-You were friends with Donald Trump
before he ran for president.
And then you were one of the people who predicted,
based on knowing him and based on knowing how he operated
that he was going to win the primary.
-Key word is "was" friends.
-Right, you were friends.
Right, yes, I should past-tense that. Yes.
-Very, very past tense.
-But when you were predicting that he was going to do better
than many were, was that something -- did he reach out?
Was he happy to hear that on TV?
-Yeah, right after he had won, I think,
one of the first primaries,
I had been saying I thought he was gonna win,
and he calls me up.
"Hey, Donny, how are you doing?
Thanks for saying I was gonna win.
This is amazing.
Can you believe how incredible it is?"
He goes, "It's incredible." I go, "Yeah."
"They can't find a replacement
on 'The Celebrity Apprentice' for me."
That's what he was focused on.
The fact that -- not that he'd just won a primary.
"It's amazing.
They can't find a replacement on 'The Celebrity Apprentice.'"
I'm like, "Dude, you're running for president.
Time to move on a little bit."
-He's not good at that.
[ Laughter ]
You did at one point live in one of his buildings.
So technically the person who is currently President
used to be your landlord.
How was he as a landlord?
-Great story. Ivanka and Jared were in the building.
And I had been in the building for about five years,
and I was moving out.
And, you know, when you live in a building,
they have a security deposit.
So I get a message from one of the people
that they want to keep $3,000
because there's a crack in the bathtub.
So Donald and I get on the phone together.
I'm like, "Donald, I've never taken a bath in five years.
I'm a shower guy."
He goes, "I don't care. There's a crack."
I'm like, "Dude, this is $3,000.
You're supposedly worth $6 billion."
But here, this is 2010.
The future President is hondelling over 3 grand
and a crack in a bathtub that I never took a bath in.
That is our president.
-At the end, who got the three grand?
-I paid him. I just wasn't -- you know, he just --
-See, that's my president. He gets the money.
[ Laughter ]
We're gonna get the wall because he got that tub money.
-You know what? I remember I even said to him,
"Why don't I send the $3,000 to charity?"
He goes, "Nope."
-Wow, that sounds like my president.
[ Laughter ]
You got to know Michael Cohen.
You got to see their relationship over the years.
What was that relationship like up close?
-You know, I think one of the reasons Trump is so panicked.
I mean, he was his guy.
Other than his kids, he was front and center.
Just to give you the kind of the sensitivity of the relationship.
I remember when Trump first did his birther thing,
and I, like everybody else, was very offended by it.
Start to see a guy we didn't know.
And I remember on television, I said, "This is racist."
And Michael calls me up and says,
"You know, Donald is very hurt.
His feelings are hurt.
Will you get on the phone with him?"
I go, "His feelings are hurt?
He's out calling our president, you know, a non-U.S. citizen."
So I got on the phone. We talked.
But even then his skin was so thin that even when he gets out
and says these ridiculously racist things,
if somebody who knows who he considers a friend
challenges him, his feelings were hurt.
I'm sorry your feelings were hurt.
[ Laughter ]
-There were reports this week that Donald Trump
asked Matt Whitaker to maybe
put somebody else on the Cohen investigation,
someone that was more loyal to the president.
Do you think he is right to be as worried as he seems to be
about the Michael Cohen of this all?
-He should be very worried.
I actually -- He should be really worried.
[ Cheers and applause ]
You know, unfortunately, I think that the --
the Mueller investigation is gonna end up a little gray.
Unless they have him on the phone with Vlad.
"Okay, Vlad, I'll take the Moscow tower,
you get Ukraine and keep the pee-pee tape to yourself."
I mean, unless there's literally that line,
that's gonna be great.
What's gonna take him down is --
and Michael Cohen will be one of the people very important
to this, is I believe the Southern district
and they're going to, what I call R.I.C.O. him, which is the
Racketeering Influence Corrupt Organization Act,
where if you're at the top of an organization
that anybody in it is doing illicit things, you go to jail.
I think they will take him apart.
I think they will take his buildings away.
[ Cheers and applause ] There will be nothing left.
If you really think about it, this guy showed up and has tried
to undo what our great-grandparents died for.
You know, separation of state, freedom of the press.
And they're going to make an example of this guy
the rest of his life, and he should be panicked.
You should be very afraid, President Trump.
-What about -- [ Applause ]
Right now, versus a year ago, two years ago, Michael Cohen,
there is maybe a danger of feeling sympathy towards him.
You know, he has said -- and I believe it to be true --
that the way Donald Trump attacks him,
there are threats on his family.
No one wants that for anyone.
Yet, at the same time, you know,
Michael Cohen chose this path, right?
-Yeah. We've talked a lot.
Michael is a friend of mine.
And we've talked a lot about this.
And his explanation is -- look -- he did wrong --
he's a good man that did wrong things
and he's gonna go to jail for it.
And he should go to jail for it.
But his explanation is the intoxication of Trump
and that you're with him and that he's a celebrity
and the cheering and -- almost like a cult.
You get sucked into it.
It's not an excuse by any standards.
But that's his explanation for it.
Look, his life has been destroyed.
I mean, jail was just part of it.
I mean, it's -- I've watched him
go through this front and center.
And look, it's hard for certain people to have empathy,
but when you know the person and you know they have kids
and you know their wife and you know in their core
they're a decent person.
So, people might disagree with me, but that's the way I feel.
-No, and I should say, you know, I think when you actually see
the reality on the day where you get sentenced
and you do see that a man has a family,
that is very hard to see.
I think that your humanity kicks in at times like that.
But I do think it's important to also remember that, you know,
there were choices made that lead you to that moment.
-And he's gonna answer for that.
-You know, I think we all were sort of talking about it
and you've mentioned it, the birtherism moment.
And that was a real moment for me
and how I assessed Donald Trump.
Looking at it now, though, of course, there were other things.
You know, he was -- he was sued for housing discrimination.
He suggested the death penalty for the Central Park Five.
You know, he's had a very immoral business practice
over the year.
Do you think the New York community was a little easy
on Donald Trump over those days
or just didn't take him seriously enough for a guy
that was doing serious things
that were having real negative impact on people?
-You know, I'm one of those people who went through the arc.
If you asked me what I thought about him 15 years ago,
would I want to be on Fox with him, no.
He was what I call the great quantifiable liar.
You'd say, "How big is the building?"
The building was 40 stories. "74 stories."
And it's funny when you're a real-estate developer.
It's not funny when you're lying
about immigration and other things.
So he was a guy -- you kind of thought
he was a goofy real-estate guy, maybe in on the joke.
The birther thing showed this ugly side,
that either at worst he's a racist
or even worse, a transactional racist.
And so to me, it was ugly, and the reason he stuck with it,
he is a transactional guy.
It worked, if you think about what he ran on.
And what he ran on is -- 20 -- what the wall is all about.
2045, guys with our color skin
are gonna be minorities in this country.
People are terrified about that.
So he ran on "make America great again,"
which is really make America white again.
He ran on, you know, the Muslim ban.
He ran on the Mexicans.
And that's why he stays with it,
because with that crowd, it works.
And it's so sad. And it's so tragic.
That at the end of the day, like or not like a president,
he should just bring us together.
And this guy is the great divider, so it's sad.
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