Donald Trump spent part of Thursday swapping pleasantries with Michael Cohen, his former "fixer" who then became the left’s favorite anti-Trumper and even testified against the president in court and before Congress. It's hard to say which is more bizarre: that this interview happened at all, or how warm it was.
Part of the sit-down aired Thursday evening on Cohen's radio show on 77 WABC-AM in New York, with the full interview set to air Sunday. It was an exceptionally friendly affair. Believe it or not, the whole segment played like a reunion special.
Cohen is currently filling in for Andrew Cuomo, who is taking a break from the show for the summer. Apparently, station owner John Catsimatidis, a Trump ally, ran it by the White House. The administration "had no objection," Catsimatidis told the New York Post, adding that Trump had "expressed empathy" for Cohen.
Empathy. For Michael Cohen. Sit with that for a moment.
On the air, Trump told Cohen, "They weaponized you like nobody's ever been weaponized, like few have been." He went from empathy to esteem. "I respect the fact that you recanted everything you said," Trump said. "That's a big thing that you did."
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In a separate interview before the radio segment aired, Cohen told CNN he'd resubmitted a pardon application to the White House after the Biden administration denied his original request, and he hadn't heard back yet. "I took that same application with the same documentation, and I just rewrote the cover letter removing the name of President Joe Biden and inserting the name President Donald Trump … I do have a receipt," Cohen said.
LIVE NOW: Michael and President Trump discuss 2016.
— TalkRadio 77 WABC (@77WABCradio) August 20, 2026
Listen Now: https://t.co/JYtLGcmjeq pic.twitter.com/sXCbatGRfH
Cohen is hardly the first Trump ally to blow up publicly and find his way back into the fold, following Elon Musk and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.). He once said he'd "take a bullet" for Trump, before his testimony in Trump's 2024 trial, on charges of falsifying business records to illegally influence an election, helped secure a 34-count felony conviction that carried no punishment.
It’s worth noting that Trump never said a warm word about Cohen before Thursday, though he'd linked to Cohen's own comments this year about feeling pressured by prosecutors Cohen has spent the past year trashing.
Cohen framed it all as forgiveness in his Substack. "Forgiveness does not mean amnesia," he wrote. "It is about having the courage to decide that yesterday will no longer dictate tomorrow." At one point, he even got sentimental. "Boss, remember when I was by your side?" he asked.
Cohen now says he only turned on Trump because prosecutors squeezed him. "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 on Substack in January.
That tracks. We know how desperate the Deep State was to stop Trump. Heck, the Biden administration didn’t even try to hide that it was weaponizing the government against Trump.
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