Why Michael Cohen’s Influencer Daughter Is Coming Up in the Trump Trial

Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, is set to testify Monday in the hush money trial against the former president. As supporting evidence for that testimony, the prosecution has submitted a series of private messages from 2016 between Cohen and his then college-aged daughter, Samantha.

It’s not clear exactly how the exchanges, dating from November of that year as the new president-elect was assembling his Cabinet, will be used. But they may serve to reveal something of Cohen’s motivations, his meetings with Trump, and the nature of his relationship with Trump at the time of the alleged hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels.

In the messages, Samantha presses her father for updates on his professional future at a time when Cohen seemed unsure how he would fit into Trump’s orbit in a political context.

The messages make a few potentially important points for the prosecution.

For one, they show Cohen felt he had gone above and beyond for Trump. In a message the evening of Nov. 13, Cohen reassured his daughter that if he didn’t join the administration, he would still have access to Trump: “I have done so so so much for him for 10 years, it can’t be overlooked.”

And in another message two days later, he seemed confident of Trump’s loyalty: “I will always have my relationship and whether I go or not, he will always call back to me because I am the only one out there he trusts and Is battle tested.” Such evidence could help demonstrate that Cohen would have been eager to lie and scheme on Trump’s behalf.

For another, they may help elucidate the exact nature of Cohen’s professional relationship with Trump—an important matter, given that so much of this case hinges on whether Trump made payments to Cohen as part of an illegal reimbursement to pay off Daniels. The exchange highlighted in the evidence shows that Cohen felt strung along by Trump, a man who didn’t seem to know, at least in Cohen’s telling, how to define Cohen’s role. In the exchange from Nov. 13, Cohen appeared disappointed that he hadn’t been chosen as Trump’s chief of staff, and expressed his desire for a place in Trump’s administration:

Michael: I’m going to ask for special counsel to the president.

Samantha: I agree 

He should give you that 

You’re his special counsel now

Michael: Yes he should

Samantha: That shouldn’t change based on where he is

Michael: Correct

Samantha: And it has less to do w a governmental position 

Than him as a person

No one would say that to a job you couldn’t do

The next day, Samantha asked for an update after her father spoke with Trump:

Michael: He wants me to go just not sure the position. 

Reince [then–chief of staff Reince Priebus] came up and he told him. Was complimentary but not happy with the title I wanted

Samantha: Did trump agree w special counsel to the president?

Why would reince be against that

What was the convo like did it seem like trump wants to do right by you or was he an asshole

Michael: Dont know. He couldn’t have been more complimentary to me but they couldn’t come up with a title yet

But for the prosecution, there may be another point to all of this: showing Cohen to be a family man. Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to campaign finance violations, tax evasion, and making false statements, and Trump’s attorneys will likely try to discredit his testimony by attacking his character and credibility. They seek to make him an unreliable witness whose (damning) testimony against Trump should be given little if any weight by the jury. The prosecution could potentially argue that Cohen’s financial misdeeds were not evidence of an immoral character, but rather motivated by an earnest desire to support his family—in 2016, Samantha was still in college, and her brother, Jake, was in high school. At one point, Samantha asks her father what would happen if he became special counsel to the president:

Samantha: Does he pay your salary or does the government 

In which case what happens to your finances then

Michael: Government. Serious pay cut

Samantha: What would we do

Whatever the prosecution makes of the exchanges between Cohen and his daughter, Samantha has generally been a strong defender of her father.

The messages make clear just how close Cohen was with his daughter. In an interview with Vanity Fair, she described Cohen as “my best friend and the best dad ever.”

There have been times when Cohen’s praise for his daughter raised eyebrows, as when he shared an Instagram post of Samantha, then around 21, in a moody photoshoot wearing pantyhose and a bra, shot in a pose meant to mimic the 1960s icon Edie Sedgwick. “So proud of my Ivy League daughter,” he wrote, praising her “brains and beauty.” (Samantha graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018.) Online critics accused him of being creepy, in line with his boss’s disturbing comments about Ivanka Trump; he shot back that they were “jealous.”

Samantha, for context, is an influencer. On Instagram, where she posts photos of herself in expensive clothes at glamorous weddings and in bikinis on luxurious international vacations, she has more than 20,000 followers. She also, on social media, presents herself as a Daddy’s girl, posting in celebration of her father’s birthday. But her support of him isn’t limited to social media. When Cohen was headed to the courthouse for his sentencing, photos captured her leaning on his arm, wearing a demure black coat and walking with a fur-lined crutch, which Page Six reported came from hip surgery. (As proof of the tenacity of Instagram influencers, Samantha was somehow also wearing heeled booties.)

