One of Donald Trump's biographers has said he is not surprised the president has been implicated in opinion-poll tampering, suggesting Trump cheats at every available opportunity.
According to a Wall Street Journal report Thursday, Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen said he paid an IT worker to rig CNBC and Drudge Report opinion polls ahead of the 2016 presidential campaign to benefit then-candidate Trump.
Cohen, who has been sentenced to three years in prison for lying to investigators and a series of fraud and campaign finance crimes, confirmed the report on Twitter. "What I did was at the direction of and for the sole benefit of @readlDonaldTrump @POUTS," Cohen wrote. "I truly regret my blind loyalty to a man who doesn't deserve it."
Speaking with CNN's Don Lemon Thursday, Trump biographer Michael D'Antonio, author of The Truth About Trump, said the accusations did not surprise him.
"Donald Trump believes either you're a sucker or you're taking advantage of the suckers," he explained. "So we were the suckers. They took advantage of us.
"But there's also I think something consistent with Donald Trump's entire life going on here. This is a man who thinks that he cannot win a straight-up competition. He has to somehow rig whatever game he's playing."
D'Antonio, who interviewed Trump extensively before writing his book, also suggested the president was regularly guilty of projection, or signaling what he is doing by accusing others of the same thing.
"Whatever he accuses others of doing is the thing that he's doing himself. Right? So who imagines that the polls are rigged? The guy who's rigging the polls," said D'Antonio.
Host Lemon said, "I've been told on good authority the reason he did it is because they wanted [Trump] to show up in the polls just enough for us suckers in the media to talk about him, to get his name out there."
D'Antonio was joined on Lemon's show by Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Rothfeld, who broke the Cohen story and noted that both poll rigging efforts failed.
Rothfeld said Trump likely had full knowledge of the efforts to manipulate the polling data. Discussing Cohen, the journalist said, "Trump people would like us to think he is rogue, but we know Trump definitely was orchestrating the hush money deals, and in this case, Michael Cohen says that Donald Trump directed him to do that. And at the time, Trump was tweeting about those polls and was very angry, in fact, that he didn't win the CNBC poll, and was complaining about it.
"That kind of indicates that he was quite aware of what was going on."
D'Antonio said that despite Cohen's shady behavior on behalf of Trump, the lawyer's newfound honesty could be his saving grace. "He's landed on his feet and he's now going to, I think, be the hero of this story," said the author.
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