The Price of Being ‘Disloyal’

What we get from Michael Cohen’s 2020 memoir of his work for Donald Trump

In Michael Cohen’s Foreword to his memoir Disloyal, written from U.S. federal prison, he identifies himself as President Donald Trump’s “former personal attorney, confidant, consigliore, and, at least in my heart, adopted son.” He confesses that he “had frequently been the one screaming threats on his behalf as Trump’s fixer and designated thug.” He admits to having “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.” He, like many other supporters, had once been “an acolyte obsessed with Donald J. Trump, a demented follower willing to do anything for him, including, as I vowed once to a reporter, to take a bullet.”

For more than a decade, I was Trump’s first call every morning and his last call every night. I was in and out of Trump’s office on the 26th floor of the Trump Tower as many as fifty times a day, tending to his every demand. Our cell phones had the same address books…everyone knew that when I spoke to them, it was as good as if they were talking directly to Trump.

“I know where the skeletons are buried,” he asserts, “because I was the one who buried them.”

The memoir was published in September 2020. Reading it in June 2021, especially after such an eventful year, I look for what kind of “staying power” it…