“Here we go!” Michael D. Cohen was saying on his radio show as the song playing in the background — “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” — quieted down.
“Mister President!!!”
“Hello, Michael,” the voice on the other end of the phone answered flatly. “How are you, Michael.”
The long, torrid and vexatious relationship between President Trump and Mr. Cohen took its latest turn on Thursday, after the president agreed to do a radio show hosted by his onetime lawyer turned nemesis turned … whatever you call this.
Quick recap: Mr. Cohen made a living for years as a kind of henchman for Mr. Trump and then flipped on him. “Time and time again,” Mr. Cohen told a judge in 2018, “I felt it was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds rather than to listen to my own inner voice and my moral compass.” By 2024, he was the star witness at Mr. Trump’s criminal trial in New York State court, testifying about hush money paid to a porn star.
Mr. Trump, for his part, called Mr. Cohen a “liar” and a “rat.” But the president has a well-documented tendency of allowing people who’ve dissed him — Elon Musk, Megyn Kelly, Stephen K. Bannon — back into his orbit. What’s one more?
Mr. Cohen tried right at the top of their conversation to “go back to 2016,” as he put it.
“You and I have obviously traveled a pretty rocky road together,” he said. “You remember? Do you remember, sir, when I went on CNN with Brianna Keilar, and she told me that you were underwater in the polls, and I responded with those famous two words: Says who? Which became some worldwide meme.”
Whether or not Mr. Trump remembered this particular exchange, he did not say.
In fact, he said almost nothing about the past, their friendship, their falling out, or what compelled him to do Mr. Cohen’s show.
“They weaponized you,” Mr. Trump told his old accomplice. “They weaponized a lot of people, and I respect the fact that you recanted everything you said. And that’s a big — that’s a big thing that you did. That’s a very big thing.” (Mr. Cohen has expressed misgivings about testifying and accused prosecutors of posing leading questions, but has not “recanted everything.”)
That was about as far down memory lane as Mr. Trump was willing to travel. The rest of the conversation consisted of his essentially popping in the same cassette tape that he pops in every day to repeat the same lines he says about the successful war with Iran, and the rockin’ economy, and the crazy Democrats, and the good poll numbers, and the many other lines he says to anyone, anywhere.
He might as well have been calling into “Fox and Friends,” or giving one of his cabinet meeting monologues. For two men with such a twisted history, it was an oddly impersonal and empty exchange.
This was not for Mr. Cohen’s lack of trying.
“You may remember, you may remember, that following morning,” he said at one point, “you called me into the office after, and then you gave me one of those traditional Trump slaps on the shoulder, and you said to me, ‘F— them, you’re stronger than them, we’ve got this …’”
Mr. Trump said that “we’re doing really well in the polls” and that “the economy has never been stronger.”
“Boss,” Mr. Cohen said, teeing up another “remember when” moment. “I literally used to analyze the polls, right? And you remember how much attention that I used to pay to that methodology? I would come in, I would say to you, ‘Oh, you know, they’re claiming that you’re 31 percent, that you’re underwater.’ But I showed you that …”
“The polls are crooked,” Mr. Trump replied.
“Exactly,” Mr. Cohen said.
Mr. Cohen had been hyping up the interview on the radio and on cable news and on social media as an epic homecoming. Shortly before he played his conversation with the president, Mr. Cohen told another host on his radio station: “This is the Donald Trump that I remember. This is the one that acts, and is acting, like the friend that I remember him to be.”
And yet, Mr. Trump seemed entirely uninterested in revisiting that friendship or anything else about the old days.
As Tony Soprano told Paulie Walnuts, “Remember when is the lowest form of conversation.”
The post Why Can’t We Be Friends? Trump Has a Reunion (of Sorts) With Michael Cohen. appeared first on New York Times.
