Trump’s former fixer travels a tortured path from ‘rat’ to redemption
Peter Baker
Washington – On a radio show last month, President Donald Trump welcomed Michael Cohen, the former fixer he once denounced as a “rat” for testifying against him, back into the fold. “I respect the fact that you recanted everything you said,” Trump said. He went on to use the word “recant” three more times.
In case anyone missed it, the president posted a message on social media Friday claiming that Cohen, a key witness against Trump in criminal and civil trials, “has just fully RECANTED his testimony.” Trump demanded “that any remnant of those Politically Weaponized Cases against me be immediately terminated and dismissed”.
Except that Cohen has not, in fact, recanted his testimony.
In his eagerness to return to the president’s good graces, Cohen now says he “felt pressured and coerced” by prosecutors to testify. But he has not actually disavowed anything that he swore to under oath about Trump’s hush money scheme to cover up an affair with an adult film actor or about his former boss’s efforts to defraud his lenders.
And so this unlikeliest of rapprochements between two men who helped get each other convicted of crimes is built not on an emotional outpouring of forgiveness but on what looks like a pretty straightforward bargain, spoken or unspoken, according to people close to both.
Trump is trying to use his former lawyer’s desire for absolution to rewrite history as he presses his effort to overturn his conviction. Cohen gets to position himself as an insider once again and possibly obtain a presidential pardon to wipe out his own felony record.
The unlikeliest of reunions
Even in the long history of strange-bedfellow political alliances, this may be one of the strangest. To call the reconciliation between Trump and Cohen Shakespearean would not fully capture just how mind-boggling it really is. The Bard would have been hard-pressed to come up with a scenario quite so far-fetched.
Trump, to be sure, has a well-known history of falling back in with people he has fallen out with (think Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn or, for that matter, his current vice president who once compared him to Adolf Hitler, or his secretary of state who once questioned the size of his private parts).
But as one baffled Trump ally put it, Cohen is not someone who just trash-talked the president; he actually testified in court against him.
Cohen went to prison because, he said, he committed crimes at the instructions of the man he now again calls “Boss.” And in a trial in which his onetime fixer provided evidence for the prosecution, Trump was convicted of 34 felonies that, had it not been for the intervening 2024 election, might have put him behind bars as well.
Cohen did not respond to emails seeking comment. Trump posted his social media message Friday about Cohen’s supposedly recanting three hours after a request for comment was sent to the White House, which then passed along the link but otherwise did not respond to questions.
‘On the wrong side’ of the boss
The relationship between these two men has arguably been one of the most consequential in modern presidential history. Cohen worked for Trump for years as his lawyer and fixer, a self-described “pit bull” who handled business and personal problems, and sought to intimidate people who got in the way. He styled himself as a consigliere so loyal that he famously said he would “do anything to protect Mr Trump” including “take a bullet”.
Cohen secretly sought on Trump’s behalf to seal a deal with the Russians to build a Trump tower in Moscow even while his boss was running for president in 2016. He was the middleman who paid $130,000 to porn star Stormy Daniels to buy her silence about her alleged tryst with Trump before the election. (Trump denies the affair.)
That eventually led to criminal charges, a guilty plea and prison. When Cohen was released, the Trump administration revoked his home confinement and locked him up again because he planned to publish a book, a move that a judge overruled because it was “retaliatory.”
When Cohen broke from Trump, he broke big time. In addition to testifying in court, he also went after the president publicly with both barrels, writing books titled “Disloyal” and “Revenge” and characterising his former employer as “a racist,” “con man” and “cheat” during a congressional committee hearing.
By the time Trump won a second term, though, Cohen’s tone began to change. He had not gotten the pardon he had requested from President Joe Biden, nor had he been welcomed with open arms by much of the anti-Trump resistance. With Trump returning to office, any hope for acceptance, much less clemency, now lay with his former boss, and he has resubmitted his pardon application replacing the word “Biden” with “Trump.”
“I think he really wants a pardon,” said Stephanie Grisham, a former White House press secretary for Trump who broke with the president. “I also think he has realised just how hard it is to be on the wrong side of the administration. It’s damn scary out here on the anti-Trump island. And I never got the vibe from him that he wants to work hard at anything, and doing the right thing is never easy.”
‘His identity was Donald Trump’
In the summer of 2025, Cohen had a brief conversation with Trump at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, joined by the president’s top personal legal adviser, Boris Epshteyn, as The New York Times previously reported. By January 2026, Cohen was writing on Substack that “I felt pressured and coerced to only provide information and testimony that would satisfy the government’s desire” to convict Trump.
Two months later, he reached out to Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, who then invited him onto her podcast, where he defended Trump against those questioning his relationship with disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Soon, Cohen was given a radio slot on WABC by John Catsimatidis, the station’s owner and a longtime Trump supporter.
By all accounts, including his own, Cohen was crushed and embittered by the events of the past several years. His life, as he put it on his radio show, was “shredded to pieces,” and he lost his sense of purpose.
“I know what it feels like to take hit after soul-crushing hit, to be bloodied and knocked to the dirt while a crowd of millions cheers for your destruction and then, then, to have to pick up the shattered pieces of your life, alone in the dark while the circus packs up and moves on to its next victim,” he said on his show. “I know the sheer suffocating terror of being turned into a public target sitting in silence while your family weeps, wondering if you’re ever going to survive the night.”
And yet after all that, Cohen turned back to Trump. “People have their sect, their team,” said Greg Ehrlich, a one-time friend who recalls first introducing Cohen to Trump.
“It’s your identity. His identity was Trump. Then he got lucky and had a second life, which was against Trump.”
But now, Ehrlich said, “he needs his identity, and his identity was Donald Trump.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
