Trump admires Putin because he ‘had the b***s to run a country like personal company’

Donald Trump’s longtime lawyer and personal fixer, Michael Cohen, claims in a new book that the president made ‘overt and covert attempts to get Russia to interfere in the 2016 election’, and said the he admired Vladimir Putin because he has the ‘b**s’ to run Russia like it’s his personal business.

The incredible allegations comes as part of Cohen’s upcoming memoir, Disloyal, set to hit shelves Tuesday, in which the shamed attorney paints Trump as ‘a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.’

Cohen also details Trump’s apparent affinity for Russia leader Putin, insisting the cause of his affections is far more straightforward than many would assume: simply put, money.

Trump loved Putin, Cohen wrote, because of his ability to ‘to take over an entire nation and run it like it was his personal company — like the Trump Organization, in fact.’ 

But he added that Trump’s campaign had been ‘far too chaotic and incompetent to actually conspire with the Russian government.’

The White House has already discredited the book as ‘fan fiction’, adding that Cohen ‘readily admits to lying routinely but expects people to believe him now so that he can make money from book sales.’

While acknowledging his own challenges as a credible narrator, in his book Cohen said that Trump’s sycophantic praise of Putin during the 2016 campaign trail began as an effort to secure the oligarch’s funds for future business dealings when he lost the election.

But Cohen claims Trump came to understand that Putin’s hatred of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, on account of her support for the 2011 protest movement in Russia, could help him amass more power in the US.

‘What appeared to be collusion was really a confluence of shared interests in harming Hillary Clinton in any way possible, up to and including interfering in the American election — a subject that caused Trump precisely zero unease,’ Cohen writes in the book, as observed by the Washington Post.

The memoir, however, does little to shed any new light surrounding the investigations conducted by former special counsel Robert Mueller and others into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

White House officials have dismissed Cohen’s commentary on Russia, insisting his claims are baseless and saying that numerous investigations found ‘no collusion’ between Trump’s campaign and Russia.

Meanwhile, Cohen asserts that another reason Trump so consistently praised Putin publicly was to fulfil his long-held desire to erect a Trump Tower in Moscow.

Cohen says the plans were calling for a 120-story building in Red Square, including 30 floors devoted to a five-star hotel with an Ivanka Trump-branded spa and Trump restaurants. The building would also contain 230 high-end condominiums for Russia Oligarchs and leaders.

Trump, according to Cohen, had planned to gift the building’s penthouse apartment to Putin for free ‘as a way to suck up’ to him.

‘The whole idea of patriotism and treason became irrelevant in his mind,’ Cohen writes. ‘Trump was using the campaign to make money for himself: of course he was.’

Trump later insisted he had no business dealings with Russia. However, Cohen documents his own extensive efforts to turn the Moscow Trump Tower project into a reality – an effort that began in the fall of 2015, months after Trump declared his candidacy.

Cohen says he was given the responsibility to oversee the project, rather than his children, because they disliked Felix Sater, a Russian-American developer who served as the Trump Organization’s liaison with Russia.

He adds that the whole family was aware of the project, despite then-candidate Trump’s public claims he had no ties to Russia.

Ivanka Trump, who is now a senior White House adviser, even selected the proposed tower’s high-end finishes, Cohen writes.

The president’s daughter has previously described her involvement in the project as minimal, saying she never even visited the projected site.

Cohen also describes in detail the partnership between Trump and David Pecker, the chief executive of National Enquirer parent company American Media, who was also a longtime friend of the family.

While Trump’s critics would obsess over the possibility of Russian Interference, it was a purposeful ‘disinformation campaign’ run by US citizens such as Pecker that was ‘by far the more insidious and dangerous development of the last cycle — and the most threatening for 2020,’ Cohen writes.

Cohen points toward how the tabloid targeted each of Trump’s 2016 primary opponents one-by-one. He includes a document in the book purported to show how the magazine planned to take down Sen. Marco Rubio.

The disbarred attorney says the National Enquirer came through for Trump again in 2016, after agreeing to pay former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal, who claimed she had an affair with Trump, for her story but then never ran it.

Trump agreed to repay Pecker for the $150,000 fee but never did, according to Cohen.

Cohen, who pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations and other crimes, including lying to Congress, calls himself the ‘star witness’ of a hush-money conspiracy that still could culminate in charges for Trump after he leaves office. He described his new book as a ‘fundamental piece of evidence’ of the president’s guilt.

Of all the crises Cohen confronted working for Trump, none proved as vexing as the porn actress Stormy Daniels and her claims of an extramarital affair with Trump, Cohen writes.

