In Michael Cohen‘s new book on his time as President Donald Trump‘s attorney, he claims the future president believed South Africa was worse off after Nelson Mandela served as its first president in the 1990s. Mandela “f— the whole country up,” Trump allegedly said when Mandela died in 2013 at age 95. Cohen’s book Disloyal: A Memoir, which hits book stores on Tuesday, also details Trump’s animosity towards his predecessor, President Barack Obama.
According to Cohen, Trump believed Obama only got into Columbia University and Harvard Law School because of “f— affirmative action,” reports The Washington Post, which obtained an early copy of Cohen’s book. Trump had a “low opinion of all Black folks,” Cohen wrote. Trump once said of Obama, “Tell me one country run by a Black person that isn’t a s—hole. They are all complete f— toilets.”
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Trump was also critical of Mandela, the anti-apartheid leader who spent 27 years in prison before serving as South Africa’s first president from 1994 to 1999. After Mandela died, Trump said he did not think Mandela “was a real leader – not the kind he respected,” Cohen wrote. Trump praised South Africa’s apartheid era, Cohen claims. “Mandela f— the whole country up. Now it’s a s—hole. F— Mandela. He was no leader,” Trump said, according to Cohen.
Cohen said Trump described minorities as “not my people.” After he announced his run for president in 2015 with a speech in which he described Mexicans as criminals and rapists, Trump shrugged off concerns Latinos would not vote for him, Cohen wrote, according to CNN. “Plus, I will never get the Hispanic vote,” Trump said, Cohen wrote. “Like the Blacks, they’re too stupid to vote for Trump. They’re not my people.” Trump did win 28% of the Latino vote in 2016.
One leader Trump did praise repeatedly was Russian President Vladimir Putin. Cohen claims Trump was enamored by Putin’s control of everything in Russia. “Locking up your political enemies, criminalizing dissent, terrifying or bankrupting the free press through libel lawsuits — Trump’s all-encompassing vision wasn’t evident to me before he began to run for president,” Cohen wrote. “I honestly believe the most extreme ideas about power and its uses only really took shape as he began to seriously contemplate the implications of taking power and how he could leverage it to the absolute maximum level possible.”
Elsewhere in Cohen’s book, he describes himself as Trump’s “designated thug” and wrote about his felony convictions for lying to Congress and violating campaign laws for Trump. Cohen is now serving a three-year federal prison sentence for the crimes and other personal finance offenses. He was serving his sentence at the federal facility in Otisville, New York, but is now serving at home due to the coronavirus pandemic. Cohen described in detail how he paid $130,000 to the adult film actress Stormy Daniels, a woman Trump allegedly had an affair with, just days before the 2016 election.
“Michael Cohen is a disgraced felon and disbarred lawyer, who lied to Congress,” White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany told the Post in response to Cohen’s book. “He has lost all credibility, and it’s unsurprising to see his latest attempt to profit off of lies.”
