Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen has been on something of a repentance tour since he pled guilty to a slew of felonies and admitted to giving women hush money at Trump’s behest. First, he changed his party affiliation to Democrat and urged Americans to vote blue on November 6. Now, he’s apparently super sorry for following around a racist and misogynistic piece of shit for years as part of his own naked pursuit of power. Whoops, man!
Vanity Fair’s Emily Jane Fox spoke with Cohen about the racism Trump demonstrated in the years before his presidency. No shit! Trump’s racism is well documented, from his refusal to rent to black tenants in the 1970s to his racist attacks against the Central Park Five to kicking off his presidential campaign in 2015 by calling undocumented Mexican immigrants rapists.
But okay, Cohen, try and clear your conscience. We’ll wait.
From Vanity Fair:
During our conversation, Cohen recalled a discussion at Trump Tower, following the then-candidate’s return from a campaign rally during the 2016 election cycle. Cohen had watched the rally on TV and noticed that the crowd was largely Caucasian. He offered this observation to his boss. “I told Trump that the rally looked vanilla on television. Trump responded, ‘That’s because black people are too stupid to vote for me.’” (The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
And then there was this moment in the wake of Nelson Mandela’s death in 2013.
“[Trump] said to me, ‘Name one country run by a black person that’s not a shithole,’ and then he added, ‘Name one city,’” Cohen recalled, a statement that echoed the president’s alleged comments about African nations earlier this year.
And this little ditty in the late 2000s, when the two were en route to the Trump International Hotel in Chicago.
“We were going from the airport to the hotel, and we drove through what looked like a rougher neighborhood. Trump made a comment to me, saying that only the blacks could live like this.” After the first few seasons of The Apprentice, Cohen recalled how he and Trump were discussing the reality show and past season winners. The conversation wended its way back to the show’s first season, which ended in a head-to-head between two contestants, Bill Rancic and Kwame Jackson. “Trump was explaining his back-and-forth about not picking Jackson,” an African-American investment manager who had graduated from Harvard Business School. “He said, ‘There’s no way I can let this black f-g win.’”
“I should have been a bigger person, and I should have left,” Cohen told Fox.
Yeah, well, he wasn’t and he didn’t.