They weren’t always so close—in that same Vanity Fair interview, Samantha claimed that she didn’t speak to her father “for two to three months” at the start of Trump’s campaign in 2015 because of “the comment about Mexicans”—presumably Trump’s remarks, during his 2015 announcement speech, about Mexican immigrants “bringing drugs … bringing crime” and being “rapists.” She claimed she warned her dad that “this is going to be so bad, and you are insane for being part of this.”

But when Cohen was gunning for a position in the Trump administration in 2016, Samantha seemed to be supportive.

From Nov. 14, 2016, at 7:10 a.m.:

Samantha: I think though w all your effort you deserve a place in history w the administration 

Michael: I agree

Samantha: Good luck love you 

Michael: Love u more

And from Nov. 15, 2016, at 6:35 a.m.:

Michael: Truth is I’m not sure that I really want to go to DC. I’m really weighing the financial options that are being presented to me. If any of them come through, it’s really a lot of money versus a reduced income from the government job 

Samantha: I just think a White House job gives you unparalleled power for the future and seems worth it but maybe I’m wrong 

Well keep me updated or if you end up needing to make decisions and want to talk to me

Michael: Of course I will

Samantha: Love you 

Michael: Love you more

In September 2020, while Cohen was still in prison for campaign finance violations and tax fraud, Samantha stepped up and did some of the publicity work for her father’s new tell-all book, which accused Trump of being “a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.” In the interview in Vanity Fair, she portrayed Cohen as a man with “Stockholm syndrome” who was enthralled by a cruel and abusive boss because he “saw how Trump treated his own children and how mean he was to them, and I think he thought that if he’s treating me like that, then I am part of the family.”

In his book, Cohen wrote that when his daughter was a teenager, “she saw Trump much more clearly than I could.” Specifically, he retold a story about Trump ogling Samantha during a summer day at the Bedminster, New Jersey, resort in 2012. Per Vanity Fair:

Somehow Trump’s attention was diverted to another skirt walking off a tennis court. “Look at that piece of ass,” Cohen recalls Trump saying, as he whistled and pointed. “I would love some of that.” It so happened that Trump was referring to Cohen’s then 15-year-old daughter, Samantha. 

Cohen informed Trump of his mistake. “That’s your daughter?” Trump responded. “When did she get so hot?” When Samantha reached her dad, Trump asked her for a kiss on the cheek, before inquiring, “When did you get such a beautiful figure?” and warning her that in a few years, he would be dating one of her friends. 

In a 2020 interview with CNN’s New Day, Samantha, who was 24 by that time, recalled she was mainly upset that day because Trump insulted her father. “What stood out to me in that moment was he said to my dad, ‘Well, there is no way that she got her looks from you. Thank God you married a beautiful woman.’” she told the network. “And I was desensitized to men making creepy comments about me, but I was not desensitized to someone blatantly insulting and degrading my father in front of me, someone who I looked up to and loved very much, and that was very upsetting to me.”

Samantha interned at the White House in the East Wing in college, recalling that Melania Trump “really liked me.” (In the Vanity Fair interview she said she had hated the internship because “no one was doing anything.” She also said that “everyone looked like Kellyanne Conway.”) And when her father was mocked for sharing the bra-and-pantyhose photo, she told FourTwoNine magazine that the critics were “merely Trump haters who are using this as an opportunity to stir up drama.”

But by the time her father started speaking out against Trump, she expressed disdain for Trump’s GOP. In the interview with New Day, she described a close friendship with Tiffany Trump. (This, in contrast to Ivanka, whom she described as “cold.” “One time she told on me after she saw me smoking cigarettes outside of our building,” she recalled.) That friendship changed when her father got into politics. “Myself and others are disappointed she’s supporting this rhetoric that we know she doesn’t believe,” she told New Day. “Our close circle of mutual friends included gay people, Black people, people of all different races and ethnicities. It’s just very sad to see her going along with this.”

She speculated that Tiffany Trump was probably playing a role because she “grew up unwanted” in her family—something Samantha said she couldn’t relate to because “my dad has never been anything but the best dad in the entire world to me.”