I just finished reading DISLOYAL, Donald Trump's personal lawyer's book on his work for Trump. He describes working for Trump as an addiction that blocks rationality. The Trump world was exciting, challenging, and very heady stuff. Just a few days before the FBI arrested Cohen, he had sat at the dinner table with now President Trump and one of the richest men in the world, a meeting he had brokered for them both. And he described the way Trump then distanced himself from Cohen and actually worked through Attorney General William Barr to have him put back in prison after he had been released to home custody during the pandemic as many other prisoners had been released. All his years of loyalty to Trump were being repaid with retaliation to prevent the writing of this book.
Cohen does a couple other things that surprised me. First, without diminishing their culpability, he humanized Don Jr., Ivanka, Eric, and Malania. There was little he could do besides describe the actual behaviors of Trump himself to humanize him.
The other thing that surprised me was how much he downplayed the Russian connection in his book. While he spoke at length about the probability of the existence of the "pee-pee tape" and showed no regard for the Steele Dossier, he said practically nothing about the Russian help everyone else who has written about the 2016 election included in great detail. He may have been saving what he really knew for sharing with Congress after his book was published. Or he may have really had little to do beyond what he admitted, that he had worked on the Moscow Trump Tower deal all during the campaign at the time when Trump was denying any business with the Russians.
His main thrust as to what got Trump elected was that the Main Stream Media amplified everything about Trump they could find and kept reporting all the negative things the GOP was doing to make Clinton's emails seem like the crime of the century. To Cohen, what little the Russians did was nothing compared to the media's fascination with all things Trump. Trump was exciting and free of any moral or ethical restraints, a state of being that was admired and yearned for by half the American population. Trump was a star, one who ruled "reality" television, including the world of wrestling. Fox Network, Limbaugh, and other "conservative" media only enhanced what the rest of the news gathering agencies were doing, in Cohen's mind.
As a side note, let me add that Jonathan Karl's BETRAYAL, Michael Wolff's LANDSLIDE, and the Woodward/Acosta book PERIL also said amazingly little about the Russian influence. They may have been asked by the Department of Justice to hold up on what they learned about Russia. I can't imagine such writers not encountering a lot more about foreign interference in the Trump years. I am awaiting a book by someone who reports on the influence Putin had on Trump to do things like sending federal troops into the BLM protests to break them up, to clear the square in front of St. John's Church for Trump's PR stunt ("dominate the streets"), and other moments when Trump tried to do things that even his most loyal staff found a way to torpedo or drag out until he forgot about it.
Cohen has laid bare what it is like to become a cult member at the same time he was aware of how badly he was acting on Trump's behalf. His book is most engaging.
