Disloyal: Cohen Pines
Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump
(c) 2020 Michael Cohen, Skyhorse Publishing
Michael Cohen is a vicious dirtbag who should never be allowed to walk free again.
The first part of that sentence is factual, backed by Cohen himself. The second part is just my opinion.
Granted, it’s a strong opinion. Cohen destroyed hundreds of lives and ruined dozens of businesses, gleefully and maliciously. In nearly all cases, such behavior was in response to small businessmen who had contracted to work, performed the work as agreed and in a timely manner, and were guilty of nothing more than asking for the agreed-upon price. Sometimes Cohen did it because he enjoyed the cruelty of the process, but usually he did it at the behest of an even bigger scumbag, the man who is presently President of the United States.
Given Cohen’s track record, it’s difficult to determine how much is come-to-Jesus repentance, and how much is just self-serving bullshit. Reading it without any surrounding context, one can almost sense Cohen’s eyelids lowered in self-disgust and shame, with the eyes’ surreptitious focus through the lashes, carefully gauging the response of the reader.
With context, i.e. the life and times of Donald John Trump, it reads with a terrifying and convincing reality, the story of a willing lackey (and as Cohen made clear, he was a centi-millionaire, sometimes worth up to a quarter billion, and could have walked away from his master at any time) to a vicious, egotistical and cruel parody of a human being.
His book is not comfortable reading. It shows just how petty, mean and nasty us hairless apes can be. You won’t find much here to leave you cheering for human nature, and it leaves you wondering, with a sick ball of dread in your stomach, how two in five Americans can support the foul pig in the White House. To that, Cohen has no answer, other than the smug belief of all con artists that there are many marks out there, an endless supply.
Cohen himself is a lesser pig, and I hate to reward him for his swinish behavior by recommending his book. But I think of all the books about Trump that we’ve seen so far, including Mary Trump’s brilliant effort, this is the most important one for us to read to take the true measure of what we, and America, are up against.