There’s no justifying it, but I have a sneaky soft spot for Michael Cohen, the former lawyer, fixer and – as Fox News is keen to remind us – “ex-con” testifying against Donald Trump in the Stormy Daniels hush-money trial. Coming hard on the heels of Daniels’ explosive appearance last week, Cohen’s testimony could have been anticlimactic. Not so!
The 57-year-old, navigating a tricky line between languid, affable and sheepish, met tough questioning by Trump’s lawyers with the calmness of a man with nothing to lose and a lot of unfinished business to get through. Cohen, you’ll remember, literally did time for those hush-money payments (among other things), so it’s fair to say he might have a few scores to settle.
If Cohen’s return to court felt inevitable, it is in line with so many members of Trump’s former inner circle, all of whom, given time, seem to revolve back into view like the fish at Yo! Sushi. Cohen is one of an effective Marvel Universe of characters unleashed by the Trump administration who, eight years after Trump entered the White House, are serious contenders as our era’s lasting, historical villains.
Among these Cohen, much like Anthony Scaramucci, the banker and Trump’s former press secretary, and – I’ll stick my neck out here – Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s former lawyer who is facing his own indictments plus a $148m defamation judgment against him, occupy the role of second-tier villains to main players such as Roger Stone, Steve Bannon and Paul Manafort (also back in the news this week, four years after being released from prison). As slapstick as they are rogueish, these guys could be extras in Bugsy Malone, or the great American novel Dickens never wrote. And if they are as opportunistic as everyone else in Trump’s world, you have to admit they are highly entertaining.
In court this week Cohen, looking like the Fonz and sounding like the former personal injury lawyer from Long Island he is, somehow survived the defence team’s attempts to discredit him, and managed to land a series of blows on his former employer. It should not, in all honesty, have been so. Cohen, who in 2018 pleaded guilty to a combination of federal campaign violations he says he undertook on Trump’s behalf and tax evasion crimes all of his own, nonetheless presented in unruffled form a jaw-dropping account of how Trump got him to pay off Stormy Daniels, then covered up the payments.
This is the crux of the case, and Cohen, assuming a mild air that somehow made his testimony all the more devastating, didn’t mince words. It reminded me of that bit in A Fish Called Wanda when Jamie Lee Curtis, in the witness box at the Old Bailey, says casually that, yes, she could be absolutely sure of what time her boyfriend had left the house because, “I was saying to myself, ‘It’s five to seven, where could he be going with that sawed-off shotgun?’”
The shotgun in this case was a series of repayments allegedly made by Trump to Cohen, which Cohen says the former president was aware were being disguised as a legal retainer. Cohen smoothly shared details of a meeting he had with Trump in the Oval Office in 2017, in which he alleges Trump promised to repay Cohen the $130,000, which Cohen himself had already paid to Stormy Daniels. At later meetings, in the presence of Allen Weisselberg, the then chief financial officer for the Trump Organization, Cohen maintains Trump was present while the lie about the nature of these payments was cooked up. When asked by a prosecutor to confirm what, in fact, the 11 cheques paid to Cohen by Trump were for, he replied coolly. “The reimbursement to me for the hush-money fee.”
The fact that Cohen reviles his former boss, loyalty to whom has cost him everything, should have been his second most undermining characteristic as a witness – after the fact he’s a convicted liar. Somehow, however, things didn’t pan out this way. Trump’s lawyers came at Cohen again and again as a bitter former employee seeking revenge. His vested interest in seeing Trump jailed – the maximum penalty for the charges Trump faces is four years in prison – was, at one unmatchable point in the proceedings, linked to the fact Cohen sells a line of T-shirts featuring an image of Trump behind bars. Nothing in fiction could improve upon this.
Perhaps it is just a case of my enemy’s enemy, but watching the drama this week it was hard not to feel some warmth towards Cohen, a type of New York hustler whose entire career is on a par with those pilot fish who survive by nibbling plankton off a whale. Convicted liar though he may be, it’s striking to see him appear so soberingly honest about one thing. Trump’s lawyer, hoping to prove that Cohen is a compromised witness, at one stage read out some remarks Cohen had allegedly made about Trump that included calling him a “boorish cartoon misogynist” and a “Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain”. Lightly, Cohen responded, “Sounds like something I would say.”
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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