The Fixers

A report on the hush-money scandals that have threatened the presidency of Donald Trump. Palazzolo and Rothfeld led a Wall Street Journal team that won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for a series of stories on Trump lawyer Michael Cohen's shady payments to Stormy Daniels. The reporters tied these efforts directly to Trump and also connected that effort to an earlier deal with Karen McDougal, a former Playboy Playmate of the Year with whom Trump had relations, and an agreement with the publisher of the National Enquirer to silence her. "The Journal had little interest," write the authors, "in a story about Trump having had consensual affairs"--his philandering was well-known--"...but hush money was indisputably newsworthy." The authors clearly demonstrate how the stories the reporters broke had larger ramifications and continue to reverberate, as they connect through Cohen to dealings with Russia investigated as part of the Mueller Report and show that the president's tendencies to lie and bluff and distance himself from his enablers long predate his entry into politics. This sordid tale extends from the early influence of Roy Cohn through the more recent efforts of Rudy Giuliani as Trump's "fixer." Yet the heart of the book is the relationship and subsequent estrangement between Trump and Cohen, who was loyal to a fault and felt his loyalty had been betrayed. The authors detail how Cohen claimed he had never requested a pardon from Trump, though he had, repeatedly; and how Cohen's numerous gambits to enrich himself hurt his attempts to cut his prison time. Nearly everyone in this book is some sort of double dealer or worse; the narrative doesn't pit good guys against bad guys but rather bad guys battling worse guys. A deeply reported look at how the president who promised to "drain the swamp" has been operating from the sewer.

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