Trump’s allies pledged loyalty to him. Until they didn’t.
Once enforcers, they turn against him in courts
NEW YORK — Donald Trump could not hide his anger. Sitting at the front of a crowded New York courtroom this week, he folded his arms tightly across his chest. He tossed his head and scowled. He stared into the middle distance and scrolled through his phone.
His ire was directed at Michael Cohen, his former personal lawyer and fixer, who had taken the witness stand 15 feet away and had promptly called Trump a liar. Cohen has told his share of lies as well. But in court, he swore he had done so “at the direction of, in concert with, and for the benefit of Mr. Trump.”
Cohen’s two days of dramatic testimony this week provided the first glimpse of what could become a familiar scene: Trump, sitting at a defense table, watching as a lawyer who once did his bidding now cooperated with the authorities seeking to hold him to account.
On the same day Cohen began his testimony, Jenna Ellis, who had sought to help Trump overturn the results of the 2020 election, pleaded guilty to state charges in Georgia. She was preceded by Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, both lawyers who worked with Trump’s campaign, both now expected to cooperate in the criminal case that the Georgia prosecutors brought against him.
The circumstances surrounding the Georgia criminal case and the New York civil fraud trial are vastly different. But near the center of each case are lawyers who pledged public fealty to Trump — until they very publicly did not.
Trump has long relied on a phalanx of legal attack dogs to speak on his behalf, or to do or say things he would rather not do or say himself. And because Trump has such a tenuous relationship with the truth, those lieutenants often spread a message that prosecutors and investigators consider to be outright lies. Lies about an election he lost, a relationship with a porn actor he may have had, and a net worth he may not quite have achieved.
Now those statements are ricocheting back at Trump as he contends with the civil trial in New York, brought by state Attorney General Letitia James, and with four criminal indictments up and down the East Coast. And while Trump is quick to blame his betrayers — Cohen is “proven to be a liar,” he said outside the courtroom this week — his predicament was born from his own lopsided approach to relationships.
Trump has a history of disavowing people who were once close to him and find themselves in trouble. He had long since cut ties with Cohen — until Tuesday, they had not seen each other in five years — and more recently he distanced himself from the lawyers in the Georgia case. He had also refused to pay their mounting legal bills.
Their relationships, a oneway street flowing in Trump’s direction, appeared to work for a time. But when those loyal soldiers faced their own legal jeopardy, their allegiance to the former president became strained or even shattered.
Cohen was among several in a series of people who Trump turned to over decades in the hopes they would emulate his first fixer and defender, lawyer Roy Cohn. “Roy was brutal, but he was a very loyal guy,” Trump told one of his biographers, Timothy O’Brien, in an interview. “He brutalized for you.”
That brutality — along with Cohn’s method of conflating public relations defenses with legal ones, making showy displays in court and accusing the federal government of “Gestapo-like tactics” against Trump in a 1970s suit alleging housing discrimination — became Trump’s preferred model for a lawyer.
Cohen has often said that those sort of tactics influenced what Trump looks for in those who defend him.
While it is unclear how useful Ellis will be to the case against Trump in Georgia, Cohen has already been tormenting Trump for the last five years. Ellis became critical of him in the last several months.