Such was Cohen’s early admiration for Trump that he bought apartments in two of Trump’s buildings in the 2000s. They first connected after Trump appreciated Cohen’s ferocious approach in a dispute with one building’s condo board, and the Long Island–bred lawyer has evinced a flair for melodrama at every turn in their roller-coaster relationship since—after his conviction, he released books titled Disloyal and Revenge. He was in rare form this week as he geared up for the interview with his old boss, explaining to listeners that “forgiveness does not mean amnesia” or “that the pain was fake or that I have forgotten a single second of what transpired.”
“Can loyalty survive the ultimate fallout?” Cohen went on, seeming to stretch the limits of his poetic capacities. “Can friendship exist after deep betrayal? Can two people who stood together at the summit and then tore each other apart in the valley actually find common ground again?”
To be sure, Cohen may have an ulterior motive for this dizzying rapprochement. He told CNN on Thursday that he had submitted a pardon application to the White House and planned to follow up the next day; Trump is currently appealing his felony conviction related to the infamous hush-money payment. “I respect the fact that you recanted everything you said,” Trump told Cohen on the air. “And that’s a big thing that you did.” (While it’s not clear what Cohen has privately said to Trump, he has not retracted the testimony he gave under oath.)
With that out of the way, Trump began to ramble: about Iran, about Venezuela, about how “the rallies are potentially bigger than ever,” about how Kamala Harris “knew less about the border than a child would know.” Cohen barely got a word in, but he slipped into reminiscence easily: “Boss, you remember when I was by your side?” During the nearly decade-long period when Cohen played Trump’s antagonist in a national psychodrama, he looked agitated and haggard, but now, he sounded as if he had stepped back into a prior state of exhilarated comfort that had never quite worn off. In Disloyal, Cohen asks himself about the source of his “starstruck, moth-to-the-flame compulsion to insinuate [himself] with a man so transparently problematic in myriad ways.”
The answer, he wrote, “included something deeper than the obvious lures of money and power, though those were crucial factors. It was physical, emotional, not quite spiritual, but a deep longing and need that Trump filled for me. Around Trump I felt excited, alive, like he possessed the urgent and only truth, the chance for my salvation and success in life.”
