Disloyal: A Memoir
(Skyhorse, $32.50) “Disloyal is as unsavory a book as Michael Cohen is a character,” said Alex Shephard in
The New Republic. Donald Trump’s former personal attorney is a convicted felon currently serving time for crimes he committed on Trump’s behalf, and his new memoir chronicles much other dirty work he performed in his decade as Trump’s fixer. “Still, the revelations in Disloyal are significant,” and its read on the president is valuable, too. For Cohen, as for so many other acolytes, Trump embodies a particular batch of resentments and desires, including the desire to ignore reality when it’s unfavorable. Cohen remains a clownish figure. “But in the upside-down world of Trump’s America, sometimes clowns have more insight than everyone else.”
“The book is written with all the heat of a spurned former lover,” which is part of what makes it enjoyable, said Naomi Fry
in NewYorker.com. Though “riddled with clichés and often repetitive,” Disloyal does deliver “a granular sense of the chaos that is life in the Trump vortex,” complete with petty rivalries and ill-judged schemes. News stories have noted Cohen’s claims that Trump is a racist, a philanderer, and a tax cheat. They also have reported that Trump taped a video in 2012 in which he ritually fired an actor playing Barack Obama, and that Trump believed that the $54 million he made on a 2008 Florida real estate sale was a direct contribution from Vladimir Putin. But it’s the atmosphere of constant grifting that’s most enlightening here.
Cohen pushes back against one key allegation, said Tyler Olson in FoxNews.com. While reporting that Trump allied with Putin during 2016 to get a Moscow skyscraper built, he claims that the campaign was too disorganized to “actually conspire” with Russia. Elsewhere he warns that his former client is a danger to the country, said Carlos Lozada in The Washington Post. Even so, rather than seeming truly sorry for his part in enabling Trump’s rise, Cohen gives the impression that if he hadn’t been caught, and then pushed aside, he’d still be happily playing gangster. “The whole thing is written as a lament—but it’s really a lament that it’s over.”