After Donald Trump’s criminal trial adjourned on Thursday afternoon, I was standing on a corner near City Hall, comparing notes with another journalist who was in the courtroom. I looked up, and there was Todd Blanche, Trump’s lawyer, walking back to the defense team’s war room after a day spent cross-examining the prosecution’s key witness, Michael Cohen. Blanche, whom I profiled for a New York cover story in April, looked exhausted and giddy, like he was running on adrenaline. I shouted, “Hi,” and he replied with a grin, “How do you think I did?”
My answer is complicated.
There are two Trump trials going on simultaneously at the courthouse at 100 Centre Street. One you’ve probably heard all about, because it’s a political circus. Judge Juan Merchan has held Trump in contempt ten times for violating a gag order in his public statements attacking the “sham.” He has threatened to throw Trump in jail and has scolded Blanche, saying he was “losing all credibility” when he contended his client was trying to stay within the order’s bounds. Trump has reportedly been frustrated with Blanche’s refusal to brawl with the judge — a fight no lawyer can win — and has tried to compensate by summoning MAGA bomb-throwers (J.D. Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, Matt Gaetz, etc.) to watch the proceedings from the front two rows before heading out to the news cameras to pummel Merchan at lunchtime. Meanwhile, just a few feet back in the gallery, Trump antagonists like George Conway and Norm Eisen are tweeting avid play-by-play legal analysis. (“Smackdown,” Eisen posted after the judge denied a defense request on Thursday. “Blanche is not up for this.”) When the day is done, Trump walks out of the courtroom and delivers his daily stem-winder at the hallway press pen with Blanche standing behind him. The analysts head to CNN and MSNBC to declare Trump’s defense dead and dissect the corpse.
None of this gavel-to-gavel coverage, however, is supposed to reach the jury. The most contentious parts of the trial, like the contempt hearings and the defense’s motions for a mistrial over the testimony of Stormy Daniels, have taken place outside of the presence of the 18 citizens — 12 jurors, six alternates — who were selected to hear the case. They have been instructed to shut out all other news about the trial. Each morning, when they march into the courtroom, everyone stands and straightens their demeanor. Merchan turns into a softie. The attorneys put on smiles. Trump closes his eyes to the proceedings. One morning, the strains of Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” filtered into the courtroom from a small pro-Trump protest across the street. Otherwise, the tumult has mostly been kept outside.
I seem to be in the minority in the gallery, but I think that when it comes to what is happening in this inside trial — the one unfolding in front of the jury — Blanche and the defense have done about as well as could be expected. Let’s not forget that they represent the world’s worst client. Trump once boasted at a rally that he possesses a “Ph.D. in litigation,” the rare claim of his that is scarcely an exaggeration, and in previous trials he has displayed a tendency to micromanage his attorneys. He likes to offer running commentary, noting what he sees as double standards — So did Biden! What about Hillary? — while urging his lawyers (sometimes very audibly) to decry the “witch hunt.” He has a history of throwing tantrums when things are not going his way. (“You are full of shit!” he yelled at a judge during his 1990 divorce from Ivana, according to a memoir by his late attorney Jay Goldberg. “I’m done here!”) He stalked out of court during closing arguments in the E. Jean Carroll defamation trial in January. So it counts as a victory for his lawyers that Trump has chosen to display his disregard by staging what appears to be a slumber strike. The alternatives would be much more disruptive.
While Trump has been dozing, the prosecutors of the Manhattan district attorney’s office have methodically built the case against him. Their first witness, David Pecker, described how his tabloid company struck a deal to support Trump’s 2016 campaign by buying and smothering stories of the candidate’s philandering. He was followed by lawyer Keith Davidson, who negotiated deals on behalf of two women, and Hope Hicks, who substantiated the prosecution’s contention that their stories could have destroyed the campaign. Stormy Daniels offered graphic and sometimes erratic testimony, to the outrage of the defense, effectively demonstrating what a mess she might have made for Trump. Interspersed with these narrators, prosecutors called custodial witnesses to introduce documentary evidence, including phone records, invoices, and checks signed by Trump himself in the Oval Office. Only after all the other pieces were in place did they bring up Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, to act as their closer.
Before Cohen took the stand, however, the defense still had a puncher’s chance. “If any other defendant was held in contempt ten times during a trial, I would say it’s going horribly for them,” said Karen Agnifilo, a former top official in the Manhattan DA’s office. Considering the circumstances, however, she said the defense had done “a good job, and they’re exposing places where there are holes.”
