Trump now has his back against the wall

Last week in the US was best summed up in the words of Stormy Daniels. “How ya like me now?!” the adult film actress tweeted on the evening US President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, and former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, both found themselves convicted on eight counts each.

Seven months after Daniels burst into public consciousness with allegations of a 2006 affair with Trump and an alleged payoff, we are starting to see how those claims might play out for him and those in his orbit. Last week a Virginia jury convicted Manafort of bank and tax fraud, just hours before Cohen pleaded guilty to eight separate charges in a New York courtroom, including violating US campaign finance law.

By Friday we learnt that Allen Weisselberg, the CFO of the Trump Organisation, had been given immunity in exchange for testifying about the payments made to Daniels and a former Playboy model, Karen McDougal, in exchange for their silence over their alleged affairs with Trump.

David Pecker, owner of the National Enquirer and an old friend of the president, is also said to be co-operating with authorities in exchange for immunity. That Pecker, whose tabloid news outlet gleefully ran stories bashing Trump’s opponents during the 2016 US primaries, now seems to be betraying the president’s trust is a sign of the changing situation in which Trump finds himself.

For years, the president has depended on a culture of loyalty from those surrounding him — first in business and then in the White House. In the private sector, the gambit more or less paid off. In politics, it has run up against a wall.

In the wake of Cohen’s decision to co-operate with prosecutors and enter a guilty plea, Trump railed against “flipping”, saying in an interview with Fox & Friends that the practice “almost ought to be illegal” and praising Manafort, who had stayed strong and refused to “break”, even under the threat of imprisonment. (Whether prosecutors actually offered Manafort the opportunity to “flip”, as Trump puts it, is an open question.)

While Trump claims to know all about the art of “flipping”, he nevertheless appears to have been caught off guard by the level of Cohen’s betrayal. In April, after the New York Times reported that Cohen could end up co-operating with federal authorities, Trump shot down the idea. Cohen, the president tweeted at the time, was “a fine person with a wonderful family”. He continued: “Most people will flip if the government lets them out of trouble, even if … it means lying or making up stories. Sorry, I don’t see Michael doing that …”

Whether the comments were an attempt to pressure Cohen to stay strong or a grave lack of foresight the instinct appears to have been faulty.

A similar impulse backfired in 2017 when Trump summoned his then FBI director, James Comey, to the White House to ask for his loyalty. The request, Comey would later recall, felt as if Trump were seeking “to establish a patronage relationship” — evoking the world of the New York mafia.

Comey countered the president’s offer with a vow of “honest loyalty” and was sacked a few months later. (Trump ultimately paid the higher cost — the firing sparked the opening of Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation.)

In the wake of the Manafort and Cohen convictions, Trump’s instinct has been to double down. He has taken particular aim at the US attorney-general, Jeff Sessions, the first Republican senator to endorse him in 2016, who he feels betrayed his trust by recusing himself from supervising the Mueller investigation.

The walls of protection around Trump now appear vulnerable. His enemies appear to be beating him at his own game — whether former aide Omarosa Manigault Newman, who has published a White House tell-all, or Daniels, who has been touring the country to boost her profile.

Meanwhile, in a feat of Trump-inspired marketing, Daniels announced this month that she would launch a new, limited-edition line of perfume. The name of the fragrance? Truth. /© Financial Times 2018