President Donald Trump and his former fixer Michael Cohen are putting their contentious past behind them.
Trump on Thursday joined Cohen, who has testified against him in Congress and in court, for an interview on Cohen’s radio show. The appearance, via phone, marked a new chapter in the pair’s fraught relationship after years of feuding that included Cohen’s serving as a star witness in two trials targeting Trump and congressional testimony in which he called his former boss a “racist, a con man and a cheat.”
During the show, Cohen struck a different tone, quoting a Bible verse about forgiveness, playing the song “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” and largely avoiding mention of their previous clashes.
Trump, for his part, touched on some of their past, saying his former ally had been “weaponized ... like nobody’s ever been weaponized.”
“They weaponized a lot of people, and I respect the fact that you recanted everything you said,” Trump told Cohen, who was sentenced to three years in prison for what he described in 2018 as actions done in “blind loyalty” to Trump.
Asked earlier in the day on CNN whether he was taking back anything he has said about Trump, Cohen responded, “What was said is said, and that’s where I stand with it.”
Cohen toed a similar line on his radio show, saying he did not want his fight with Trump to be the defining chapter of his life.
“The good memories don’t cease to exist simply because terrible ones followed them,” Cohen said. “True loyalty doesn’t mean pretending that you were never hurt. Reconciliation doesn’t mean surrendering your principles or rewriting facts. It simply means deciding that your story doesn’t have to end in its worst chapter.”
Trump’s remarks, however, were more reminiscent of his campaign-style rallies. He spoke in positive terms about the Iran war, disparaged Democrats and boasted about his economic policies.
The full interview is expected to air at 5 p.m. ET Sunday on Cohen’s WABC radio show, “When You Know, You Know.”
Cohen told NBC News before the interview aired Thursday: “There are things that he said to me that I have never heard before. It was a great interview, and people will be shocked when they hear it.”
The prospect of Trump’s joining Cohen for an interview would have been unthinkable until recently after Cohen cooperated with prosecutions of Trump.
For over a decade, Cohen worked for Trump as a devoted lawyer and fixer, and he famously said he’d “take a bullet” for his boss. They fell out in 2018, after Cohen was caught in the crosshairs of dual investigations by special counsel Robert Mueller and a U.S. attorney’s office in New York.
Cohen pleaded guilty that year to what a federal judge later described as a “veritable smorgasbord” of criminal conduct, including making secret payments to women who claimed they had affairs with Trump, lying to Congress about Trump’s business dealings with Russia and failing to report millions of dollars in income. That led to his three-year prison sentence.
“My weakness can be characterized as a blind loyalty to Donald Trump,” he said at his sentencing, adding that “time and time again I felt it was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds.”
Trump denied wrongdoing and claimed Cohen was lashing out only because he didn’t get a pardon. Cohen told CNN on Thursday before the radio interview aired that he didn’t ask Trump for a pardon during their conversation.
In 2019, Cohen testified before Congress about Trump’s business practices the previous year, telling lawmakers that “Mr. Trump inflated his total assets when it served his purposes” and “deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes.”
Those claims led New York Attorney General Letitia James to open an investigation into the Trump Organization soon afterward, while the Manhattan district attorney’s office began looking into Cohen’s claims that Trump had directed him to make hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
Cohen testified at both trials, which separately led to a civil judgment of hundreds of millions of dollars against Trump’s company and a guilty verdict on 34 counts of falsifying business records.
Trump in 2023 filed a $500 million lawsuit against him, alleging he violated their attorney-client relationship by revealing privileged information. Trump dropped the suit later that year, shortly before he was scheduled to be deposed in the case.
Their public relationship took a turn in January, when Cohen claimed on Substack that he’d been “coerced” into testifying at the trials.
“I felt pressured and coerced to only provide information and testimony that would satisfy the government’s desire to build the cases against and secure a judgment and convictions against President Trump,” he wrote.
The district attorney’s and attorney general’s offices have said their investigations weren’t politically motivated.
Trump’s attorneys are now using Cohen’s comments in court filings for their pending appeals of his criminal conviction and civil judgment. The attorney general’s office shrugged off the effort in a March court filing.
“Whatever can be gleaned from this unsworn post, it is certainly not that Cohen gave false information to OAG during his interviews,” the filing said, noting that Cohen said on an ABC podcast in March that “[i]n no way, shape or form should it connote that the information that I provided [to OAG] was anything but truthful and accurate.”
Cohen confirmed to NBC News last month the New York Times’ report that he had had two in-person meetings with Trump since last year, one at his Bedminster, New Jersey, estate last year and then again at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida this year. He said the meeting was “warm and reminiscent of old times.”
Cohen said Thursday on Substack that his interview with Trump was based on “forgiveness.”
At the end of their on-air conversation Thursday, Cohen quoted the 1978 Peaches & Herb song “Reunited” as it played in the background, telling listeners: “Yeah, reunited, and it feels so good.”