The prosecution’s case has major weaknesses, allowing the defense to pound both the law and the facts. To begin with, the charges that Trump faces, 34 counts of falsifying business records, can only be considered felonies if they were done in the service of a larger crime. Prosecutors have not clearly explained during the trial how Trump was breaking the law by reimbursing Cohen for making a $130,000 payoff to Daniels. In pretrial motions, the DA’s office argued — and Merchan accepted — that the larger crime did not have to “actually be committed” in order to justify the felony business records charge. As long as Trump had a “conscious aim” to cover up some possible campaign-related crime — vaguely described by the prosecutors in their opening argument as a “scheme to corrupt the 2016 election” — that was enough to support a charge for the cover-up, as least in this judge’s opinion. (The decision will be at the center of any appeal if Trump is found guilty.)
In its questioning of prior witnesses, the defense has made some headway in advancing an alternative explanation for the payoffs: Trump was being extorted and feared the personal repercussions. It is no crime to pay off a woman to save your marriage. This argument is weakened, however, by Trump’s insistence that he never slept with Daniels, because if she were lying, why would he be so ashamed? In his opening, Blanche predicted that the porn star’s story would be “salacious,” but told the jury it was untrue. Merchan cited that as his justification for allowing her to share the gory details. “Your denial puts the jury in a position of having to choose who they believe,” he said. “Donald Trump, who denies there was an encounter, or Stormy Daniels, who claims that there was.” Thus, the defendant’s compulsive need to “deny, deny, deny” — to quote from an email Hicks wrote in 2016, and introduced by the prosecution — ended up undermining his legal position.
Daniels’s testimony was something of a digression, though, from the narrative of the business-records crime. That was committed, according to prosecutors, only after Trump was elected, when he allegedly decided to come up with a sneaky way to pay Cohen back for dealing with his Stormy problem. The only firsthand witnesses to the reimbursement discussions, according to the evidence presented, are Cohen, Trump, and the Trump Organization’s longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, who has remained loyal to Trump and is currently in jail on Rikers Island on unrelated perjury charges. That left the prosecution in the uncomfortable position of relying on Cohen to fill in the gaps.
Inside the courtroom, Cohen came across as sober and soft-spoken, much in contrast to the way he presents on television. Using the evidence previously admitted, prosecutors carefully corroborated his narration, displaying contemporaneous records to show the jury the time and date of each phone call he described, each text and email he sent, each invoice he filed, and each check he received. In closing, Cohen — who pleaded guilty to federal crimes related to the Daniels payment in 2019 and served time in prison — expressed his regret for what he did for Trump. “To do the things that he had asked me to do, I violated my moral compass,” he said. “And I suffered the penalty.”
Blanche rose for his cross-examination. He was amped up for the confrontation. Trump, who had opened his eyes for the moment, swiveled his head and flashed an expectant smile.
“You and I have never spoken or met before, have we?” Blanche asked.
“We have not,” Cohen replied.
“But you know who I am, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“As a matter of fact, on April 23,” Blanche said, his voice rising and quivering, “so after the trial started in this case, you went on TikTok and called me a ‘crying little shit,’ didn’t you?”
“Sounds like something I would say,” Cohen replied in a monotone.
Merchan called all the lawyers up to the bench for a sidebar. “Why are you making this about yourself?” he asked. Blanche said he was trying to demonstrate Cohen’s bias. Really, though, it seemed as if he was trying to show his client he was tough enough to dismantle his accuser on the stand.
“You referred to President Trump as a ‘Dictator Douche Bag,’ didn’t you?” Blanche asked when he resumed.
“Sounds like something I said,” Cohen replied, repeating what would become his mantra.
They went on like that for a while, proving what everyone — including members of the jury, who haven’t been living under rocks — already knew about Cohen. He admitted under cross-examination that he had lied and broken the law for Trump, that he had gone to prison because of it, that he now expressed his hatred for his former employer on a daily basis on podcasts and TikTok, that he had made $3.6 million from the sale of his two books, Disloyal and Revenge, and that he made more money from the sale of merchandise on his website, including a T-shirt with an illustration of Trump behind bars.
“In Disloyal, you describe your feelings for President Trump as being ‘obsessed,’” Blanche said.
“Correct,” Cohen replied.
The opening-night reviews of Blanche’s performance were poor. The cable-TV legal analysts said he stammered and jumped around, looking disorganized and running the risk of confusing the jury, while Cohen had kept his composure, even scoring a few points on the counterattack. (When Blanche confronted him about his prior praise for his boss, Cohen replied, “At that time, I was knee-deep into the cult of Donald Trump.”) But Blanche had also laid some important groundwork for the next trial day, when he would work his way backwards in the chronology to the heart of the alleged crime.
