The president’s former fixer describes him as a mob boss figure who made racist insults, was driven by hatred for President Barack Obama and engaged in underhanded tactics against opponents.
President Trump routinely referred to Black leaders of foreign nations with racist insults. He had an abiding admiration for President Vladimir V. Putin’s willingness to treat Russia like a personal business. And he was consumed with hatred for President Barack Obama. Those are the descriptions that Michael D. Cohen, a former personal lawyer and self-described fixer for Mr. Trump, lays out in his book, “Disloyal: A Memoir,” which paints the president as a sordid, moblike figure willing to engage in underhanded tactics against anyone opposing him. “As a rule, Trump expressed low opinions of all Black folks, from music to culture and politics,” Mr. Cohen writes in the book, to be released Tuesday. He describes Mr. Trump calling Nelson Mandela, who led the emancipation of South Africa from white minority rule, “no leader.” “Tell me one country run by a Black person that isn’t a shithole,” Mr. Cohen quotes Mr. Trump as saying. He also alleges that Mr. Trump called Kwame Jackson, a Black contestant on his reality TV show “The Apprentice,” a homophobic slur, and that he had deep disgust with Black leaders in addition to celebrities and sports figures. He also was obsessed with Mr. Obama, Mr. Cohen writes. The book describes Mr. Trump hiring “a Faux-Bama, or fake Obama, to record a video where Trump ritualistically belittled the first Black president and then fired him, a kind of fantasy fulfillment that it was hard to imagine any adult would spend serious money living out — until he did the functional equivalent in the real world.” The video Mr. Cohen describes appears to be a recording that was supposed to be shown the first night of the Republican National Convention in 2012, when Mr. Trump had endorsed the party’s presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, and insisted on having time during the programming. Among the revelations from Mr. Cohen, who worked for Mr. Trump for more than a decade, are descriptions of the negotiations during the 2016 campaign with a key official at the Trump Organization about how to pay off an adult-film actress who said she had an affair with Mr.
