We read Michael Cohen’s book on Trump so you don’t have to. But you should.

Over the past five years, I’ve performed many masochistic acts known as reviewing Trump books — specifically, the big buzzworthy tomes by his family, former associates, and the journalists who got closest. This began with Trump’s own bestsellers, from both before and after his campaign began, and the most revealing Trump biography. There followed Ivanka’s cut-and-paste mess; Michael Wolff’s overly gossipy Fire and Fury; Bob Woodward’s 2018 book on Trump, the boring and bogus Fear; Omarosa’s self-delusional half-apology; James Comey’s self-serving non-apology; and Mary Trump’s disappointingly disjointed family soap opera.

My goal was not to judge the books on their news value, because in each case the news cycle was awash with the juiciest tidbits. Instead I judged them as, y’know, books. Are they page-turners? Can the author or their chosen ghost actually write well? Does the narrative hang together or collapse into a mess of self-contradiction? Do we walk away from the final page feeling like we learned something, or do we want to stab our eyes out with a pencil? In nearly all these cases, it was pencil-stabby time. 

Which is why it was a pleasant surprise to pick up Disloyal, the new book out this week from federal inmate number 86067-054, better known as Trump’s former personal attorney and “fixer,” Michael Cohen. My expectations, given all the books that preceded it, were on the floor. But Cohen’s narrative vaulted over them anyway. Disloyal is, amazingly, the first Trump book by a Trump associate that’s worth  reading all the way through — even if you’ve already read the juicy extracts (like Cohen’s new evidence for the existence of the infamous pee tape).  

At the heart of its appeal is the fact that Cohen has no fucks left to give. The worst has already happened. He’s in the federal prison system. He was left for dead, in effect, in a COVID-19-infected jail when Attorney General Bill Barr changed the conditions of prisoner release just before Cohen was set to leave, an apparent retaliation against a guy who turned on Barr’s boss. The prison guards were Trump fans who made his life hell. If you’re ever going to make an honest assessment of your life, leaving no bad stone unturned, it’s when you’ve hit rock bottom like this. 

Cohen has made a thorough self-appraisal, and the judgment is this: He was a giant dick.

Cohen has made a thorough self-appraisal, and the judgment is this: He was a giant dick. A pathetic mob-glamorizing New York goombah, whose Sopranos-style bully boy tactics enabled an even larger dick to become a fascist monster. He knows that history will always hate him for it, he’s clear about how much his wife and kids hated him for it, and he accepts it all as his due. “I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I couldn’t stop it; I didn’t want to stop it,” he writes. “I took a weird kind of pleasure in harming others in the service of Donald Trump, to my eternal shame.”

This isn’t just a one-and-done kind of owning his actions. Cohen takes self-flagellation like a medieval monk, calmly and consistently. Take the time he brought Trump and the late Fox News chief Roger Ailes together on the phone to make nice after Trump insulted Fox’s Megyn Kelly after his first debate, which led to Kelly and her family going into hiding. Cohen marvels at Ailes’ hypocrisy in defending Kelly, since he also abused her and dozens of women at Fox. Here he was on the phone with “two old white sexual predators,” Cohen notes, then corrects himself:  

There were three douchebags on that call, not two. I was enabling two fat, rich, old, disgusting creeps as surely as a drug dealer sliding a complimentary fix of heroin or Oxycodone across the bar to a drug addict would be.

Bingo. Here at last is the self-awareness about complicity lacking in Comey and Omerosa, even lacking in Mary Trump, clearly lacking in Ivanka. Michael Wolff didn’t realize he was a mouthpiece for Steve Bannon. Bob Woodward was similarly played by his administration sources; Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Lindsay Graham, and the wife-beating Rob Porter came out of Fear looking pretty good. Cohen knew he was getting played by Trump, regularly; he craved it anyway, for the heady rush of power and celebrity access it gave him. 

An entire book of mea culpas would get boring very fast, but that’s not what Disloyal is. Most of the time we see things through Cohen’s eyes at the time, from the mob hit he witnessed as a teenager through more than two decades of doing steadily worse dirty work for “the Boss,” as he calls Trump even now. We witness it without forgiveness. 

This is the essential tension in the narrative: Cohen knows the president is a corrupt and petty nightmare totally unsuited to the job, he wishes he hadn’t egged on his campaign, and yet he still feels kinship with his fellow early-riser teetotaler telephone screamer. Stiffing contractors, suing creditors, ripping off realtors: good times. “I care for Donald Trump, even to this day, and I had and still have a lot of affection for him,” Cohen says. 

It’s all very Succession — a special crossover episode starring Saul Goodman.

A lot of his pathetic servility to the Trumps is just baked into Cohen’s DNA now. He repeats the title he had at the Trump Organization, Executive Vice President and Special Counsel, like it’s a mantra. He still has a blind spot around Melania being a good person, probably due to the crushing guilt about all the times he had to lie to her about the Boss’ escapades. Cohen loves Ivanka, who apparently loved his lasagna and called him MC, and hates Jared with a passion. He feels bad for Junior, after repeatedly witnessing him being verbally abused by his dad. Other interlopers are all bad, the kids can do no wrong. It’s all very Succession — a special crossover episode starring Saul Goodman.  

More importantly for our purposes, Cohen loves words. He isn’t always great with them — the guy clearly needs to learn what a dangling participle is — but there’s a certain charm to his unvarnished New York style. And at least he knows the importance of brevity. Cohen quotes Elmore Leonard, not just a great crime writer but also a great writing teacher, who advised editing out everything the reader would skip over. 

Thus, mercifully, we don’t get recaps of well-known moments in Trump campaign history, the kind of culled-from-clippings stuff that pads out almost all those other books. What’s left is a pretty taut narrative. Cohen wasn’t involved in the election beyond key payments to buy the silence of Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, both of whom wanted to go public with Trump affair stories, and beyond a few early decisions. 

But these decisions, held up to the light, are terrifying enough. For example, Cohen was all about adding a veneer of racial respectability to Trump’s clearly racist campaign. He promoted two bloggers named Diamond and Silk. He was the one who seeded Trump rallies “with a few token minorities in the background as he spoke, to avoid the KKK appearance lurking just below the surface” of earlier all-white events. Cohen first provided the permission many voters sought to vote their racist fears without being too obvious. 

Cohen doesn’t agree with the federal charges brought against him; he claims he knew nothing about tax evasion in his taxi medallion business, and only pled guilty to save his wife from being indicted too. But he knows he’s guilty as hell of enabling Donald Trump, so his defense is muted and skipped until the final chapter. 

It’s a mere tinkle next to the clanging bell he sounds. The one warning us that Trump is cravenly submissive to wealthy autocrats like Putin (whom Trump believes to be the world’s first trillionaire), admires them so much he will provoke a constitutional crisis if he loses, and is not joking about running again in 2024. 

Given this assessment, which as many people need to hear as often as possible in a narratively gripping way, Disloyal could well be called one of the most important books of the year.