truthful hyperbole

<div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.salon.com/2020/01/28/why-does-trump-love-to-hang-with-bottom-feeders-crooked-lawyers-and-porn-stars/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">https://www.salon.com/2020/01/28/why-does-trump-love-to-hang-with-bottom-feeders-crooked-lawyers-and-porn-stars/</a></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">...You take a really a deep dive into Trump's bottom-feeding world. What made you want to write a book about all of the characters in Trump World?</div>We felt that once we had broken the stories of Karen McDougal, who was paid off for Trump by the publisher of the National Enquirer, and then Stormy Daniels who was paid off by Michael Cohen, Trump's lawyer. How did this happen? How do you have a president who has one guy paying off a porn star and another guy paying off a Playboy model? We decided to look back and see what the pattern was here, going back decades, of how Trump had people surrounding him who were just kind of willing to do his dirty work for him. That's how we came up with the idea of writing "The Fixers." It's the seamy underbelly of the Trump presidency. It's a world that most people probably don't know about, but where you have muckrakers, paparazzi, porn stars and all this, and they helped him refine the tactics that he took to The White House.In the bigger picture, is it a coincidence Donald Trump is surrounded by all these shady characters? Or is this who he finds himself most comfortable around?I don't think it's a coincidence because it goes back to Roy Cohn, who was his lawyer. The first fixer in our book was a mob lawyer, and he helped Trump game the political system in the '70s when he was coming up as a developer. Trump uses these types of people to do his dirty work, things that he doesn't want to do himself, and that most people, if they have good judgment, would not do so. Then you look at what has happened in the White House where he's trying to pressure Jim Comey to protect him. He wants Jeff Sessions to not recuse himself. He's a line-crosser, right? But he wants other people to cross those lines for him, so that he can try to keep his hands clean. It really does take us to where we are now with impeachment, right? Because he had Rudy Giuliani doing this for him in Ukraine. Trump obviously is at the center of impeachment, but Rudy is the fixer who did it.It sounds like Trump is the Walter White of it all. He's pushing people to break bad and some of the bad ones are already morally ambiguous, let's be blunt. Some of them, like James Comey, he was trying to push to be bad, to be morally ambiguous, to not care about the law or ethics at all, and do what he wants.Yeah, it was harder for him in The White House to find peace, because some of these are professional people who had careers before they ever met Donald Trump. But when he was in business he was Donald Trump, he was the Donald, he was a reality star. Michael Cohen owns taxi medallions, he's a personal injury lawyer and he comes from Long Island, so getting to work for Donald Trump was this tremendous honor for him and he would do whatever Trump wanted, and he suspended his judgment. He said that "The Art of the Deal" is the only book he's ever read twice. I mean, that's the kind of person that he was.Let's talk more about Roy Cohn, the infamous mafia lawyer. How much do you think he's inspired Trump?He set the model for how Trump operated throughout the decades. When somebody confronts you, you have an opponent, you just attack mercilessly, you never admit that you're wrong. You just keep saying what you want to be true, you make your own reality. I mean, these are the things that we see Donald Trump doing today. Roy Cohn was doing that for him in the '70s and the '80s. And for instance, we've heard from Michael Cohen about how Trump wanted him to exaggerate his wealth. I mean, we know Trump has exaggerated his wealth and Roy Cohn was doing that with him, with the Forbes list to try to make him seem more wealthy and important by creating the myth of Donald Trump. So that's all hearkens back to Roy.<div id="salon_in_article_rev_content" style="font-size: small; box-sizing: border-box; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div id="rc-widget-4df0c6" data-rc-widget="" data-widget-host="habitat" data-endpoint="//trends.revcontent.com" data-widget-id="117439" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Never admit you're wrong, declare complete victory, this is Trump. This the guy we're dealing with right now, the "perfect phone call" guy. He's the only guy in the world that scores his phone calls like they're perfect. Bill Clinton apologized after being impeached by the House. He said, "I made a mistake." Donald Trump doubles and triples down.That's what most people don't realize. This is something that has been going on for decades and it's part of how Trump made it to the presidency by using these tactics. But then he does dispose of these people if they get in trouble. If they become no longer useful to him, then he gets rid of them. Roy Cohn got sick with AIDS and Trump became embarrassed or didn't want to deal with him. He steers cases to other lawyers instead of Cohn. Cohn was very loyal, so he didn't publicly complain about it, but privately he would say, "Donald has ice in his veins."Trump is at Mar-a-Lago right before New Year's in 2017 and he's sitting around with a bunch of people and he's mocking Cohn. He says, "The last time Roy was here with AIDS, right before he died, then afterward I had to fumigate all the dishes and the silverware." One day Trump he can be nice and praising somebody and the next day he can be incredibly mean and cold-hearted.Another character you focus on in the book is David Pecker. Tell us about Pecker, who had a long relationship with Donald Trump and played a role in helping Trump way before he ran for president in 2016....<div></div></div></div>