President Donald Trump and his onetime personal attorney Michael Cohen appear to have put years of bitter hostility behind them, with the two speaking directly in a radio interview and Trump praising Cohen for walking back previous claims he made about the president.
Excerpts from their conversation aired Thursday on Cohen’s program on New York’s 77 WABC, with the complete interview scheduled to be broadcast Sunday.
Cohen spent years as Trump’s personal attorney and fixer before becoming one of his fiercest adversaries. Their relationship collapsed spectacularly, and Cohen later emerged as the prosecution’s star witness in Trump’s 2024 New York criminal trial involving hush-money payments. Cohen acknowledged in court that he facilitated payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels related to an alleged affair ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
During their new conversation, however, Trump struck a dramatically different tone toward his onetime confidant, arguing that Cohen had been used as part of a broader campaign against him and praising him for subsequently reversing his previous statements.
“They weaponized you; they weaponized a lot of people, and I respect the fact that you recanted everything you said, and that’s a big thing that you did,” Trump said during the interview.
Cohen has recently made public efforts to repair his relationship with Trump. Appearing last month on John Catsimatidis and Rita Cosby’s WABC program “Cats & Cosby,” Cohen revealed that he unexpectedly received a message from Trump approximately six months earlier.
“Out of nowhere, when I was sitting with my wife at a restaurant, my phone buzzed and it was a text from that friend who expressed to me the president’s genuine empathy for the hell that I was being dragged through … I deeply appreciated that text,” Cohen said. “I actually texted the president. I thanked him. Expressed my sincere hope that this long, exhausting feud between the two of us could finally end.”
According to Cohen, Trump responded “almost immediately” and indicated that it was “actually time for us to meet.”
Cohen leaned into the extraordinary reconciliation on his own program Thursday, playing War’s “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” immediately before airing the Trump interview.
Once the conversation began, the former bitter rivals moved on to politics and policy, discussing polling and the state of the economy. Trump expressed confidence about his political standing and suggested that his margin of victory would be enormous if he were facing voters now.
“running today, I think I’d win by 25 points.”
The discussion also touched on immigration and security at the southern border, along with U.S. military operations involving Venezuela and Iran.
Trump additionally addressed Israel and the Middle East, asserting that his presidency had been critical to Israel’s survival and that the region would otherwise have faced devastating consequences.
“Look, there would be no Israel if there was not a Donald Trump president,” he said.
