President Trump appeared Thursday on the radio show of Michael Cohen, his fixer-turned-foe, in a stunning public reunion with the man who once called him a “Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain” and testified against him both in court and before Congress.
For Cohen, who served prison time for his role in what he said was covering up Mr. Trump’s “dirty deeds,” it was the culmination of a behind-the-scenes detente that would have been impossible to imagine several years ago.
The interview, part of which aired Thursday evening on Cohen’s radio program on 77 WABC-AM in New York and which will air in full on Sunday, was an exceptionally friendly affair, with only passing reference to the men’s tumultuous history.
“They weaponized you like nobody’s ever been weaponized, like few have been,” Mr. Trump told Cohen.
“I respect the fact that you recanted everything you said,” he went on. “That’s a big thing that you did.”
In an interview with CNN shortly before the radio interview aired, Cohen said he had resubmitted a pardon application to the White House that had been denied by the previous administration, but had yet to receive any response and planned to follow up Friday.
“I took that same application with the same documentation, and I just rewrote the cover letter removing the name of President Joe Biden and inserting the name President Donald Trump,” Cohen said. ” … I have not received an acknowledgement that they have the application, which is on my to-do list. … I intend to call tomorrow to find out what happened because I did send it by FedEx, so I do have a receipt.”
The truce with Cohen makes him the latest in a long line of Trump loyalists who have had public fallings-out with the president but found themselves back in his good graces. Other recent examples include Elon Musk and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
But the split from Cohen was perhaps the most personal. Cohen once boasted that he would “take a bullet” for the president and was by Mr. Trump’s side during his political rise. After their public breakup, Cohen’s testimony in Mr. Trump’s 2024 criminal hush money trial instead helped secure Mr. Trump’s criminal conviction just as he was trying to make his political comeback.
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Behind the Trump-Cohen mending of fences
Cohen has since criticized prosecutors in the case — an admission that paved the way for their reconciliation.
Cohen has said he and the president have had multiple conversations over the past year and introduced the interview by explaining his decision to move on.
“Forgiveness does not mean amnesia. It does not mean that the past did not happen. It does not mean the scars vanish, that the pain was fake or that I have forgotten a single second of what transpired, I have not. Forgiveness isn’t about erasing history,” he said. “It is about having the courage to decide that yesterday will no longer dictate tomorrow.”
He sounded nostalgic about a time when he was one of Mr. Trump’s most trusted aides, saying at one point, “Boss, remember when I was by your side?”
The clip was introduced with the 1975 War song, “Why Can’t We Be Friends,” and closed with the lyrics, “Reunited and it feels so good,” from the 1978 Peaches & Herb song.
In a long post on his online newsletter Thursday promoting the interview, Cohen said that although his relationship with Mr. Trump became “political blood sport,” there were 15 years of close friendship between them.
“The good times don’t cease to have existed because the bad times came afterward,” Cohen wrote.
Simply, he said, “We forgave.”
The president had made no warm public statements about Cohen before Thursday, but in a series of social media posts this year, he linked to some of his former lawyer’s comments saying he felt pressured by prosecutors to testify against Mr. Trump in the criminal hush money case and a civil fraud case.
Highlights of the Trump-Cohen split
In 2024, Cohen was the star witness in Mr. Trump’s criminal hush money trial, which resulted in a 34-count felony conviction. He ended up facing no punishment.
But over days of probing questioning by prosecutors, followed by bruising cross-examination, Cohen placed the then-Republican candidate at the center of schemes during the 2016 presidential election to stifle accounts from an adult film actor and former Playboy model who said they had sexual encounters with Mr. Trump.
Cohen testified that Mr. Trump promised to reimburse the lawyer for the money Cohen fronted and he was constantly updated on behind-the-scenes efforts to bury stories the campaign feared could be harmful.
“What I was doing, I was doing at the direction of and benefit of Mr. Trump,” Cohen testified.
Cohen’s testimony at the time appeared to be the final breach in a once-close relationship between the lawyer and his client that was tested in dramatic fashion in 2018 when FBI agents searched Cohen’s office, home and hotel room.
Cohen later pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about a Trump Tower project in Russia as well as to campaign finance violations in which he implicated Mr. Trump in payments that went to Stormy Daniels, the adult film star, and Karen McDougal, the Playboy playmate. He was sentenced to three years in prison.
“I truly f**king hope that this man ends up in prison,” Cohen said at one point. “You better believe I want this man to go down and rot inside for what he did to my family.”
Trump and Cohen patch things up
Since his trial testimony, though, Cohen has sung a different tune as he’s moved closer to Mr. Trump, insisting that he had testified under duress.
“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 in a Substack post in January.
Cohen testified before Congress in 2019, alleging Mr. Trump had a history of misrepresenting the value of assets to gain favorable loan terms and tax benefits.
He gave similar testimony in a 2023 civil fraud trial in New York, which found that Mr. Trump and his companies had engaged in fraud by exaggerating his wealth for decades. A New York appeals court later threw out a $550 million judgment against Mr. Trump in that case. Mr. Trump has asked a court to overturn the remaining parts of the case.
In his tell-all memoir in 2020, “Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump,” Cohen was unsparing, calling Mr. Trump an “organized crime don” and “master manipulator.”
But, foreshadowing their later rapprochement, Cohen also wrote that he still cared for Mr. Trump, writing, “I had and still have a lot of affection for him.”
