Former Donald Trump personal lawyer Michael Cohen said the former president believes “he is a God” after CPAC organizers installed a golden statue of him at the conservative conference.
The longtime Trump supporter said that “stupid-looking Donald pagan idol” at the Conservative Political Action Conference this weekend in Orlando, Florida, will offer the former president a brief break from an investigative attack. Cohen told Ali Velshi of MSNBC on Saturday morning that Trump “may be crazy, but he’s not stupid”, saying his former confidant perceives the pressure of the pending litigation directed against him and his real estate organization. Cohen said Trump needs adulation and supporters screaming in the same way that most humans need oxygen to breathe.
Cohen said Trump publicly “will pretend to be invincible”, but the former president is extremely nervous about the ongoing investigations by the Manhattan public prosecutor and others.
“He really likes the crowd’s applause. Now it’s even more interesting because of the artist who produced that golden Donald,” said Cohen on Saturday, reacting to photos showing hundreds of CPAC participants posing next to a golden Trump statue . “Now, he really thinks he’s a god, like a pagan god, people are lining up in the hall to take a picture with a stupid-looking pagan idol from Donald.
“You will have a CPAC filled with people who will come there simply to take a photo with the pagan Donald or to see him speak and continue to spread the kind of horrible comment he has been making for over 5 years,” Cohen said, describing the behavior of the ex-president as a “sociopath”.
Cohen started working as a lawyer for the Trump Organization in 2006, 10 years before his first presidential campaign. Cohen was sentenced to three years in federal prison in 2018 after pleading guilty to lying to Congress, financial crimes and campaign funding violations during his tenure as the president’s fixer. He was released last July and is serving the remainder of his sentence under house arrest until November 22, 2021.
Look Ahead America installed the artwork depicting Trump inside the CPAC exhibition space as the former president prepares to deliver his first major post-presidential speech on Sunday. Cohen said Trump is enjoying the CPAC’s decision to make him the face of the party’s future, despite his ties to the January 6 Capitol attacks and his continued denial of losing the November election to the president Joe Biden.
“THE [GOP] had a chance to advance after 1/6, but Republican voters want Trump, “said Tim Miller, a former Republican Party strategist who left the party, in an interview published on Friday in USA today. “And instead of trying to counter that, Republicans chose submission and raised a gold idol for Trump.”
In fact, what many have described as a Republican civil war since the Capitol rebellion barely registers on the event’s list of speakers, with prominent Republican critics of the former president largely absent, in some cases despite appearing frequently at the event in the years previous ones.
MSNBC presenters Velshi and Cohen laughed after Velshi described CPAC as “a gathering of a bunch of people who say crazy things”.
Cohen praised New York Attorney General Letitia James, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance and the great litigant Mark Pomerantz for his efforts to seek justice against Trump, who has escaped the “all his life” charge.
“There are a lot of litigation pending against him, and he really hates being involved in litigation when he is the defendant, he hates it, Cohen said.” He basically loses all cases where he is a defendant because he lies and you can’t “make him feel for a deposition because his lawyers won’t allow him because he will be full of untruths.”
Newsweek reached out to representatives of Trump and Cohen on Saturday morning for further comment.
DREW ANGERER / Staff / Getty Images