On Thursday, Trump arrived with his largest group of surrogates to date, a group of House members led by Gaetz and Lauren Boebert. Jeffrey Clark, the former Justice Department official who Trump tried to install as attorney general after the 2020 election, was watching from the back row during the afternoon. Along with Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn, who has been attending throughout, Clark was one of two lawyers in the room who were now under indictment for their alleged roles in the events leading up to January 6. As if the air of insurrection weren’t explicit enough, Gaetz posted a picture of himself in the courtroom hallway on X, echoing the message Trump once sent to the Proud Boys: “Standing back and standing by, Mr. President.”
If Trump were going to win his case within the rules of the legal system, this would be the best chance for the defense. Blanche began where he had left off. He sought to suggest that Cohen was in cahoots with the prosecutors, bringing up a text exchange in which an investigator appeared to have shared information from inside the DA’s office. He played a snippet of Cohen’s podcast, Mea Culpa, in which he expressed his “delight” about Trump’s indictment. “I want to thank the Manhattan district attorney’s office and its fearless leader, Alvin Bragg,” Cohen said in the recording, in a cadence that was very different from the often whispery voice he employed on the stand. “He is about to get a taste of what I went through, and I promise you, it’s not fun.”
Then Blanche turned to some of the most damaging evidence against his client: the phone records that showed Cohen was in constant contact with Trump and other associates in the final stages of the campaign, as the candidate was traveling the country and Cohen was arranging the Daniels payoff. Blanche fixated on one particular phone call, lasting one minute and 36 seconds, on the evening of October 24, 2016. On direct examination, Cohen had testified that he had placed the call to Trump’s ever-present bodyguard Keith Schiller, who had handed the boss the phone so Cohen could tell him that had arranged the financing for the hush-money deal and get his approval to move forward. Now, on cross-examination, Blanche presented Cohen with texts he had exchanged at almost the same time with a harassing prank caller. He threatened to report the caller to the Secret Service, and the caller, who claimed to be 14, begged for mercy. Then he contacted Schiller. It seemed as if there were an alternative, and far more petty, explanation for the October 24 call. But Cohen stuck to his story, saying he had talked about both things.
“I always ran everything by the boss immediately,” Cohen said.
The courtroom gallery filled with the clackety-clack sound of reporters pounding on their laptops. Finally — a moment. When the day was over, Trump looked invigorated, maybe even jaunty, as he left the courtroom. Blanche’s co-counsel Susan Necheles was grinning from ear to ear. It was a positive day for Trump, as even those who want him convicted grudgingly admitted. “The defense needed a knockout blow,” Eisen tweeted. “They landed some punches & one on the chin.”
The trial is now almost over. Cohen will be back on the stand on Monday for more cross-examination, which should take another couple hours, and then there will be some redirect questioning, and the prosecution will rest. It is as yet unclear whether the defense will even put on a case. On Thursday, Blanche indicated that he only had a couple minor witnesses that he might call. And then there was Trump himself. “That is another decision,” Blanche told the judge, referring to the possibility that his client might decide to take the stand. No lawyer would ever advise a client in Trump’s situation to testify in his own defense. The prosecution could ask him on cross-examination whether he had ever committed fraud or cheated on his wife. And yet in prior civil cases, Trump has shown an eagerness to be a witness. He cannot resist an opportunity to create drama, even when it comes at a risk to his legal defense.
If things proceed rationally, though, Trump will follow his lawyer’s advice. If he passes on the opportunity to take the stand, this jury, like most juries, will decide the case without hearing from the defendant, and they will have to weigh the evidence and the credibility of the witnesses. John Moscow, who spent 30 years working in the DA’s office under the legendary Robert Morgenthau, told me he thought it would be a simple matter for the prosecution to counter the defense’s challenges to Cohen. “Has he lied? Oh yeah. For whom? Donald,” Moscow said. “Did he go to prison? Yes. For whom? Donald.” In the end, he said, he thought the jury would remember the documents — the “34 pieces of paper,” as Blanche called them in his opening — that prosecutors introduced. Eleven of them were checks, most of which were in the amount of $35,000 and bore the unforgettable signature of one Donald J. Trump, a man who famously keeps a tight grip on his wallet.
“There’s no connection between him and crime?” Moscow said. “I’m sorry, he signed the checks.”
