There was a point in time when many of us thought Michael Cohen would turn out to be the hero we need. He turned his back on his old friend Donald Trump—a man for whom he had cleaned up many a mess. He started telling tales out of school, letting us know bits and pieces of the dirty dealings the president was involved in. It was juicy and salacious, and we ate it all up—every single drop.
Since that time though, Cohen has become less of an unsung hero and more of a man who is snitching on the homies to save his own ass. That doesn’t go over well in some circles. Cohen is definitely the kind of person Meek Mill, Rick Ross and Yo Gotti warned us about in “Don’t Panic.” He’s out here spitting on the mic, giving it all up—and he’s probably still going to jail anyway.
That hasn’t stopped Cohen from continuing to drop dimes on the for whom he formerly served as a consigliere of sorts. In his latest spill, Cohen told Vanity Fair that he has spent the last few months “quietly reflecting on his former boss and his own role in the Trump Organization.”
The attorney has switched his political affiliation to Democrat and has gone on Twitter to urge people to vote in the midterm election that he describes as being “the most important vote in our lifetime.”
And because his former boss continues to demonize everyone who is not a WASP, Cohen told the magazine that he was moved to disclose some egregiously racist things Trump said during a conversation between the two of them at Trump Tower while Trump was still a candidate for the presidency in 2016.
After a campaign rally that Trump attended and Cohen watched on television, the attorney pointed out to his boss that the attendees at the rally were mostly white.
“I told Trump that the rally looked vanilla on television,” Cohen told Vanity Fair. “Trump responded, ‘That’s because black people are too stupid to vote for me.’”
In another conversation that happened after Nelson Mandela’s death, Cohen said “Trump told me ‘Name one country run by a black person that’s not a shithole,’ and then he added, ‘Name one city.’”
Cohen also said that in the late 2000s when the two of them were traveling to Chicago for a Trump International Hotel board meeting, their limo took them through one of the rougher neighborhoods in Chicago on the way from the airport. Trump told Cohen that “only blacks could live like this.”
Then there was a conversation that Cohen and Trump had about the first season of The Apprentice, when the competition came down to a head-to-head battle between Kwame Jackson, an black investment manager who had graduated from Harvard Business School, and Bill Rancic, who would eventually go on to win the season.
“Trump was explaining his back-and-forth about not picking Jackson,” Cohen said. “He said, ‘There’s no way I can let this black f-g win.’”
When asked, Jackson told Vanity Fair that he had heard Trump made that comment about him.
“My response to President Trump is simple and Wakandan,” Jackson said. “Not today, colonizer!”
Despite having all these bigoted and racist things said to him in private by Trump, Cohen continued to work for him and cover up his alleged crimes and transgressions. Hindsight is 20/20, however, and now Cohen wishes he had left the president’s employ when he had the chance all those years ago.
“I should have been a bigger person, and I should have left,” he told the magazine.
His excuse for not leaving then? He “grew numb to the language” and was “in awe of the job,” so he forgave his boss’s racism and bigotry and continued to do the job he was paid for—which included publicly defending Trump against claims that he was in fact a racist.
Just to make that last bit clearer, Michael Cohen—who had personal knowledge that Trump was a racist and a bigot—went out and publicly declared Trump to not be a racist or a bigot.
He claims he defended Trump because he thought becoming president would change him. He was dead wrong, which he admits. He now says he believes becoming president has made Trump worse.
Of course, none of this will matter in the grand scheme of things. Teflon Don could probably go on live television and shoot a migrant child in front of the whole world, and his constituents would cheer him on for eliminating a threat. That’s just how sick this game has become.
None of this will likely save Cohen either, as he awaits sentencing for his own crimes.
He’s going down on a sinking ship along with Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, and Michael Flynn.
The president left them all behind to jump in a lifeboat.