The inside story of Donald Trump's disastrous criminal trial

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

81% : To many who knew him, Blanche's decision to represent Trump came as a surprise.
60% : Soon after taking on Trump as a client, Blanche and his wife bought property in West Palm Beach and moved there in order to be able to dash to Mar-a-Lago at a moment's notice.
57% : A Long Island native who adored Trump so much in his teens that he read his book The Art of the Deal twice, Cohen became the New York mogul's lawyer and problem-solver.
52% : It was Cohn who taught Trump how to operate on the national stage.
51% : Cohn, who was fond of spouting off on the courthouse steps, instilled in Trump the essential lesson that to stop attacking was to begin losing.
51% : Blanche believes Cohen's frustration came from not getting a "little more loyalty and love" from Trump and his entourage, to whom he had given his soul.
50% : In a manner reminiscent of The Apprentice, Trump would sometimes assemble many of his attorneys -- civil, criminal and corporate -- and various advisers around a table at Trump Tower and ask them to posit what they thought the best tactic was for a particular motion or appeal, no matter whether they had any relevant experience.
43% : Bragg, who attended Harvard Law School, became the first African-American elected to the position of Manhattan DA in 2021, pledging in his campaign to go after Trump.
41% : Blanche did not tell Trump, who often sat for hours at trial with his eyes apparently closed, to stay more alert in front of the jury.
40% : One juror who would doubt Cohen's account; one juror to baulk at the idea that Trump had intricate knowledge of the precise structure of the payments Cohen made to Daniels.
40% : Trump is no stranger to the American legal system.
38% : He would not try to limit what Trump said about the case on social media or on TV, but he would otherwise do things his way.
38% : To many, Cohen's sorry state by the time the hush money trial began was the moral to the story of the costs of personal and professional fealty to Trump.
37% : For a start, the indictment provided almost no detail on the underlying crime which Trump was alleged to have committed by obscuring the payments to Daniels.
37% : Among those who have worked for Trump more recently, Nick Gravante, who was counsel to the convicted former Trump Organization chief financial officer, and Chris Kise, a former Florida solicitor-general who left his prestigious firm to represent the ex-president, reportedly resisted their client's exhortations and were either sidelined or fired.
37% : On the stand, Cohen had recalled, in vivid detail, a short phone call that took place on October 24 2016, in which he claimed to have told Trump that the deal with Daniels had been completed.
36% : Then, Blanche asked the witness to confirm that just two days prior, he had testified that Schiller had passed the phone to Trump, and that they discussed Daniels.
35% : But their liberal-leaning children had both graduated and were living in states where they weren't as likely to suffer social sanction for their father's association with Trump.
35% : From the start, Trump believed there were no circumstances under which a Manhattan jury would ever acquit him.
35% : Initially, Trump pressed Blanche to adopt a pugilistic stance with the court, in the manner of Roy Cohn, the McCarthy-era communist-hunter turned fixer who was his first and fiercest personal attorney.
35% : The conversation was crucial to the prosecution, because it directly tied Trump to the hush-money scheme.
35% : Trump often referred to "Perry Mason moments", referring to the old television show in which the lead character, a lawyer, would elicit an unexpected confession from a teary witness.
34% : Daniels, who was not cross-examined by Blanche, set off a bombshell when she revealed Trump hadn't worn a condom and seemed to suggest -- for the first time -- that the alleged sex was not entirely consensual, due to the presence of a bodyguard outside the hotel room door.
34% : He had reiterated that Cohen had been caught in a lie on the stand and that he had admitted to stealing tens of thousands of dollars from Trump.
33% : Wharton thought it was impossible for Schiller to have discussed the harasser and pass the phone to Trump for Cohen to brief his boss, all within 96 seconds.
33% : Trump saw Costello on TV and, against Blanche and his team's objections, told him to add him to the witness list.
33% : Cohen, who went from being depended on by Trump to being discarded by him, was just a few years ahead of Blanche at American University, and, I suggest as tactfully as possible, perhaps a few years ahead of him in being considered for a job in a Trump administration.
32% : Not to mention a walking cautionary tale about the potential consequences of lawyering for Trump.
