Michael Cohen revealed in an interview with Vanity Fair published Friday that his former client, President Donald Trump, repeatedly made racist statements.

The president’s former personal attorney has turned against his boss in a big way in recent months, not only by implicating Trump in hush money payments, but also urging Americans to vote Democrat in the midterm elections. Cohen spoke to Vanity Fair‘s Emily Jane Fox in light of the political violence of last week, and provided four anecdotes of Trump’s racist comments over the years.

The first instance detailed occurred in 2016, when Cohen was watching one of Trump’s campaign rallies, and observed that his crowds were almost entirely composed of white people. Trump’s reply: “That’s because black people are too stupid to vote for me.”

According to Cohen, this reminded him of a conversation he had with Trump shortly after the death of Nelson Mandela.

“[Trump] said to me, ‘Name one country run by a black person that’s not a shithole,’ and then he added, ‘Name one city.’”

This second instance draws parallels to the controversy sparked several months ago when Trump allegedly described Haiti, El Salvador and countries in Africa as “shithole countries.”

The third story Cohen offered was from a trip in the 2000s where he and Trump were in a car riding through a rough area of Chicago on the way to a business meeting. According to the president’s former lawyer, Trump took note of his surroundings and said something to the effect of “only the blacks could live like this.”

The last recollection Cohen had to offer was a moment when he was with Trump for a discussion about the season of The Apprentice that ended in a tete-a-tete between Bill Rancic and Kwame Jackson.

“Trump was explaining his back-and-forth about not picking Jackson,” an African-American investment manager who had graduated from Harvard Business School. “He said, ‘There’s no way I can let this black f-g win.’”

Cohen said that in retrospect, he wished he stopped working for Trump when he hear these remarks. Fox asked him why he’s coming forward with all of this now:

When I asked him why he was coming forward now with such uncomfortable claims, Cohen was clear: he knew that the president’s private comments were worse than his public rhetoric, and he wanted to offer potential voters what he believed was evidence of Trump’s character in advance of the midterm elections.

[Photo via Getty Images]

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