I knew him better than even his family did, because I bore witness to the real man, 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.

The biggest influence by far—by a country mile—was the media. Donald Trump’s presidency is a product of the free press. Not free as in freedom of expression, I mean free as unpaid for. Rallies broadcast live, tweets, press conferences, idiotic interviews, 24-7 wall-to-wall coverage, all without spending a penny. The free press gave America Trump.

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.

listening to him go on and on and on about Obama and caricature his mannerisms. 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, a kind of fantasy fulfillment that it was hard to imagine any adult would spend serious money living out—until he did the functional equivalent in the real world.

Business in New York has always been hard-edged, with the opening bid in negotiations typically starting with an exchange of “fuck you” and the threat of litigation. No tactic or ruse was too low, including preying on the weak or vulnerable—in fact, that became Trump’s business model, perhaps because he’d gone broke so many times himself, only to be bailed out by his Daddy, that he knew just how defenseless the insolvent really are.

Trump brand in the former Soviet Union. I’d learned that Trump had a certain audience in the United States, mostly not at the higher levels of taste and society, but there were many who weren’t attracted to his gaudy blend of wealth, braggadocio, and machismo. Not so in Georgia, not by a long shot. The more boorish elements of Trump’s shtick were directly relatable to wealthy oligarchs ripping off the resources of their countries, as if he was a universal role model.

During the slow times in the summer, I would be invited to sit with Gaspipe or gangsters like Roy DeMeo, Anthony Senter, Joey Testa, and Frank Lastorino, a kind of Murderer’s Row of gangsters, like the 1950s Yankees batting lineup, only these guys really were murderers. This was when I first heard the name Roy Cohn, the infamous New York attorney who worked for Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare and later was a lawyer for many mobsters—including Donald Trump.

The biggest influence by far—by a country mile—was the media. Donald Trump’s presidency is a product of the free press. Not free as in freedom of expression, I mean free as unpaid for. Rallies broadcast live, tweets, press conferences, idiotic interviews, 24-7 wall-to-wall coverage, all without spending a penny. The free press gave America Trump. Right, left, moderate, tabloid, broadsheet, television, radio, Internet, Facebook—that is who elected Trump and might well elect him again.

But that wasn’t the end of the Doral story, not by a long shot. The painting contractor eventually walked off the job, no doubt in frustration at not being paid in a timely fashion. Scores of small contractors have had to sue Trump over the years to try to get justice against a billionaire who has absolutely no compunction about screwing the little guy. I know because I was often the one tasked with doing such lowlife things to innocent and honest business people providing goods and services to the Trump Organization.

As the election wore on, I began to believe that Trump secretly wanted Putin’s kind of power for himself, which is part of why I’m convinced he won’t leave office voluntarily—but I will get to that subject in due course. To Trump, Putin was like the Saudi royal family, or Kim Jong-un in North Korea: the incarnation of dynastic wealth and the real ruling class of the planet. Everyone other than the ruling class on the earth was like an ant, to his way of thinking, their lives meaningless and always subject to the whims of the true rulers of the world.

The cosmic joke was that Trump convinced a vast swathe of working-class white folks in the Midwest that he cared about their well-being. The truth was that he couldn’t care less. I don’t mean that as speculation or an opinion. That was a stone-cold fact during the 2016 campaign and throughout Trump’s presidency to this very day. To Trump, his voters are his audience, his chumps, his patsies, his base. Guns, criminalizing abortion—Trump took up those conservative positions not because he believed in them but because they were his path to power. That was what I meant when I told Congress that Trump is a con man.

Both sides were wrong. I knew that the reality was much more complicated and dangerous. Trump had colluded with the Russians, but not in the sophisticated ways imagined by his detractors. I also knew that the Mueller investigation was not a witch-hunt. Trump had cheated in the election, with Russian connivance, as you will discover in these pages, because doing anything—and I mean anything—to “win” has always been his business model and way of life. Trump had also continued to pursue a major real estate deal in Moscow during the campaign. He attempted to insinuate himself into the world of President Vladimir Putin and his coterie of corrupt billionaire oligarchs. I know because I personally ran that deal and kept Trump and his children closely informed of all updates, even as the candidate blatantly lied to the American people saying, “There’s no Russian collusion, I have no dealings with Russia . . . there’s no Russia.

Trump doesn’t have a simple combover, as it would appear. The operation was much more involved than a simple throw-over of what was left of his hair: the three-step procedure required a flop up of the hair from the back of his head, followed by the flip of the resulting overhang on his face back on his pate, and then the flap of his combover on the right side, providing three layers of thinly disguised balding-male insecurity. The concoction was held in place by a fog of TREsemme TRES Two, not a

high-end salon product. Flip, flop, flap, and there was the most famous combover in the world.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The debate of August 6, 2015 was held in Cleveland, Ohio, and broadcast on Fox News and Facebook. It was the first debate and the most anticipated question that loomed was how Trump would perform. He’d never participated in a formal debate before, making him a neophyte up against practiced and supposedly ruthless opposition. The world had no idea what was coming, and neither did the deer-in-the-headlights Republicans who were helpless to counter the sheer aggressive force of Donald Trump.

