Donald Trump has to rig every game he plays, president's biographer tells CNN's Don Lemon

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 already 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, Michael D’Antonio—author of “The Truth About Trump” biography—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 he wrote his book—also suggested the president is regularly guilty of projection, signalling what he is doing by accusing others of the same thing.