Trump’s GOP defenders are ‘in the cult,’ says Michael Cohen

Michael Cohen, the former personal attorney for former President Trump who is now a key figure in his New York indictment, criticized Republicans defending Trump, saying they are “in the cult.”

“Why do you think Republicans, at least many of them, keep staying with Trump?” CBS News’s Robert Costa asked Cohen in an interview that aired Sunday. 

“They’re in the cult. And I know what it’s like to be in the cult,” said Cohen. “It’s time to wash your eyes and to see exactly who Donald Trump is. It’s time to start to listen to the truth,” he said of the former president’s supporters.  

Trump was indicted last week over his alleged role in a hush money scheme meant to prevent adult film star Stormy Daniels from going public with an alleged affair with Trump in the weeks before the 2016 presidential election.

Now a 2024 presidential contender, Trump has dismissed the Manhattan case as a “political persecution.” Others in his party have echoed his remarks about the indictment while criticizing he prosecutor pursuing the case. 

“See, that’s the problem: Donald Trump doesn’t tell the truth, ever. Ever. Everything that he says is either a mis-exaggeration, misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, or just a blatant lie. And that information is all done in order to benefit one person, and one person only, and that’s him,” Cohen said. 

Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to organizing the payment to quiet Daniels’s allegations of an affair with the former president. Trump denies the affair. 

Cohen told CBS that he expects “complete and total mayhem” when Trump appears in New York for his scheduled arraignment on Tuesday. 

“This is his worst fear: being mug-shotted, fingerprinted, being referred to as a felon,” Cohen said of Trump, adding that he thinks the former president is “petrified.”