No words ring more true for me than when Michelle Obama stated, “Being President doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are. . . .” Please remember what I testified to Congress, the second time: There is a serious danger that Donald Trump will not leave office easily, and there is a real chance of not having a peaceful transition. When he jokes about running again in 2024 and gets a crowd of thousands to chant “Trump 2024,” he’s not joking. Trump never jokes.

The free press gave America Trump. Right, left, moderate, tabloid, broadsheet, television, radio, Internet, Facebook—that is who elected Trump and might well elect him again.

Why do you give a shit about him?” my kids would ask. “It’s his deal, not yours,” they’d say. “I’m not going to talk about this anymore,” I would reply. “It’s repetitive.” So the subject would be dropped because my family didn’t have the wherewithal to resist me—or to save me. It wasn’t just as if I was an alcoholic or a drug addict refusing to get help. It was exactly that. I was an addict unable to stop myself from drinking or popping pills or shooting heroin into my veins. Worse, I brought my addiction home, constantly shouting on the phone to reporters and publishers when I should have been having a quiet breakfast with my children or a walk in the park. I never, ever, ever got through an entire meal in a restaurant with my wife without being interrupted by Trump. He’d call to ask a favor, or have me make a call on his behalf, or just to complain and rant.

Why do you give a shit about him?” my kids would ask. “It’s his deal, not yours,” they’d say. “I’m not going to talk about this anymore,” I would reply. “It’s repetitive.” So the subject would be dropped because my family didn’t have the wherewithal to resist me—or to save me. It wasn’t just as if I was an alcoholic or a drug addict refusing to get help. It was exactly that. I was an addict unable to stop myself from drinking or popping pills or shooting heroin into my veins. Worse, I brought my addiction home, constantly shouting on the phone to reporters and publishers when I should have been having a quiet breakfast with my children or a walk in the park. I never, ever, ever got through an entire meal in a restaurant with my wife without being interrupted by Trump. He’d call to ask a favor, or have me make a call on his behalf, or just to complain and rant. My family hated it when I picked up his calls, as I always did, no matter the hour or the circumstances. I was always pressing his message, always pressing his message, always pressing his message. What I really needed was an intervention, but my wife and kids and parents and friends didn’t know how to stage such a scene, or how I would react. “Badly,” was the short answer, in hindsight, as it would likely have provoked me to go further and further into the madness, as I gradually and then rapidly took leave of my senses.

Trump saved the crappiest jobs for me, a fact that I took pride in; I was given the dirty work because I was willing to get dirt on my hands—and blood if necessary. If that seems bizarre to you, think about it like being under the spell of a cult leader. I don’t mean that as a cliché or an accusation: I mean literally. How did Jim Jones get his followers in Guyana to drink the poisoned Kool-Aid (actually, it was a cheap knockoff called Flavor Aid) and commit mass suicide? The answer was that Jones took control of the minds of those drawn to him, not all at once but gradually, over time, by luring them into his mind. “Stop drinking the Kool-Aid,” we would say to each other at the Trump Organization all the time.

There are reasons why there has never been an intimate portrait of Donald Trump, the man. In part, it’s because he has a million acquaintances, pals, and hangers on, but no real friends. He has no one he trusts to keep his secrets. For ten years, he certainly had me, and I was always there for him, and look what happened to me. I urge you to really consider that fact: Trump has no true friends. He has lived his entire life avoiding and evading taking responsibility for his actions.

No. The biggest influence by far—by a country mile—was the media. Donald Trump’s presidency is a product of the free press. Not free as in freedom of expression, I mean free as unpaid for. Rallies broadcast live, tweets, press conferences, idiotic interviews, 24-7 wall-to-wall coverage, all without spending a penny. The free press gave America Trump. Right, left, moderate, tabloid, broadsheet, television, radio, Internet, Facebook—that is who elected Trump and might well elect him again.

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.

Please remember what I testified to Congress, the second time: There is a serious danger that Donald Trump will not leave office easily, and there is a real chance of not having a peaceful transition.

Business in New York has always been hard-edged, with the opening bid in negotiations typically starting with an exchange of “fuck you” and the threat of litigation.

Trump channeled blue-collar white men because that was part of how he saw life, but also because he knew he could make a buck that way.

The fact that I was willing to literally physically fight and punch another man in the face on behalf of Mr. Trump should give you a sense of the lengths that I was willing to go to please the Boss, much to the ongoing and growing disgust of my wife and kids. But

Trump had cheated in the election, with Russian connivance, as you will discover in these pages, because doing anything—and I mean anything—to “win” has always been his business model and way of life.

stiffed contractors on his behalf, ripped off his business partners, lied to his wife Melania to hide his sexual infidelities, and bullied and screamed at anyone who threatened Trump’s path to power.

