Former lawyer and US President Donald Trump's friend-turned-foe, Michael Cohen, has said the two men have reconciled.
Trump appeared on Cohen's radio show "When You Know…You Know" set to air on Sunday, August 23, marking a public reunion with the man he once called "Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain" and testified against him both in court and before Congress.
In a snippet of the interview shared on Thursday, August 20, Cohen is heard calling Trump "boss" and "sir" and reminiscing about their previous closeness, despite helping prosecutors convict Trump of 34 felonies in 2024.
Cohen's radio show reunion
"Boss, you remember when I was by your side? I literally used to analyze the polls," Cohen said during a 15-minute portion of the interview aired Thursday night on his WABC-77 radio program.
"Maybe what we should do is then have a press conference and literally put out all of the accomplishments," Cohen suggested.
Also in the snippet, Trump said: "They weaponised you, like nobody's ever been weaponised, like few have been... they weaponised you, they weaponised a lot of people and I respect the fact that you recanted everything you said and that's a big thing that you did."
Background of the feud
Cohen spent years accusing Trump of being a "racist," a "predator" and a "fraud" after pleading guilty and implicating Trump in wrongdoing in 2018.
In a lengthy post on Substack, Cohen said that he would have an "impossible reunion" with Trump, years after the close relationship between the two men collapsed amid an investigation into Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.
Cohen was the US president's personal attorney before a major fall-out. He became the star witness in a landmark hush money case that resulted in the first-ever criminal conviction of a former president.
Private meetings and forgiveness
The interview comes two years after he testified against Trump in both a criminal case and a sprawling fraud trial and nearly a decade after he emerged as a prominent Trump critic in the aftermath of his own legal battles and time in prison.
He was sentenced to three years in prison in 2018 on charges related to hush money payments to help conceal Trump's affair with an adult star.
Interview ahead of the broadcast, Cohen said that he and Trump have met privately three times and reconciled since the fall-out.
"Eight years of silence. Hundreds of thousands of headlines. Fifteen years of history fractured in an instant, and somehow, against almost every expectation, here we are," Cohen wrote in his substack.
Questions have been asked over how the men, who spent years engaged in a public disputes, could reconcile.
"The answer is actually much simpler than people want it to be. We forgave," the substack continued.
"Donald Trump and I spent roughly fifteen years in the trenches together. We built relationships, shared victories, endured setbacks and pursued a path that ultimately reached the highest office on Earth.
"Then everything exploded."
The friendship fractured. Trust disappeared. The relationship became ammunition. The world watched as two people who had once been extraordinarily close became combatants in one of the most public political implosions imaginable.
Cohen said that 15 years does not vanish because the "relationship becomes toxic" and memories do not disappear.
"Loyalty doesn't mean pretending someone never hurt you. Forgiveness doesn’t mean surrendering your principles. Reconciliation doesn’t mean rewriting history," he said.
Pardon application
Reports are circulating that Trump's former attorney is even considering asking for pardon.
Speaking to CNN, Cohen said that prior to Trump taking office, he did have a pardon application in with former president Joe Biden.
He said that the pardon was denied.
Cohen said he took the same application, with the same documentation and resubmitted it to Trump, but has not received an acknowledgement that the application has been received.
