Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s onetime fixer and convicted felon, is set to report to a federal penitentiary in a few months to serve three years for his role in a host of financial crimes, including arranging illegal payoffs to several women in exchange for their silence about alleged affairs committed with Trump.
Given that Cohen is about to spend a considerable chunk of time behind bars, he opted him to spend some of his last few precious moments of freedom in a dark room with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, desperately trying to rehabilitate his image before he’s locked up. And, honestly, the whole thing is just kind of sad.
“I knew what I was doing was wrong,” a mopey-sounding Cohen admitted, adding: “I stood up before the world and I accepted the responsibility for my actions.”
While not sharing anything anything particularly concrete that hadn’t, in some way, been reported on by the press already—Did you know that Donald Trump is a habitual liar?—Cohen’s interview instead was a transparent attempt to frame himself as a tragic hero in this whole ridiculous saga. In addition to vowing to share everything he knows about Trump’s alleged crimes with Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, Cohen said that his hope was to be remembered by history as “helping to bring this country back together.”
“Somehow or another, this task has now fallen onto my shoulders,” Cohen said.
“I gave loyalty to someone who, truthfully, does not deserve loyalty,” Cohen added later.
Which isn’t to say that Cohen didn’t still display some residual, reflexive subservience to the man who spent a lifetime shitting on his chief aide. Per Cohen—who has literally spent the past several months telling federal prosecutors what a terrible person Donald Trump is—the xenophobic, chronically lying maniac we see on TV and Twitter isn’t actually the real Trump.
He even had some advice for his longtime patron, which Trump will absolutely take to heart, for sure.
Anyway, I suppose we can look forward to a few more months of the Cohen rehabilitation tour before he’s locked away, but judging from this opening salvo, the most impressive thing about Michael Cohen these days is his jacket-turtleneck combo.