Michael Cohen says his former boss Donald Trump is capable of “absolutely anything and everything” if he returns to the White House now that the Supreme Court has granted presidents full immunity from official acts.
“You let your mind wander to the furthest level of dystopia, and then you finally get a little glimpse of how far he will go,” he said Tuesday during an appearance on MSNBC’s ‘Deadline: White House’.
“There’s no limit to what he and his sycophants out there at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. will be, will at least be successful in trying to do,” he added.
Cohen sounded the alarm about Project 2025, an extreme policy playbook for a second Trump term, drawn up by several former Trump White House advisers who would also likely join a future administration. Trump has tried to distance himself from the document in recent days.
Cohen predicted that journalists and others on Trump’s “enemies list” could all be targets.
“Donald already has a blueprint of what he needs to do, and that is to arm the Justice Department, to arm the government, which is what he said he was going to do,” Cohen said. “Any person who works in government will not be working for the U.S. government, but for him.”
Among the policies in the Project 2025 proposal is a plan to reclassify government workers into a category that makes them much easier to fire. Experts have said the move could pave the way for authoritarianism and fundamentally change the nature of the federal government.
Trump has done that too openly promised to seek retaliation against enemies if he were to win the election.
Cohen, Trump’s former fixer and personal lawyer, testified extensively against Trump during his hush money trial in Manhattan earlier this year. Trump was convicted of all 34 crimes for falsifying company records.
Trump also faces three other criminal charges. Should he return to the Oval Office before they go to trial, he could order the Justice Department to dismiss the two federal cases against him.
Cohen served prison time on campaign finance and other financial charges after he helped facilitate hush money payments ahead of the 2016 election to silence women who said they had extramarital affairs with Trump.