On national TV, President Trump’s old attack dog faced off against his new ones.
For 14 seasons, on NBC’s “The Apprentice,” Donald J. Trump presented a gilded image of the Trump Organization, which the reality show depicted as a hard-charging, happy, successful business.
On Wednesday, before the House oversight committee and a nationwide TV audience, Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s longtime lawyer and fixer, told America that it had been watching a different story all along: less “The Apprentice” and more “The Sopranos.”
Mr. Cohen described a business, and a campaign, in which lies and threats were routine and embarrassing stories were bought and buried, all in service of a boss who dropped Tony Sopranoesque hints about how best to make his problems go away.
Mr. Cohen, who had already pleaded guilty to lying to Congress, brought documentation to back up some of his charges. Besides addressing his credibility issues, it was a Trumpian visual gesture, providing the TV networks dramatic images to splash onscreen alongside his testimony — checks, letters, financial statements, a portrait of himself that Mr. Trump bought using funds from his charitable foundation, according to Mr. Cohen.
But beyond any specific accusation, Mr. Cohen was making a more sweeping argument: that his onetime boss was not a good person. He was a “racist,” a “con man” and a “cheat.” Mr. Cohen stuck with Mr. Trump, he said, because he had something to gain from it. (He described the reality star’s presence as “intoxicating.”)
And in some dramatic exchanges, he told his hostile Republican questioners that they were now carrying the same water. “I protected Mr. Trump for 10 years,” he said. “The more people that follow Mr. Trump as I did, blindly, are going to suffer the same consequences as I did.”
While describing the president like a Mario Puzo creation, Mr. Cohen wrote himself as someone out of Charles Dickens: rattling his chains as a caution like Jacob Marley in “A Christmas Carol” and maybe even earning, in his words, “redemption,” like Sydney Carton sacrificing himself at the end of “A Tale of Two Cities.
