On Thursday evening, actor Tom Arnold tweeted a photo of himself with longtime Donald Trump fixer Michael Cohen and the message, “I love New York.” By Friday morning, he was claiming that he and Cohen would be “taking Trump down together,” adding: “This dude has all the tapes.”
Those tapes—allegedly an outtake reel of the president using the “n-word” during his Celebrity Apprentice days, among other things—are at the center of an upcoming Viceland special Arnold is hosting, called The Hunt for the Trump Tapes. But more than anything, Arnold’s tweets are the latest clue that Cohen might be preparing to flip on his former boss.
Arnold sat down with MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace on Friday afternoon to explain what he’s up to. He said the president used to be an “affable guy” and even a friend, but now he views Trump as “obviously a racist” who “has racist people around him and he is cruel and he lies.”
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“I know it seems crazy, but he’s just changing everything about the fabric of our country,” Arnold added. “But it’s just god awful. And so, you know, I’m glad my friend Michael Cohen is with us.”
In a follow-up tweet to his original post, Arnold, who was a contestant on the Trump-hosted Celebrity Apprentice, walked back his earlier comments a bit, clarifying that Cohen did not exactly agree to take the president down with him. “I’m the crazy person who said Me & Michael Cohen were teaming up to take down Trump of course,” he wrote. “I meant it.”
Arnold told Wallace that he has personally seen tapes in which Trump uses the “n-word” and even calls his son Eric the “r-word” in addition to openly sexually harassing women on the set of his reality show. But he has not yet been able to get those tapes out. “I’m not going to quit until he’s out of office,” he said. “Because he and his family are just awful grifters, horrible people.”
After attacking Trump for his birther crusade against President Barack Obama, Arnold said, “The irony is Donald Trump is an illegitimate president. He did not win the election without help from Russia. You will see this, and he knows he’s illegitimate. Every time you mention it, he freaks out and that’s karma.”
Later, Arnold confirmed that he has actually “run into” Cohen six times and that the first time they met they were adversaries, as was reported earlier this year by The Daily Beast. He insisted that Cohen never paid him “hush money” but that there was someone else involved that he “tried to get to hush.”
Arnold also admitted that if you follow him on Twitter—or say, listen to him rant on MSNBC—you might think he is a “crazy” person. “But when this is all over, you will go ‘Oh my god.’”
Asked by Wallace if he thinks Cohen will flip, Arnold said, “Here’s what I know. He’s going to take care of his family, his country, the rest of us Jews. Donald Trump is not. He’s done. He knows Donald Trump does not care about him. He does not care about his family and it’s over. He also doesn’t want to be harassed by Donald Trump because he is the president of the United States still and he probably has a bunch of dudes. But Michael Cohen is going to take care of his family and his country first. That’s all you need to know.”
Finally, the MSNBC host had to ask Arnold about his ex-wife, Roseanne Barr, who has been in the news of late after he show was canceled following a racist tweet. “We divorced 24 years ago,” he said. “Like a lot of people in this country,” he believes she got “sucked into” the conspiracy theory-laden Trump world “with Nazis and racists and just crazy, crazy, crazy.”
“It’s not just Fox News, but it’s Fox News and the internet stuff,” he continued. “And it’s like a drug. And Donald Trump is the kingpin. He is perpetuating—that’s why he has to go, too. He is the kingpin of this drug that’s keeping people sick in this country.”
