More Cohen on Trump

In fact, if you go back to my House Oversight Committee hearing, the public hearing, in February of 2019, I cautioned not just Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, and a slew of the Republicans who felt as though they needed to denigrate me repeatedly on behalf of Donald, I warned the entire world on who Donald Trump truly is: a con man. A thief. A liar. They didn’t heed the warning. And many of them are now caught up in significant litigation.
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Q: You wrote that you helped create this Frankenstein monster and let it out of its cage, so you feel a moral duty, or that it’s your penance, to make sure that we re-cage the beast. ...

... Donald Trump never wanted to be president of the United States. [In my day dreams and before I went to bed, I thought that. I took the fantasy a step further: He would announce that it had all been a lark and would decline office in a national address.] The entire campaign originated from a desire to increase the visibility of the brand. And Donald was frequently heard saying, “This is going to be the greatest political infomercial in the history of U.S. politics.” Once he tasted power, I knew that he would never want to give it up. He always admired dictators, monarchs, authoritarians, supreme leaders. And when I stated that we need to put Frankenstein’s monster back in its cage, I believe it’s the only way to silence MAGA and the cult of Donald J. Trump.
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Q: What is your hope for the book, then?

...It’s also to hold those accountable who acted improperly, all at the direction of, and for the benefit of, Donald J. Trump, a wannabe dictator.
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...Donald Trump figured out how to play the media and how to use members of his party in order to discredit me. In fact, when I spoke before the House Oversight Committee, before the world, I made dozens of allegations, the most prescient being that if Donald Trump lost reelection there would never be a peaceful transfer of power. I talked about the inflation of his assets for the purpose of increasing his net worth while deflating the same assets for tax purposes. Every single statement that I made — the ones that were beneficial to Donald and the ones that were detrimental to Donald — were all truthful. They were all accurate. In fact, when I spent 100 hours with the Mueller team, being the second-most quoted person in the Mueller report only behind Don McGahn, two members of the Mueller team came to my sentencing, where they stated that everything I told them was truthful, accurate and relevant to their investigation.
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I also don’t believe that Donald is actually going to run in 2024. Because I believe that he knows that he cannot win and that, even if he did choose to run, that he will face opposition for the Republican nomination. He also knows very well, statistically, that he cannot win the general election. He’s lost those independents now, based upon Roe v. Wade, climate, student relief, etc. So what he’ll do is he will seek to remain relevant in the party by becoming a power broker and believing that whichever nominee he backs and endorses will owe him a duty of loyalty so that, in the event that his day of reckoning comes, they will terminate or pardon him from the plethora of litigation and consequences that currently plagues him.