Mr. Trump, for his part, called Mr. Cohen a “liar” and a “rat.” But the president has a well-documented tendency of allowing people who’ve dissed him — Elon Musk, Megyn Kelly, Steve Bannon — back into his orbit. What’s one more?
Mr. Cohen tried right at the top of their conversation to “go back to 2016,” as he put it.
“You and I have obviously traveled a pretty rocky road together,” he said. “You remember? Do you remember, sir, when I went on CNN with Brianna Keilar, and she told me that you were underwater in the polls, and I responded with those famous two words: Says who? Which became some worldwide meme.”
Whether or not Mr. Trump remembered this particular exchange, he did not say.
In fact, he said almost nothing about the past, their friendship, their falling out, or what compelled him to do Mr. Cohen’s show.
“They weaponized you,” Mr. Trump told his old accomplice. “They weaponized a lot of people, and I respect the fact that you recanted everything you said. And that’s a big — that’s a big thing that you did. That’s a very big thing.” (Mr. Cohen has expressed misgivings about testifying and accused prosecutors of posing leading questions, but has not “recanted everything.”)
That was about as far down memory lane as Mr. Trump was willing to travel. The rest of the conversation consisted of him essentially popping in the same cassette tape that he pops in every day to repeat the same lines he says about the successful war with Iran, and the rockin’ economy, and the crazy Democrats, and the good poll numbers, and the many other lines he says to anyone, anywhere. He might as well have been calling into “Fox and Friends,” or giving one of his cabinet meeting monologues. For two men with such a twisted history, it was an oddly impersonal and empty exchange.