Trump, despite his later protestations, green-lighted the $130,000 payment to silence Daniels ahead of the 2016 election, reasoning he would ‘have to pay’ his wife a far greater sum if the affair ever became known.

‘It never pays to settle these things, but many, many friends have advised me to pay,’ Trump said, according to Cohen. ‘If it comes out, I’m not sure how it would play with my supporters. But I bet they’d think it’s cool that I slept with a porn star.’

Trump allegedly strategized with Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg on how she could be paid-off without attracting notice.

Weisselberg suggested finding a Trump friend to put up the money, in the guise of paying for a membership to a Trump golf course or the club Mar-a-Lago, according to the book. When Cohen countered that Weisselberg could be that friend, ‘Weisselberg went white as a sheet — like he’d seen a ghost,’ Cohen writes.

Ultimately, Cohen says it fell on him to pay the hush fee. He took out a personal home equity loan to come up with the cash, all the while assuming Trump would probably fail to repay him as agreed.

‘Stuck with the tab for Trump’s sex romp in a hotel room in Utah a decade ago,’ Cohen writes. ‘This was the job I loved?’

Cohen said the president later reimbursed him with ‘fake legal fees’ – monthly instalments of $35,000 after he’d entered the White House as president and hiding the sums by naming Cohen his personal attorney.

Cohen asserts that Trump would get a tax break and legal services along with the money — meaning he would actually come out financially ahead for paying off the adult-film star.

In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the Trump Moscow project, as well as to violating campaign finance laws by paying Daniels to remain silent.

Cohen told the court that he made the payments at the behest of Trump. He also pleaded guilty to tax evasion and lying to a financial institution, crimes that were unrelated to his work for Trump.

He was sentenced to three years in prison, which he had been serving at a federal facility in Otisville, NY, until he was allowed to leave prison and serve his sentence from home because of coronavirus fears.

Beyond Russia and the Daniel’s scandal, the book describes episodes of Trump’s alleged racism and his ‘hatred and contempt’ of his predecessor, Barack Obama, the nation’s only African American president.

Cohen claims that at some point in time, Trump hired a ‘Faux-Bama’ to star in a video, in which Trump ‘ritualistically belittled the first black president and then fired him,’ CNN reported Cohen as having written.

The news organization, which also obtained a copy of the memoir, said that the actor who played Faux-Bama was not named and there’s no hint of when or why the video was filmed.

But, the book does include a color picture in which Trump can be seen sitting behind a desk opposite a besuited black man with graying hair and an American flag pin on his lapel.

One of the books on Trump’s desk reads ‘Obama’.

Over the years, Trump has been criticized for spreading ‘birther’ statements, which insinuated that Obama was unqualified to be president because he might not have been born in the US – an untrue theory.

Among Cohen’s book’s claims was that Trump said the only reason why Obama had been admitted to Columbia University for undergrad and then Harvard Law School was because of ‘f**king affirmative action.’

Cohen also wrote that Trump’s ‘low opinion of all black folks’ included him allegedly saying: ‘Tell me one country run by a black person that isn’t a s**thole. They are all complete f**king toilets.’

On a more personal note, Cohen included some alleged details about Trump’s much discussed hairstyle.

In the memoir, Cohen wrote that the distinctive hairdo is a ‘three-step’ combover, which was developed as a way to hide what Cohen called ‘unsightly scars on his scalp from a failed hair-implant operation in the 1980s’.

Cohen wrote that he once saw Trump post-shower, when his hair was down.

According to Cohen, Trump’s ‘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’.

While making all these alleged revelations about his former client, Cohen also wrote: ‘I care for Donald Trump, even to to this day. I had and still have a lot of affection for him.’

Cohen wrote that his support of Trump for president was due to thinking ‘Trump was a visionary with a no-nonsense attitude and the charisma to attract all kinds of voters’, he writes.

But, wrote that he really wanted Trump in the White House ‘because I wanted the power that he would bring to me.’

Cohen wrote in the memoir that things that Trump has been maligned for after he became president weren’t obvious until after he was elected.

‘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 wrote.

‘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.’

In a statement to the Washington Post Saturday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said that ‘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.’

The White House, meanwhile told the AP that the memoir amounted to ‘fan fiction.’

Cohen ‘readily admits to lying routinely but expects people to believe him now so that he can make money from book sales,’ White House spokesman Brian Morgenstern said in a statement to the news agency.

‘It’s unfortunate that the media is exploiting this sad and desperate man to attack President Trump.’