32% : In 2016, he remortgaged his home to pay off Daniels, allegedly at the behest of Trump himself.
31% : (Blanche insists the decision for Trump not to take the stand was made jointly with his client.)
30% : Crucially, he claimed not to have "any strong opinions" on Trump.
30% : And despite having repeatedly vowed to do so, Trump had been talked out of testifying by Blanche and others, who gingerly pointed out that his previous appearances had not helped.
29% : like the times that he would talk about his desire to see Trump and his family in prison".
28% : If Trump was maligning his defence team behind their backs, or blaming Blanche for the defeat, word never reached the exhausted lawyer.
27% : Blanche, who had never spoken to Trump or expressed any interest in representing him, knew what the conversation was likely to concern: the first criminal indictment of a former president in American history.
27% : Something in him had bristled at the way the New York legal establishment had walked away from the notion of defending Trump but had no qualms about lionising lawyers who defend the likes of Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein.
27% : When a court officer called Blanche over at one point and instructed him to tell Trump to stop using his phone in court, Blanche replied: "You tell him."As the trial went on, Blanche's relations with the court nonetheless began to fray.
26% : Former top aide Hope Hicks testified that Trump was worried about the electoral effects should the Daniels affair come out after the emergence of the Access Hollywood tape, in which he bragged about groping women.
26% : It also means the years-long efforts by state and federal prosecutors to bring Trump to justice has been temporarily thwarted by persistent lawyering.
25% : His political prospects seemed to be dimming, with Florida governor Ron DeSantis raising vast sums of cash and handsomely beating Trump in polls of likely Republican primary voters.
25% : In early July, the US Supreme Court ruled that presidents enjoy criminal immunity for so-called "official acts", leaving another case against Trump -- in which prosecutors alleged he fuelled the January 6 insurrection -- in tatters.
25% : The delay, which the judge said he made to "dispel any suggestion" of political bias, means Trump will no longer face any significant criminal proceedings before Americans go to the polls.
24% : But at Mar-a-Lago a few weeks later, Trump wasn't the caustic, rambling loudmouth of his political rallies or the late-night social media poster prone to conspiracy and bitterness.
24% : Then there was the matter of the Manhattan jury pool, which would be overwhelmingly and, Blanche felt, unfairly biased against Trump.
24% : At one point, in an extraordinarily unusual move, Justice Merchan warned Blanche that he was "losing all credibility with the court" by defending incendiary social media posts made by Trump.
24% : The call in question, placed to Trump's bodyguard, Keith Schiller, who was with Trump and could pass the phone to him, appeared to have been about another matter entirely.
24% : A federal election law specialist had been rendered useless, when Merchan ruled he could not go into the intricacies of whether or not Trump fell foul of campaign finance rules.
24% : The jury's decision was unanimous: Trump was guilty on 34 felony counts.
23% : Emboldened by his victory prosecuting a fraud case against the Trump Organization, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg had recently revived an investigation into Trump falsely accounting for a pay-off to porn star Stormy Daniels in the run-up to the 2016 election.
23% : Trump, who hours before Merchan's order had publicly harangued his lawyers in a bitter press conference, is far from being in the clear, and is still on the hook for more than half a billion dollars thanks to judgments in civil fraud, sexual abuse and defamation lawsuits.
22% : Cross-examination could remind the jury of the recent E Jean Carroll civil verdicts, in which Trump was found liable for sexual abuse in the mid-1990s and defamation, and in which she was awarded more than $88mn in damages.
21% : After Trump won the White House and he was denied a position in his old boss's administration, legal trouble caught up with Cohen.
21% : Blanche's point was to show the jury that Cohen harboured such blind hatred for Trump that he even hated his lawyer, who he had never met.
21% : Bove, dour and detail-obsessed, was one of the few attorneys who had deep expertise in the Classified Information Procedures Act, which Trump was separately accused of running afoul of in Miami.
13% : As his children often remind him, he'd even shed a tear the night Hillary Clinton lost, fearing for America's institutions under Trump.

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