Book excerpt: The shocking, definitive account of the lawyers and media tycoons who enabled the rise of Donald Trump, featuring new revelations from a Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal team With his blunt-force fame and the myths he’s propagated about himself, Donald Trump has always moved in a world of gossip barons, crooked lawyers, and porn stars. But when he became the Republican nominee for the presidency in 2016, all of these characters crawled out from the underbelly of Trump’s stardom and stumbled onto the global stage with him. In The Fixers, Joe Palazzolo and Michael Rothfeld have produced a deeply reported and exquisitely drawn portrait of that world, full of secret phone calls, hidden texts, and desperate deals, unearthing the practice of “catch and kill” by which Trump surrogates paid hush money to cover up his affairs, and detailing Trump’s historic relationship with his fixers—from his early, influential relationship with Roy Cohn to his reliance on Michael Cohen, National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. It traces the arc of their interactions from the 1970s through the 2016 campaign and beyond. It is a distinctly American saga that navigates the worlds of reality TV, cash-for-trash tabloids, single-shingle law shops, celebrity bashes, high-end real estate, pornography, and politics. The characters and settings of this book are part of a vulgar circus that crisscrosses the country, from New York to L.A. to D.C. Terrifying, darkly comic, and compulsively readable, The Fixers is an epic political adventure in which greed, corruption, lust, and ambition collide, and that leads, ultimately, to the White House. Advance praise for The Fixers “Of the dozens of books chronicling Donald Trump’s presidency, The Fixers is destined to sit atop the pile. It has everything you look for in a political page-turner: Colorful characters, intrigue, sex, corruption and—unlike much of the Trump canon—meticulous, factual reporting by two ace reporters. What a read!”—John Carreyrou, New York Times bestselling author of Bad Blood