Michael Cohen’s Star Turn

As he has turned from Donald Trump fixer to antagonist in the last several years, Michael Cohen has developed a public profile and some level of cachet. Once a relatively under-the-radar attorney for the former president, his opposition to his old boss turned him into an avatar for Trumpworld exiledom, as well as a cultural curiosity—a somber face with a thick Long Island accent at the center of a national scandal.

Over the course of Trump’s hush money trial, Cohen has spent some evenings taunting his former boss on TikTok. As he prepared to take the witness stand last Monday, Rosie O’Donnell texted him, “Ur doing great.” The weekend before, Page Six reported, he walked around shaking hands at the Manhattan members-only club Casa Cipriani.

Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records stemming from a payment that Cohen made to the porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016. As it has played out in the last several weeks, the trial has reintroduced on the national stage a set of early Trump-presidency figures who once dominated news cycles. Daniels has testified about her claim that she and Trump had sex in 2006, which he denies, and the money she received to keep quiet about it; former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker recounted the tabloid’s methods for suppressing negative stories about his old friend and concocting dirt about his rivals; and Hope Hicks, former White House communications director, broke down in tears on the stand when discussing her time working at the Trump Organization.

Here was a succession of characters at the porous boundary between politics and celebrity who, through a mix of outsize personality and transactional elan, had become players in a well-rehearsed drama. Much of what’s been litigated in Trump’s Manhattan trial had been covered in intensive detail in 2018, the year that the FBI raided Cohen’s office and hotel room, though not with hours of public input from the participants. Cohen, as the prosecution’s final witness, was the production’s star, and perhaps best positioned to put the finest point on the milieu from which the criminal case sprung. Trump was “showing me that he inhabited a different type of reality,” he wrote in his 2020 memoir, Disloyal, “one that he would share with me alone, a world that was filled with wonder and excitement and power and intrigue and adulation.”

Over four days of testimony, Cohen comported himself with a studied self-possession. At several junctures, Trump’s hulking lead lawyer Todd Blanche, slightly hunched over in a tight suit, seemed to try to draw him out. He was occupying the role—aggressor on Trump’s behalf—that Cohen once had. On Thursday, during the most contentious exchange of the trial, he claimed that Cohen was misrepresenting a crucial 2016 phone call during which Cohen claimed to have gotten Trump’s sign-off for the hush money payment.

“That was a lie,” Blanche exploded, stalking away from his microphone to convey his outrage. “You can admit it.”

But Cohen was formal and measured at every turn. “No, sir,” he said. “I can’t.”

This was not the hothead described elsewhere in the trial. Cohen was a looming figure in the proceedings before he took the stand. His former banker said he had been selected to work with Cohen because of his “ability to handle individuals that may be a little challenging”; Daniels’s lawyer said he tried “like hell to avoid talking to him.” Hicks, who’s presumably dealt with all manner of Trump hangers-on, recalled that she “used to say that he liked to call himself a ‘fixer’ or ‘Mr. Fix It,’ and it was only because he first broke it.”

Earlier in his career, Cohen worked in personal injury and medical malpractice law and invested in taxi medallions. He was a sharp-elbowed operator, firmly in Trump’s world before he ever knew Trump—he testified last week that he met Pecker at a function in Long Island before meeting the tabloid king’s old friend. In 2006, Trump liked what he saw when Cohen, living in one of the developer’s buildings, took management’s side in a dispute with the condo board. Cohen was soon living a dream. “If you do something wrong,” he told ABC News in 2011, “I’m going to come at you, grab you by the neck, and I’m not going to let you go until I’m finished.”

The chastened, weathered pose Cohen has adopted in the last few weeks represented a reversal. He seemed to be performing penitence, reflecting at one point that, “I was even for myself unusually angry.” His adherence to this stance, steadfast in the face of Blanche’s provocations, was its own marker of his intensity. He would be as fully committed to his new public face as he had been to his old one. Cohen told Trump, he testified, that he secured an initial denial from Daniels about an affair in order “to get credit for expressing that I was continuing to ensure that he was protected.” He wanted his boss to see that he had “stayed loyal.”

Trump has reportedly been unhappy at points with his new lawyer, but showed flashes of a good mood during the more hostile stretches of Blanche and Cohen’s back-and-forth. During one bout of his running trial commentary in the courthouse hallway, he asked Blanche, standing by his side, “Is that a good statement, Mr. Attorney?”

“Yes,” his lawyer replied, smiling a bit.

And if it wasn’t Blanche next to him, it was Vivek Ramaswamy or J.D. Vance, or Lauren Boebert or Matt Gaetz. The latter stages of the trial—the prosecution is expected to rest its case after Cohen’s testimony, with closing arguments set for next week—have featured a cavalcade of figures angling for a spot in Trump’s orbit. Jurors had been hearing for weeks what it was like to feel that gravitational pull, and what sort of people have been attracted to it. Blanche asked Cohen, in an effort to suggest that the witness was acting out of spite, whether he wanted a job in the White House as Trump’s chief of staff. “I would have liked to be considered for ego purpose,” Cohen ruefully replied.

At every place along the personal arc that he was describing on the stand, Cohen had been publicly drawn to or visibly repelled by Trump. Each day of his testimony, photographers have been waiting to see him walk out the condo building he has lived in since the early 2000s, still bearing the name Trump Park Avenue.