After Trump's election, as he waited for a Washington job that never came, Cohen sold himself to corporations as a direct line to the new president. Trump was Cohen's potential pathway to prestigious new titles - mayor, congressman, even White House chief of staff. Now, as he prepares to testify before two congressional committees this month and faces a three-year prison sentence beginning in March, Cohen finds himself repeatedly denigrated by the man he publicly revered. Theirs was a relationship Cohen could boast about to anyone he encountered, including childhood friends from Long Island, some of whom said they did not expect him to amount to anything extraordinary.
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Trump was Cohen's ticket to greater wealth, TV appearances and Page Six, the New York Post's daily serving of intel about Manhattan's jet set. Trump," as he called his boss, Cohen was squarely focused on his own ambitions. In Cohen, Trump found a fellow New Yorker who had also grown up at the city's suburban edges, a one-man cheering section who hailed Trump as an infallible "patriarch" worthy of protection "at all costs."
In his decade at the center of Trump's inner circle, Cohen styled himself as the tycoon's pugnacious man Friday, an indefatigable loyalist who aped his boss' husky-voiced bluster. "It went from Michael Cohen interested in running for mayor to, well, 'I'll run for lieutenant governor under Donald Trump.' I didn't want to disabuse him of it, because he was our liaison. He told Caputo he had always wanted to run for mayor of New York City, a race he said he could win if Trump was governor.Īt one point, Cohen floated the idea of a Trump-Cohen statewide ticket, an idea Caputo considered as absurd as Cohen running for mayor. But Cohen surprised Caputo by talking about his own political aspirations.
After the meetings, Cohen would adjourn to his office at Trump Tower to plan next steps with Michael Caputo, the Republican strategist plotting Trump's gubernatorial campaign.