U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at a dinner with Republican Senators, in the State Dining Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 18, 2025. REUTERS/Annabelle Gordon
President Donald Trump received a brutal fact check on Monday from one of his former close associates.
Michael Cohen, who was once described as Trump's "fixer," argued in an op-ed for MeidasTouch that Trump's approval rating proves the president is unpopular among wide swaths of Americans. That's despite Trump's repeated claims that his second term has been one of the most "consequential" in modern history, as one of his posts on Truth Social suggests.
"You can spin the numbers, cook the books, slap gold trim on it and scream 'greatest ever!' from the top of Trump Tower, but a bad deal is still a bad deal," Cohen wrote. "And this second-term reboot is looking more and more like a rerun of failure."
Cohen's comments come at a time when Trump is seeking to find any narrative strand that will distract from his troubles with the Jeffrey Epstein files.
During the campaign, Trump and his surrogates promised voters that they would release the files once in office. Attorney General Pam Bondi even declared the files were "sitting on her desk" waiting to be released.
However, Trump's Department of Justice has thus far declined to release the files, which has deeply angered his base. It's also been reported that 1,000 FBI agents are combing through the files to flag any mentions of Trump.
To Cohen, these issues are all too familiar.
"What’s terrifying isn’t that he says these things. It’s that his MAGA base still believes him. I used to be one of those people; hell, I used to help him sell the fantasy," Cohen wrote. "But now I see what I helped build: an empire of delusion propped up by sycophants, spineless enablers, and an audience that confuses volume for truth."