Michael Cohen, the one-time lawyer and “fixer” for Donald Trump, warned Friday on an episode of his podcast about the grim outlook should the former president be reelected to the White House.
Trump is currently amid the packed field of candidates seeking the 2024 Republican presidential nomination as part of his bid to retake the White House for a second term. Amid that field, Trump has consistently led by a substantial margin, with national polling averages putting his support among likely GOP voters at around 50 percent, while his closest rivals have struggled to maintain double-digit support.
In head-to-head polling match-ups for Trump’s hypothetical yet seemingly inevitable 2024 rematch against President Joe Biden, the two candidates have largely appeared neck-and-neck, with some polls giving an edge to Trump and some to Biden. More recent polls have begun to lean more toward the former president, though polling a year out from the general election has been known to shift dramatically over the ensuing months, and Democrats like Biden have had a recent trend of outperforming poll numbers considerably in smaller elections.
On Friday, Cohen released the latest episode of his MeidasTouch Network podcast, Mea Culpa, in which he hosted Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat. During the discussion, Cohen echoed a grim prediction many observers have made about the health of American democracy should Trump secure reelection.
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“A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for the end of democracy,” Cohen said. “And I personally don’t want to be led around. I don’t want anybody telling me, as they’re already doing right now, what you can and can’t do in your bedroom. I don’t want them saying who can and cannot vote. All of a sudden, you’re going to have someone knock down your door and it’s going to be Trump’s ‘brown shirts’ pulling you out and sending you to Guantanamo Bay.”
Newsweek reached out to Trump’s office via email for comment.
Cohen continued: “And I know that sounds hyperbolic, but I know him so well, I know what’s on his mind, and I know what he intends to do. He’s looking to scare the piss out of everyone…The way that Kim Jong-un runs North Korea, he wants to run the United States of America that way.”
Trump and his associates have, in the years since Cohen flipped and became an outspoken critic of his former boss, claimed that his one-time fixer is an unreliable and biased voice against the former president, citing Cohen’s own past admissions about lying on Trump’s behalf.
Echoing Cohen’s concerns, Trump has in recent months been criticized for what many have deemed to be increasingly authoritarian rhetoric, with a Veteran’s Day statement in which he compared various groups in the United States to “vermin” being likened to Nazi propaganda. Meanwhile, a report from The Washington Post earlier this month claimed that Trump has been mulling the use of the Insurrection Act on day one of his second term to allow for the deployment of military force to quash protests against him.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.