Michael Cohen was at home on the afternoon of Thursday, May 30, in his tenth-floor apartment at Trump Park Avenue, a building still managed by the family company belonging to the man he once called “the Boss.” He was sitting on the floor in the living room, his back against the couch, watching MSNBC with his wife and daughter. He held his breath as he waited to hear the verdict. His face was frozen. Eyes wide. Mouth open. Host Ari Melber delivered the news: “Count one … Guilty.” Cohen let out a wild sound, as if half-man and half–rescue animal, a hoot and a growl and a howl all at once. “WwwwwOOOfugh!” His expression turned awestruck. Melber continued, “Count two … Guilty.” Again: “WwwwwOOOfugh!” His heart was beating hard now, so hard that you could almost see it through his shirt. “Count three … Guilty.” “WwwwwOOOfugh!” His wife and daughter laughed, cried, and applauded. “Count four … Guilty.” “WwwwwOOOfugh!” “Count five … Guilty.” “WwwwwOOOfugh!” He balled his hands into fists, punched the air, and cried out, “Yes!”
Inside a stuffy courtroom in lower Manhattan, Donald Trump was having a more contained reaction to the news. He looked downcast as he absorbed the 34 lashes of the verdict. The judge, New York State justice Juan Merchan, then briskly went through the formalities of conviction: polling the members of the jury to check if they were truly unanimous, scheduling a sentencing hearing for July 11, and ordering up a report on Trump from the Probation Department. He released the convict — the certain Republican nominee for president — back into the free world on his own recognizance.
Four miles north, a few blocks from Trump Tower, a smile flickered across Cohen’s face. He had been there — crushed beneath the heel of the system. It seemed only just that Trump should now feel its weight too.
He had hoped that Trump’s conviction would mean his own vindication. For weeks, the defense had campaigned against his character and other witnesses had needled or knifed him on the stand. “He said he was a lawyer,” testified Jeffrey McConney, a former Trump Organization colleague, his voice rich with disdain. “He liked to call himself ‘a fixer,’” Hope Hicks told the court, “and it was only because he first broke it.” Her testimony particularly stung and enraged Cohen. Inside the Trump Organization, Cohen had been perfectly happy to play the bad guy, and he was perfectly happy — often even proud — to recollect his bad-guy past. But testimony that suggested he was bad at being the bad guy? That was too much for him to take. Cohen was still a Trump man at heart. He couldn’t stand the idea that others close to Trump, who saw the world as he once had — divided simply between winners and losers — had thought him a loser all along.
The defendant left no doubt about where he stood. On social media, Trump called his former henchman a “jailbird” and a “sleaze-bag.” In rebuttal, Cohen called Trump “Von ShitzInPantz” and a “Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain.” Inherit the Wind it was not. Some TV commentators argued that Cohen was such a lowlife, and his testimony so unreliable, that it threatened the prosecution’s case. Trump’s lead attorney, Todd Blanche, used the phrase “Cohen lied,” or some variation of it, more than 60 times in his summation. Cohen, according to Blanche, was reasonable doubt personified. If the jury had ended up deadlocking over a Trump verdict, as the defense was hoping, then it was Cohen who would take the blame for the mistrial. So the unanimous guilty verdict came with a sense of release and revenge. They were even: both officially convicted felons. The loser had won.
Still, on some level, Cohen regretted his betrayal. He had not had a choice, as he saw it, but he wished that he had, that Trump had not forced him into the role of enemy. He wished that he could have stayed in his good graces, continued to serve as personal attorney to the president of the United States, continued to work as an extremely expensive Trump-world consultant trading on his connections to the administration. Cohen had spent a lot of time thinking through the endless counterfactuals. Even if he believes, as he says he does, that Trump is dangerous, that he’s bad for the country, bad for humanity, and that in fact we have not yet seen just how bad things will get — that if he’s elected again, the country may not survive — Cohen would take it all back if he could. In a heartbeat, he would accept an alternative reality in which he was never put in a position to become the witness who helped convict the first U.S. ex-president ever to be criminally indicted. He didn’t buy it when people said that in such a reality, his life would be much worse. He might have gone to prison anyway, like so many others who remained loyal to the Boss. But Cohen dismissed lines of thinking that complicated his regret.
On the floor of his apartment, with MSNBC still droning in the background, the smile Cohen flashed dissolved fast, replaced by a worried look. Smiling didn’t feel quite right. He wondered: Was it safe to smile now? Could he even wear a smile comfortably? He wasn’t so sure.
A few hours later, he took the elevator to the lobby of the apartment building, walked over the Trump seal engraved in bronze on its marble floor, and went out through the front door. Trump’s name loomed overhead from the gilded awning. A media scrum had formed on the sidewalk upon news of the verdict. The journalists lurched in his direction, pointing recording devices and microphones and cameras. He stared straight ahead, waving them off, and boarded an idling black SUV. As he tried to shut the door, a reporter wedged his body halfway into the vehicle. He pleaded with Cohen for a sound bite, a word, anything. Cohen declined and politely wrestled the door shut. The reporter knocked on his window. Others followed, making contact with the car as it rolled away.
