Donald Trump’s Final Appeal: Are You Going to Believe Michael Cohen?

As Donald Trump’s Manhattan hush money trial reached its final chapter on Tuesday, the former president took what’s become his customary morning walk through the center of a downtown courtroom, passing his eyes across the rows of reporters who have been studying his glances for the past five weeks. He was trailed by family members (Don Jr., Eric, and Tiffany, but not Melania, Ivanka, or Barron) who had arrived for the occasion of closing arguments; his usual cohort of aides and advisers (Jason Miller and Boris Epshteyn); and, following directly behind him, his lead attorney Todd Blanche, who was slated to offer the last word in his client’s defense.

Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records in order to conceal a payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels for keeping quiet about her claim that they had sex. Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen arranged the hush money deal in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election—in an effort, prosecutors have argued, to stem the scrutiny of Trump’s relationships with women that followed the release of the Access Hollywood tape—and he was the final witness in the prosecution’s case. The personnel were the problem, Blanche suggested as he began his remarks. “You should want and expect more than the testimony of Michael Cohen,” he told the jury, and “something beyond the word of a woman who claimed that something happened in 2006.”

But Blanche also emphasized a point that has sometimes been lost amid the flurry of attention paid to the boldface names involved in the trial. “The case is about documents,” the attorney said. “It’s a paper case.” It was not, in other words, about “an encounter that President Trump has repeatedly and unequivocally denied,” he went on, or even the payment to Daniels.

During the beginning of Blanche’s statement, Trump turned toward his lawyer—in the direction of the jury. As throughout the trial, though, the jurors and the former president never seemed to make eye contact. Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney whom Trump has repeatedly vilified over the last year, has been absent from the trial since opening statements over a month ago. He sat in the second row of the courtroom on Tuesday.

Blanche is not charismatic, exactly, or particularly fluid, but he projects a pleading sturdiness. “The words that Michael Cohen said to you on that stand,” he told the jury, “they matter.” Cohen’s admitted track record of lying was the prevailing motif. And while, as promised, Blanche’s remarks revolved around the dry details of the business records in question, they also turned on a more human element. “What the government did for the past five weeks at the end of the day,” Blanche said, “is ask you to believe the man who testified two weeks ago.” (Or, as one of the headings in his slideshow presentation put it, “Case Turns On Cohen.”)

This, ultimately, was the defining tone of Blanche’s summation once he made his way through the records. He asked for disbelief, veering somewhat disjointedly through the intricacies of the prosecution’s case and seeking to poke holes wherever he could. Falsifying business records would amount to a misdemeanor if not for a second element of the charges that elevates the allegations to felonies: that the records were distorted in order to conceal another crime. “The records weren’t even false,” Blanche said. But even if they were, he continued, “Every campaign in this country is a conspiracy,” meaning that the arrangement to silence Daniels’s claim represented nothing nefarious. And even if there was a conspiracy, as the prosecution argued, between Trump, Cohen, and former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker to suppress negative stories about the candidate and push embarrassing coverage of his rivals, “That’s what they came up with?”

A bit over three hours after he began, Blanche concluded his remarks. He did not, as defense attorneys sometimes do, appeal to any sweeping sense of justice or history. Aside from referring to the defendant as “President Trump,” he only waved at the stakes of the trial in passing as he wrapped up, reminding the jurors that the proceedings did not amount to a referendum on their political views. His voice rang loudest, thinning almost to a squeal, when he discussed Cohen’s recollection of a call he said he had with Trump. “It was a lie,” Blanche shouted.

The prosecution is set to offer its summation in the afternoon.