With the loyalty of a surrogate son, Michael D. Cohen kept his boss’s secrets and cleaned up his messes. He described himself in his memoir as Donald J. Trump’s “designated thug.”
Now Mr. Cohen is the central witness against his former boss in the first criminal trial of an American president. He began his testimony on Monday, describing how he buried stories his boss didn’t anyone to read — including a porn star’s account of a sexual encounter.
Mr. Cohen testified that he had paid $130,000 in hush money to the woman, Stormy Daniels, at Mr. Trump’s request, and that Mr. Trump signed off on the plan to reimburse him. That reimbursement is central to the case: Prosecutors say Mr. Trump falsified records to disguise the payments as legal expenses.
In the years since, Mr. Cohen has gone to jail, published books, and transformed himself from Mr. Trump’s lackey to his chief antagonist.
Mr. Cohen, the son of a Holocaust survivor, had idolized Mr. Trump since his youth on Long Island. After graduating from Cooley Law School in Michigan, he joined a personal injury firm.
And after buying apartments in two of Mr. Trump’s New York buildings in the early 2000s, he caught Mr. Trump’s eye during a dispute with the condo board at Trump World Tower in New York and soon joined his business, the Trump Organization, as a sort of do-it-all fixer.
Colleagues spotted him inside Mr. Trump’s office, overheard him yelling from his own and watched him walk the hallways with a pistol strapped to his ankle.
Occasionally, he performed tasks that approximated legal work under the amorphous title of executive vice president of the Trump Organization and “special counsel” to Mr. Trump. But more often than not, Mr. Cohen’s tasks were unrelated to the law — and sometimes, at odds with it.
In testimony before Congress, Mr. Cohen estimated that over the years he had made 500 threats at Mr. Trump’s behest.
And Mr. Cohen, who indulged his own political aspirations as a failed City Council candidate, was one of the strongest believers in Mr. Trump as a possible president when he flirted with running in 2012. Mr. Cohen set up a website, ShouldTrumpRun.org, and went on a scouting trip to Iowa.
Although he had no formal role in the 2016 campaign, Mr. Cohen nonetheless raised millions of dollars, recruited Black supporters and was an enthusiastic booster of Mr. Trump on television.
But his greatest service came behind the scenes, arranging payoffs to two women who had threatened to go public with stories about having sex with a married Mr. Trump. One, Karen McDougal, struck a $150,000 deal with Mr. Trump’s allies at The National Enquirer, who bought and buried the former Playboy model’s story.
The second woman was Ms. Daniels, who described her encounter with Mr. Trump in graphic detail on the witness stand last week. When Mr. Trump was slow to pay the $130,000 hush money, Mr. Cohen dug into his own pocket.
Mr. Trump repaid him monthly throughout the first year of the presidency. Mr. Cohen was no longer a Trump Organization employee, and Mr. Trump had excluded him from a job in Washington. But Mr. Cohen’s email signature now carried a loftier title: personal lawyer to the president.
