“You Called Me a Crying Little Shit, Didn’t You?”: Michael Cohen and the Combative Climax of the Trump Trial

For the crescendo of his hush money trial in Manhattan, Donald Trump arrived at the courthouse on Tuesday with a beefed up entourage. Michael Cohen, his loyal lawyer-fixer turned devout antagonist, was set to continue his testimony and face cross-examination from Trump’s glowering lead lawyer Todd Blanche—a convocation of past and present pit bull attorneys for the former president. There have been dull stretches over the past several weeks, but this would not be one of them, and House Speaker Mike Johnson, North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy were on the scene.

“I do have a lot of surrogates and they are speaking very beautifully,” Trump told reporters in the morning.

The show of support offered a kind of counterpoint to the portrait of Trump that Cohen was painting. Assistant district attorney Susan Hoffinger asked Cohen how he felt after the FBI raided his Park Avenue hotel room and Rockefeller Center office in April 2018.

“How to describe your life being turned upside down,” Cohen said. “Concerned, despondent, angry.”

“Stay tough,” he remembered Trump telling him. “You’re gonna be okay.”

They haven’t spoken since, Cohen testified.

After the raid, Cohen pleaded guilty to charges that included campaign finance violations connected to a payment he made to the porn star Stormy Daniels. Trump has denied Daniels’s claim that they had sex in 2006 and pleaded not guilty to charges of falsifying business records in order to conceal his reimbursement to Cohen for the hush money.

During breaks in his testimony, Cohen shuffled slowly and somewhat gingerly in and out of the courtroom. It was perhaps his last chance on such an immense stage to tell a story that he has been recounting for several years now. He was solemn, measured, and, in the final moments of a relatively tranquil period of direct examination, seemingly reflective.

“I regret doing things for him that I should not have,” Cohen said. “Lying, bullying people to effectuate a goal.”

It was easy to see, before any witness took the stand, where Trump’s defense would go with this sort of admission. In pre-trial filings, his attorneys argued that Cohen shouldn’t be allowed to testify at all given his track record as an admitted perjurer. But here he was, face-to-face with his old boss for whom he once said he would take a bullet, and Blanche wasted no time.

“You know who I am, don’t you?”

Cohen had gone on TikTok in recent weeks, Blanche pointed out, to comment on the state of the trial. “You called me a crying little shit, didn’t you?”

Cohen was measured, speaking slowly and carefully—dry, but just polite enough to avoid the appearance of smugness. “Sounds like something I would say,” he replied.

The prosecution began objecting and the judge convened a sidebar conference. Trump looked, as he often has throughout the trial, comatose.

In the early stage of his questioning, which marks one of the final portions of the state’s case against Trump, Blanche sought to draw out a picture that showed Cohen’s ire toward his old boss. As Blanche noted, Cohen has been quite vocal about his disillusionment, and he didn’t resist the implication that he felt scorned. His TikTok commentary on the trial, he testified, was a late-night outlet he found for himself. He’s been having a hard time sleeping.

Out of the seven nights in the week, Blanche asked, how often did Cohen talk about Trump?

“I only do it six days a week,” Cohen said. “I would say about six days a week.”

It was fair, he said later, to describe his current activities as a redemption tour and a full reversal of his affinity for the defendant. “I admired him tremendously,” Cohen said. “At that time, I was knee-deep into the cult of Donald Trump.”

After a break in the proceedings on Wednesday, Blanche’s cross-examination of Cohen will continue on Thursday.