WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is expected to appear Thursday on the radio show of his former fixer-turned-foe Michael Cohen, making a public reunion with the man who once called him a "Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain" and testified against him both in court and before Congress.
Cohen, who served prison time for his role in what he said was covering up Trump's "dirty deeds," confirmed that the Republican president will appear in a taped interview airing on his 77 WABC program Thursday evening and Sunday.
In an interview with CNN shortly before the interview's scheduled air time, Cohen said it would be a “doozy,” but he declined to address his past criticism of Trump.
“I refuse to be pulled back into yesterday’s news and yesterday’s headline," he said.
To the many people asking, “How is this possible?” he said, “The answer is that we forgave."
The truce with Cohen makes him the latest in a long line of Trump loyalists who have had public falling-outs 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 Trump and was by Trump's side during his political rise. After their public breakup, Cohen's testimony in Trump's 2024 criminal hush-money trial instead paved the way for Trump's criminal conviction just as he was trying to make his political comeback.
Cohen has since criticized prosecutors in the case and has said he and Trump have started to reconcile.
The White House did not comment on Cohen’s statements or confirm the appearance, but Trump’s official schedule showed him taping a radio interview Thursday morning.
In a long post on his online newsletter Thursday promoting the interview, Cohen said that although his relationship with 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.”
Trump has made no warm public statements about Cohen but in a series of social media posts this year linked to some of his former lawyer’s comments saying he felt pressured by prosecutors to testify against Trump in the criminal hush money case and a civil fraud case.
In 2024, Cohen was the star witness in Trump's criminal hush money trial, which resulted in a 34-count felony conviction.
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 Trump.
Cohen testified that Trump promised to reimburse the lawyer for the money he fronted and was constantly updated about behind-the-scenes efforts to bury stories feared to be harmful to the campaign.
“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 Trump in payments that went to Stormy Daniels, an adult film star, and Playboy Playmate Karen MacDougal. He was sentenced to three years in prison.
Since his trial testimony, though, Cohen has sung a different tune as he’s moved closer to 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 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 that found Trump and his companies engaged in fraud by exaggerating his wealth for decades. A New York appeals court later threw out a $550 million judgment against Trump in that case. 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 Trump an "organized crime don" and "master manipulator."
But, foreshadowing their later rapprochement, Cohen also wrote that he still cared for Trump, writing, “I had and still have a lot of affection for him.”
___ Associated Press writers Eric Tucker in Washington and Jill Colvin in New York contributed to this report.
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