called, inviting him to a meeting with his father - a call that “summoned me to my destiny and my downfall.” He was semi-retired but still “plenty ambitious and very energetic.” He also owned investment properties in several Trump buildings in Manhattan. Like his future boss, he left for Manhattan as soon as he could.īy 1996, he was living on the Upper East Side with two kids and his wife, Laura, the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants from Queens. He wanted to be Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky or Trump’s pal, Roy Cohn, a “Tough Jew” who practiced law “like a gangster.”īooks Bolton book tells all about Trump - except what makes him tickįormer national security advisor John Bolton skewers President Trump and White House insiders in ‘The Room Where it Happened.’Ĭohen accumulated personal injury cases that he quickly settled, then accumulated enough cash to buy New York City taxi “medallions” - lucrative, leveraged permits that made him a fortune before he was 40. He wasn’t interested in the law as an elevated profession.
You’ll be a surgeon like me, or a lawyer.”Ĭohen did become an attorney, graduating from a Michigan law school he picked because it was the easiest one to get into. When his son Michael began imitating the tough guys he saw at the El Caribe, his father wasn’t impressed: “Cut it out, the whole mafia, gangster thing. His father, a Polish-born Jew who escaped the Nazis only because he spent World War II in a Russian detention camp, emigrated first to Canada, then to New York, where he set up a thriving medical practice in the Long Island suburbs. Oddly, Cohen says he still cares for Trump “even to this day.” And he blames himself from beginning to end. Trump’s transparent lies and boastful grievances corrupted some deep part of his soul, as it would those of his voters a decade later. There’s an unstated message in Cohen’s account that each of us is supposed to ponder: Are we all a little like him, possessed of some deep national neediness (even if only via the adrenaline rush of the latest outrage) for a serially bankrupt golf course operator serially accused of sexual assault? Haven’t we all rightly ended up, metaphorically speaking, in the sewage treatment plant?Ĭohen self-destructive descent into Trumpland foreshadows the country’s, or so his account implies. His book was written in Otisville Federal Prison, in upstate New York, on breaks from his job in the sewage treatment plant. He would wind up an inmate, called a “rat” by the man he once served. He writes that he also encouraged Trump to run for president, first in 2011 and then in 2015, and orchestrated Trump’s now famous ride down the escalator in Trump Tower’s marbled lobby.Ĭohen would eventually pay the same price many wise guys have for years of unquestioning loyalty to a godfather.īy 2018, he had pleaded guilty in federal court to multiple crimes - including lying to Congress and violating campaign finance laws by making hush-money payments to two women who claim they had affairs with Trump (which the president denies). Cohen was his consigliere, the tough street lawyer whose job, he says, was stiffing Trump’s business partners and burying his scandals. It’s Cohen’s inner life that gives his book its considerable power.īy the time Cohen went to work for him, Trump was shunned by big banks, making his money mostly by licensing his name and appearing on television. “Around Trump I felt excited, alive, like he possessed the urgent and only truth, the chance for my salvation and success in life.”
It was physical, emotional, not quite spiritual, but a deep longing that Trump filled for me,” he writes. “The answer, I was coming to see, included something deeper than the obvious lure of money and power…. This proximity provides an answer to one of the great mysteries: How does Trump, for all his flaws, command loyalty, especially from people who know him best? The President’s “only niece,” clinical psychologist Mary Trump, portrays a man warped by his family in “Too Much and Never Enough.” Books Review: The most devastating thing about Mary Trump’s portrait is her empathy for Donald Trump
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