In the quiet, Cohen exhaled. For a few blocks, he was quiet, too. He wore a dark blazer, dark pants, and dress shoes. The stress of the trial had taken its toll and he had lost 30 pounds. When people told him he looked good, he was offended. He had not been doing well, and he was not happy when the evidence of suffering worn on his body was seen as anything else. “I look horrible,” he would shoot back, correcting the compliment. His face, with its marsupial features, was sunken. He looked out the window at nothing in particular. Finally, as the car passed St. Patrick’s Cathedral, he spoke.
“I thought I would feel differently,” he said. He had expected something approaching peace or happiness or at least some catharsis, a reprieve from the darkness and anxiety that had consumed him, in a variety of ways and with varying degrees of totality, since 2018, when he turned against Trump, decided to cooperate with prosecutors, and pleaded guilty to eight federal felonies. The list of charges included tax evasion, making false statements to banks and Congress, and campaign-finance violations related to a $130,000 hush-money payoff to Stormy Daniels — the same transaction at the heart of Trump’s Manhattan trial. On cross-examination, he had referred to this process as “my journey,” therapy-speak that Blanche seized on and ridiculed. (“Well, the journey you have been on, at least for the past few years, has included daily attacks on President Trump. That’s part of your journey, right, sir?”) But Cohen really did feel as if he had been traveling somewhere, and now that he had reached his intended destination, he was hollow.
“It’s hard to believe that after six years, after everything I’ve been through, that the journey is complete.” He let out a one-note laugh. “It’s unbelievable that this is the first time in his life that he’s been held accountable for anything.”
The SUV pulled up at 30 Rock, where he was set to appear on MSNBC. Back in 2018, when Cohen’s residences and offices were raided by the FBI, the network’s hosts had greeted the news with breathless anticipation. Cohen testified at trial that in those same moments, he was alone and despondent; other witnesses said they feared he would take his own life. Six years later, though, Cohen and the liberal media were on the same team. As Cohen walked across the Peacock-print carpet and made his way to security, MSNBC’s biggest stars — Melber, Chris Hayes, Nicolle Wallace, Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid — were locking in upstairs for a night of special coverage. Cohen offered a friendly greeting to the guard as he removed a fig-size coin, a good-luck charm from a fan, from his pocket.
Upstairs, the mood around the greenroom was giddy. Maddow sprinted through the hallway, her show notes in hand. MSNBC had been covering the Trump verdict like the fall of the Berlin Wall, and now it was time to celebrate victory for the good guys. Cohen received a resistance hero’s welcome. As the backslapping and handshaking and congratulating crescendoed, he loosened up, the flash of a smile giving way to a perma-grin and his quiet stare thawing into hyperactive animation. He laughed and joked with the hosts and analysts and reporters and pundits who were by now Cohen’s old friends, even though he first got to know many of them as he helped fight Trump’s war — a sometimes WrestleMania-style spectacle — against the “fake news” media.
“Long day?” Hayes asked.
“Six years,” Cohen replied. “Six. Years.”
He hugged MSNBC host and legal commentator Katie Phang. “I didn’t eat the whole day. I was, like, nauseous,” he told her. “You know what I ate today? I ate one hard-boiled egg.” A producer perked up and offered to show Cohen over to a craft-services table. He eyed the selection with little interest as he made his way to a coffee urn. He drinks it black, no sugar, an order that has become part of his consumable character as described in both of his books. He paced around, coffee in one hand and phone in the other.
Cohen’s attorney, Danya Perry, arrived to join him on the panel. “Everyone was emotional,” she said, describing the moments after the verdict was read. “I think for a bunch of different reasons.” They both proceeded to the makeup room, though Cohen declined a touch-up for himself. As campy and, well, Trumpy as he could sometimes be, he did not possess the showman’s vanity, even if he did think he looked, at present, pretty lousy. Perry had been by Cohen’s side since his release from a federal prison in 2020 and had helped to prepare him for his four days on the witness stand. Compared to those ordeals, this TV interview would be easy, but Perry couldn’t resist giving him some words of caution. “No gloating,” she told him. “No victory lap!” Cohen turned to face her and winked. He was so back. And then he was on.
For as long as he could remember, Michael Cohen had had trouble sleeping. As a kid growing up on Long Island, he was nervous and restless. He lay awake deep into the night, eyes fixed on the ceiling, panicked about mortality. There was no God, he was as sure then as he is now, and that scared him. “I believe when you die, that’s it, and it saddens me,” he said. “There’s no soul. No free will. There’s nothing.” As a kid, he sometimes stole drinks from his parents’ liquor cabinet just to settle himself down. (He now drinks only the occasional Scotch, he says.) When he did manage to sleep without chemical assistance, his mind and his body still could not rest. In a recurring dream, he was Moses. He would sleepwalk through his house clutching a hockey stick in his hand like a staff. “Let my people go,” he would say.
Sleeplessness continued to plague Cohen in adulthood. His coffee dependence didn’t help. Neither did his anxious addiction to work, a condition that only worsened as his conscious hours became consumed with his service to “Mr. Trump.” Cohen was rich before he ever met Trump. His father was a surgeon, and his siblings were all lawyers. He married into a Ukrainian American family in the taxi business and, through taxi medallions and real estate, amassed significant wealth of his own. By the early aughts, Cohen was worth tens of millions on paper (he estimates his net worth peaked at $104 million), and he and his in-laws began buying units in Trump buildings as both residences and investment properties. He first became acquainted with the Trump family when he helped stamp out a........