Trump and Michael Cohen Reunite for Radio Interview After Years of Bitter Legal Feuding

Donald Trump called in to Michael Cohen's WABC radio show Thursday, marking the first public conversation between the two men in roughly eight years, according to NBC News and The Independent. The full interview airs Sunday at 5 p.m. ET on Cohen's program, "When You Know, You Know." Thursday's broadcast released about 15 minutes of the conversation as a preview.

The reunion is notable given the history. Cohen spent over a decade as Trump's personal attorney and self-described fixer, once saying he'd "take a bullet" for his boss. That ended in 2018 when Cohen pleaded guilty to federal charges including campaign finance violations and tax evasion tied to investigations by special counsel Robert Mueller and the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York, according to NBC News. He served three years, part in prison and part in home confinement.

Cohen went on to become a star witness against Trump, testifying in front of Congress that his former boss was a "racist, a con man and a cheat," per NBC News. He later testified in Trump's 2024 New York hush money trial, telling jurors, "I regret doing things for him that I should not have. To keep the loyalty and to do the things that he asked me to do, I violated my moral compass," according to The Daily Beast. In 2024, Cohen said Trump would run the country "like the Führer" if reelected, The Independent reported.

None of that came up directly in Thursday's segment. Instead, Cohen opened by revisiting his viral 2016 CNN moment with host Brianna Keilar, when he responded to a question about Trump's poll numbers with "says who." Trump told Cohen he had been "weaponized... like nobody's ever been weaponized" by the media, and praised him for having "recanted everything you said," an apparent reference to Cohen's January claim that New York prosecutors pressured him to testify against Trump, per The Independent.

Cohen didn't walk back his trial testimony itself. Asked earlier the same day on CNN whether he was retracting anything he'd said about Trump, Cohen replied, "What was said is said, and that's where I stand with it," according to NBC News. On his own show, he quoted a Bible verse about forgiveness and played the song "Why Can't We Be Friends?" while saying, "The good memories don't cease to exist simply because terrible ones followed them. True loyalty doesn't mean pretending that you were never hurt. Reconciliation doesn't mean surrendering your principles or rewriting facts."

Cohen appears to be drawing a line between personal reconciliation and factual retraction, not erasing his sworn testimony. Whether that distinction holds up depends on what else surfaces when the full interview airs Sunday.

Trump used the platform the way he uses most interviews: talking up the economy as a "renaissance," defending the ongoing conflict with Iran by claiming its military and leadership have been severely weakened, repeating his position that Iran cannot be allowed a nuclear weapon, and touting his record on illegal immigration, according to The Independent.

He also claimed that if he ran for reelection today, he'd win "by 25 points," according to both The Independent and The Daily Beast. That claim doesn't match public polling. The Daily Beast noted more than two-thirds of Americans currently disapprove of his handling of the economy. Trump dismissed unfavorable polls as "rigged" and called the reporters behind them "crooked," a claim not backed by any polling methodology data in these sources.

Cohen, for his part, complained about "CNN, MS NOW, and the other left-leaning outlets" continuing to report on Trump's underwater approval numbers, per The Daily Beast, essentially adopting Trump's framing rather than pushing back on it.

The Daily Beast's coverage framed the interview as "an embarrassing display of sycophancy," calling Cohen a "fixer-turned-Judas" who "fawned" over Trump. That's a characterization, not a fact, and readers should treat it as the outlet's editorial take rather than reporting. The Guardian's live coverage, by contrast, noted Cohen had previously compared Trump to "a mobster" and included a detail the other sources skipped: Cohen declined to say whether he'd use the interview to seek a pardon, telling his audience "maybe, maybe not."

That pardon question is the open thread here. Cohen was convicted of federal crimes tied to his work for Trump. A public reconciliation, timed alongside a possible pardon request, would be a materially different story than a simple radio makeup session. Nothing in Thursday's preview clip confirms or rules that out. The full interview airs Sunday.