If he had a do-over, Michael Cohen says he would have “smacked” Donald Trump after his boss made inappropriate comments about his then-teenage daughter, Samantha Cohen. On the September 14 episode of The View, host Joy Behar grilled the president’s former fixer about the way he reacted — or rather, didn’t — when Trump allegedly called 15-year-old Samantha a “piece of ass” in 2012. Behar demanded that Cohen tell her, right then, what he would have said to Trump, had he not been intimidated, as he insisted.
“I would have liked to smack him across the side of the head,” Cohen said, confessing that he was “ashamed” that he didn’t defend his teenage daughter. Cohen said nothing as Trump allegedly objectified Samantha and made her uncomfortable, he wrote in Disloyal: A Memoir, because he didn’t want to challenge his boss. “Under any other circumstances, I never would have let anybody speak about her that way. But, I was part of the cult, and there was really no wrong that he could do. I knew it was wrong. I don’t have an answer,” he said on The View, adding that Samantha told him she thought he was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.
“I never would have allowed someone to speak about my daughter in such a disrespectful way,” Cohen said. “And I did because, as so many people say, ‘let Trump be Trump.’ And that’s the problem with this country, myself. The whole purpose of Disloyal was to get people to open up their eyes and see the individual for who he really is. And I’m not the only one suffering from what I call ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome.’
Samantha spoke out about the 2012 incident in a September 12 interview with Vanity Fair. “If you can hit on a 15-year-old, I am pretty sure there is something wrong with you, and when you allow someone with that little integrity to be in the most powerful office, that sets the tone for the rest of the country’s culture,” she told the magazine.