Michael Cohen, once Donald Trump’s fiercely loyal fixer turned star witness against him, said he has mended fences with the president.
In a Friday interview with 77 WABC, Cohen cast the reconciliation as a response to his own political isolation, citing backlash from “the left” over his comments about Democrats and Jeffrey Epstein.
“We rekindled our relationship because of a shared experience of betrayal,” Cohen said. “It’s really all about betrayal.”
He recounted how an intermediary contacted him earlier this year to convey Trump’s “genuine empathy” over how he had been treated, and that Trump himself later reached out to suggest they meet.
“The ice between us, it didn’t just melt, it broke,” Cohen, 59, said.
The truce closes the book on a high-octane feud that defined much of Trump’s first term and left behind a trail of legal trouble.
Cohen served for years as Trump’s personal attorney with such loyalty that he once said he would “take a bullet” for him. But, in 2019, he told Congress that Trump was a “con man” and a “cheat.” Later, he admitted in Trump’s hush-money case that he helped facilitate payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels to conceal an alleged affair with Trump. The president was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records, though he has maintained his innocence.
Cohen’s transformation won him admiration from many Democrats and contempt from Republicans, who denounced him as a turncoat. Trump labeled Cohen a “sleazebag” who is “fully discredited.”
During his interview with 77 WABC, Cohen, who served three years in prison for lying to Congress and tax violations, spoke at length about his path back into Trump’s good graces.
“If you want to understand how it all happened, well you do have to take a look at the facts, but more importantly, the timeline,” he said.
“For years, the left, they embraced me as their ultimate weapon against him,” he continued. “But loyalty on that side of the aisle is completely transactional. And the moment that I deviated from their script…they turned feral.”
Cohen, who also took the witness stand in Trump’s civil fraud suit in New York, said it all began when he criticized New York Attorney General Letitia James and District Attorney Alvin Bragg in a post on Substack. He wrote that he “felt pressured and coerced…to testify in a specific manner.”
He also wrote that he never saw Trump meet with or speak to Jeffrey Epstein, the sex offender whose network of high-profile connections has drawn intense scrutiny in recent years.
“Those two things shattered [the left’s] narrative,” Cohen said. “And the far left, they literally went on this absolute war path…literally driving days of malicious, defamatory headlines against me, attacking my social media posts.”
“I think I lost 30,000 followers just on my Substack,” he griped.
Six or seven months ago, an unnamed mutual friend between Cohen and Trump “brought the media onslaught to the president’s attention,” he said, adding: “The president knew exactly what it felt like to be at the center of that kind of partisan target practice.”
While dining at a restaurant with his wife, Cohen said he received a text from that friend, who telegraphed Trump’s “genuine empathy for the hell that I was being dragged through.”
“And so I actually texted the president,” Cohen continued. “I thanked him, expressed my sincere hope that this long, exhausting feud between the two of us could finally end.”
To Cohen’s surprise, Trump replied almost immediately, stating that it was time for the two men to meet, he said.
The Independent has contacted the White House for comment.
Elsewhere in his interview, Cohen all but took credit for Trump’s political career.
The president’s former lawyer said that, in 2011, he found a newspaper survey that found about 5 percent of respondents wanted to see Trump run for president. He cut out the text and handed it to Trump, then a real estate developer and star of NBC News’ The Apprentice.
“He looked at it,” Cohen recounted. “And he says, ‘You know, we should do it.’”
He added that the only reason Trump didn’t run sooner was because of his real estate projects and his lucrative deal with The Apprentice.
“You don’t walk away from Hollywood,” Cohen said Trump told him at the time. “Hollywood walks away from you.”