As I started to answer questions, it was evident that the Republicans didn’t want to hear a word I had to say, no matter how true or how critical to the future of the country.

To Trump, life was a game, and all that mattered was winning. In these dangerous days, I see the Republican Party and Trump’s followers threatening the Constitution—which is in far greater peril than is commonly understood—and following one of the worst impulses of humankind: the desire for power at all costs.

What appeared to be collusion was really a confluence of shared interests in harming Hillary Clinton in any way possible, up to and including interfering in the American election—a subject that caused Trump precisely zero unease.

The cosmic joke was that Trump convinced a vast swathe of working-class white folks in the Midwest that he cared about their well-being. The truth was that he couldn’t care less.

To Trump, his voters are his audience, his chumps, his patsies, his base. Guns, criminalizing abortion—Trump took up those conservative positions not because he believed in them but because they were his path to power. That was what I meant when I told Congress that Trump is a con man.

Trump warped reality to fit his needs with no remorse or conscience

He didn’t care about racial justice, needless to say, and his only real goal with black voters was suppression, especially aiming his efforts at African American women in swing states like Michigan and Wisconsin and Ohio,

Hyperbole was his instinctual method of communication, exaggerating his own talents and wealth and physical characteristics and achievements, as if by enlarging things he could make them real.

He needed a lawyer for when he was in the wrong: when he was trying to go around the law, or offer a twisted or tortured interpretation to an agreement that could be used to screw the other side.

Trump was showing me that he inhabited a different type of reality, one that he would share with me alone, a world that was filled with wonder and excitement and power and intrigue and adulation. All I had to do was do what I was told, without question or a second thought.

Trumps were actually tiresome and conceited bores

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.

In this way, as in so many others, he was the absolute opposite of Obama. Instead of No Drama, it was Drama All the Time.

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.

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.

Roger Ailes was himself a sexual predator who’d harassed Megyn Kelly and countless other women, as would emerge when he met his own moment of disgrace and denouement

I took a weird kind of pleasure in harming others in the service of Donald Trump, to my eternal shame.

Trump doesn’t help people, he preys on them, and buying the estates of the formerly super wealthy was a specialty of his, as his purchase of Mar-a-Lago illustrated;

Or the pathetic spectacle of Rudy Giuliani committing harakiri for Trump, just like I used to do, somehow imagining that the fate that befell me and Roy Cohn won’t happen to him—as if the rules of gravity have been suspended magically.

Trump is a master at getting otherwise seemingly sensible people to enter into his fantasyland because of the fear that failure to do so means banishment.

The task in a catch, kill, and twist operation was to bury the truth, and if that wasn’t possible, to distort it beyond recognition, to sow doubt and confusion and even fear.

here’s the thing about the Trump kids: they’re human beings. The truth was that they loved and hurt and yearned just like everyone else, at least in those days, before the kids entirely vanished into their father’s hellish nightmare vision of life.

Pecker’s considerable power emanated from a virtually complete lack of morality or basic decency or shame, compounded by a brazen willingness to cover up rapes and assaults and despicable acts of all varieties, provided he was benefitting a powerful man and that he would receive a favor in return;

Trump only cared about subjects that concerned him, and his benefit and well-being, so anything that detracted or distracted from the complete and utter focus on him and his ego was a waste of time and energy.

Trump spent his waking hours chasing money from endorsements for products like Trump Steaks and Trump Vodka and, infamously, Trump University.

in fact, he almost never laughed, unless it was at a crude sexual comment, or at someone else’s misfortune.

That was Trump when it came to Obama: competitive, but in many ways afraid of actually being compared—even though he would ridicule any suggestion that he was intimidated by the President.

He was pro-abortion; he told me that Planned Parenthood was the way poor people paid for contraception. He didn’t care about religion. Homosexuals, divorce, the break-up of the nuclear family—he’d say whatever they wanted to hear, and they’d hear what they wanted to hear. This was the moment, for me: the split second when I knew Trump would be president one day.

Anti-abortion laws, Supreme Court justices, opposition to gay marriage and civil rights, and the cultural war-like rhetoric aimed at godless liberals.

He constantly referred to himself in the third person, a trait that I saw as a quirk at the time, but in hindsight was the indication of dissociative egomania that should have served as a warning.

Russian investors to buy into his condo projects in New York and Florida,

Trump doesn’t help people, he preys on them,

Kushner was supremely arrogant, a real snob, to be honest, with an exaggerated sense of his importance and intelligence.

as a personal injury and medical malpractice attorney, I learned to always let the other side shoot first; the first offer served as the floor for future talks.

I wonder what your parents would say if you brought her home?” This was Trump’s idea of humor, because my father was a survivor of the Holocaust and she was German. Get it? Ha, ha.