Trump and Michael Cohen quietly reconcile after years of hostility

Michael Cohen said he and Donald Trump began mending fences about six months ago after an unexpected text from a “White House friend and an insider” carried what Cohen described as Trump’s “genuine empathy” for the “hell” Cohen said he was going through. Cohen now calls the relationship “cordial and growing,” a sharp reversal after years in which he went from Trump’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer to one of his most damaging witnesses.

The break between the two men was built in federal court. On Aug. 21, 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court to eight counts, including tax evasion, campaign-finance violations and making false statements to a bank. On Nov. 29, 2018, he pleaded guilty again, this time to lying to Congress about Trump Organization plans for a Trump Tower Moscow project. In December 2018, he was sentenced to three years in prison.

Cohen’s testimony later became central to the New York hush-money case that shadowed Trump into the 2024 campaign. In May 2024, a Manhattan jury convicted Trump on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, making him the first former U.S. president convicted of a crime. The conviction is under appeal, but the record of the case cemented Cohen’s role as a witness whose cooperation helped turn a private loyalty test into a public legal defeat for Trump.

The thaw now appears to serve clear political and personal purposes. For Trump, softening relations with a former insider reduces the visibility of an antagonist who knows the machinery of Trumpworld and has already helped build the case against him. For Cohen, the reconciliation arrives alongside a new media role at 77 WABC radio, where his show was set to begin July 12, 2026, giving him a platform beyond the courtroom and the prison-record narrative that has followed him since 2018.

Cohen has so far avoided the diatribes and prosecutions Trump has directed at other critics, a contrast that makes the shift look less like reconciliation than calculation. In Trumpworld, old enmities can become liabilities, and even a former fixer can regain value when silence or loyalty becomes more useful than revenge.