[News] In tell-all book, Michael Cohen says Trump hired a 'Faux-Bama' before White House run

[Whoo!]

 

Before Donald Trump ever sought the Oval Office, he was preoccupied by its occupant President Barack Obama, publicly questioning his

birthplace and privately describing him as "a Manchurian candidate" who obtained his Ivy League degrees only by way of affirmative action, according to a new book by Trump's former attorney, Michael Cohen.

Trump's disdain for Obama was so extreme that he took his fixation a step further, according to Cohen: Trump hired a "Faux-Bama" to participate in a video in which Trump "ritualistically belittled the first black president and then fired him."

Cohen's book, "Disloyal: A Memoir," doesn't name the man who was allegedly hired to play Obama or provide a specific date for the incident, but it does include a photograph of Trump sitting behind a desk, facing a Black man wearing a suit with an American flag pin affixed to the lapel. On Trump's desk are two books, one displaying Obama's name in large letters.

CNN obtained a copy of Cohen's book ahead of its Tuesday publication.

As an insider who spent years as Trump's personal attorney and self-proclaimed "fixer," Cohen says he is uniquely equipped to unleash on Trump, whom Cohen describes as "a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man" and a person interested in using the presidency exclusively for his personal financial benefit.

But according to federal prosecutors and Cohen's own guilty pleas, he, too, is a liar and a cheat. In 2018, he pleaded guilty to nine counts of federal crimes, including tax evasion, lying to Congress and campaign-finance violations he and prosecutors have said were done at Trump's direction to help him win the 2016 presidential election.

CNN has reached out to the White House for comment. In a statement to the Washington Post, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said, "Michael Cohen is a disgraced felon and disbarred lawyer, who lied to Congress. He has lost all credibility, and it's unsurprising to see his latest attempt to profit off of lies."

Cohen acknowledges and apologizes for his role in Trump's rise, saying he was "more than willing to lie, cheat, and bully" to help his long-time boss win the White House. And he recounts the pressure and guilt he experienced as he spoke out against Trump, writing that he considered suicide "as a way to escape the unrelenting insanity" in the weeks prior to testifying to Congress in 2019.

But in the book, he disputes having committed certain crimes to which he has already admitted, portraying himself a victim of the "gangster tactics" of the federal prosecutors of the US Attorney's office for the Southern District of New York.

Still, Cohen's account of Trump's personal nature and presidency is damning, and during Cohen's time in prison, he writes, "I became even more convinced that Trump will never leave office peacefully."

Trump's model of a man in power, according to Cohen, is Vladimir Putin, and Trump is described as enamored of Putin's wealth and unilateral influence, and awestruck by what he sees as the Russian president's ability to control everything from the country's press to its financial institutions.

"Locking up your political enemies, criminalizing dissent, terrifying or bankrupting the free press through libel lawsuits -- Trump's all-encompassing vision wasn't evident to me before he began to run for president," Cohen writes. "I honestly believe the most extreme ideas about power and its uses only really took shape as he began to seriously contemplate the implications of taking power and how he could leverage it to the absolute maximum level possible."

He also argues that, with Trump himself expecting to lose the presidential race, Trump's goal in cozying up to Putin was to position himself to benefit financially from a planned real-estate development in Moscow after the election.

"By ingratiating himself with Putin, and hinting at changes in American sanctions policy against the country under a Trump Presidency," Cohen writes, "the Boss was trying to nudge the Moscow Trump Tower project along." (One of the crimes to which Cohen pleaded guilty was lying to Congress about the duration of the negotiations regarding the Moscow development.)

Cohen also portrays Trump as aspiring to have ties to the Russian president. After Trump sold a Palm Beach mansion he purchased for $41 million to a Russian oligarch named Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million in 2008, Cohen says, Trump told Cohen he believed the real buyer was Putin.

Cohen, however, disputes the validity of a rumored videotape depicting Trump during a trip to Moscow, saying, "this claim never occurred, to the best of my knowledge and investigations."

But Cohen discloses that during the summer of 2016, he received an anonymous call from a man who said he was in possession of a tape matching its description. Cohen told the caller that he would need to see a few seconds of the tape to determine if it was real, and the caller demanded $20 million before hanging up, never to be heard from again.

Blacks & Latinos, 'They're not my people'

If Putin is held in the highest regard in Trump's mind, Cohen writes, Trump's own voters rank among those in the lowest. Speaking to Cohen after Trump gathered religious leaders at Trump Tower in the lead up to the 2012 presidential race, an encounter during which they asked to "lay hands" on him, Trump asked Cohen, according to the book: "Can you believe that bullsh*t?...Can you believe people believe that bullsh*t?"

In the wake of Trump's presidential kickoff announcement in 2015, in which he called Mexicans criminals and rapists, he dismissed concerns that he had alienated Latinos. "Plus, I will never get the Hispanic vote," Trump allegedly told Cohen. "Like the blacks, they're too stupid to vote for Trump. They're not my people." (Trump won 28% of the Latino vote in 2016.)

Trump's contempt, in Cohen's telling, extends broadly. Cohen characterizes Trump bluntly as racist, and says that while he never heard Trump use the "N-word," Trump used other offensive language.

Ranting about Obama after he won office in 2008, Trump said, "Tell me one country run by a black person that isn't a sh*thole...They are all complete f*cking toilets," according to Cohen. After Nelson Mandela died, Trump allegedly said of South Africa that "Mandela f*cked the whole country up. Now it's a sh*thole. F*ck Mandela. He was no leader."

Cohen also divulges personal details about Trump, including his hair routine, described as a "three-step" combover designed to disguise "unsightly scars on his scalp from a failed hair-implant operation in the 1980s."

Writing that he once witnessed Trump shortly after he showered, Cohen recalls that "when his hair wasn't done, his strands of dyed-golden hair reached below his shoulders along the right side of his head and on his back, like a balding Allman Brother or strung out old '60s hippie."

Many instances of Trump's alleged deceit have previously been detailed by Cohen and others in recent years: Trump's alleged inflation of his net worth to publications like Forbes and Fortune and his minimizing of the value of his properties to avoid taxes, Cohen's pressuring of the New York Military Academy to not release Trump's high school records to avoid their public disclosure, Cohen paying to rig CNBC and Drudge Report polls in Trump's favor, Trump campaign officials hiring extras for $50 apiece to attend Trump's 2015 announcement that he was running for president and the alleged fraudulent Trump University scheme, over which Trump settled a class action lawsuit for $25 million.