After a marathon day of closing arguments in Donald Trump’s New York hush-money trial, jurors are poised to begin deliberating the former president’s fate today on 34 criminal counts of falsifying business records — the last phase of an unprecedented case pitting Trump against the city and state where he made his name.
The jury will have to decide if the maneuvering around a $130,000 payoff in 2016 to porn star Stormy Daniels by Trump’s roving legal fixer, Michael Cohen, was “a conspiracy and a cover-up” designed to “hoodwink voters,” as Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass put it on Tuesday, citing a “mountain” of documentary evidence he said corroborated the testimony of Cohen, Daniels and numerous other witnesses.
Defense lawyer Todd Blanche gave jurors another option: to regard the whole transaction as a messy backstage campaign drama unworthy of felony prosecution, and unprovable in any case with convicted, disbarred lawyer Cohen — the “GLOAT,” or “greatest liar of all time,” in Blanche’s words — as the prosecution’s star witness.
Trump says Daniels’ claim of a sexual encounter with him in 2006 is made up. His lawyers have argued that the 34 checks, pay stubs and ledger entries in 2017 logging payments totaling $420,000 to Cohen were for legal work, not falsified documents in a scheme alleged by prosecutors to disguise Cohen’s reimbursement and keep voters in the dark.
Whatever the verdict, and however long it takes, the first criminal trial of a former U.S. president is possibly the only one of the four prosecutions that Trump is facing to be heard by a jury before the November election. On that basis alone, the verdict could land as an electoral event with implications for Trump’s third White House run.
In one sign of the trial’s elevated stakes, the twelve jurors and six alternates were given anonymity from the day they arrived as prospects, with their names kept out of the public record as a security measure. The People v. Donald Trump opened with jury selection on April 15 inside a hulking art deco courthouse in lower Manhattan, the same repair-prone municipal building where movie producer Harvey Weinstein was tried and convicted of sexual assault, and where he returned in May after his 2020 conviction was overturned.
Once a panel was picked, the Trump trial stretched across six weeks of evidence, testimony and arguments. The actual time those jurors spent with the case inside Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom was a less imposing-sounding 17 days, from opening arguments to Tuesday’s closing summations. But the trial has consumed an untold amount of bandwidth by other measures: disruption to jurors’ daily lives; a security bulwark of uniformed court officers, Secret Service details and NYPD fleet vehicles visible behind rows of barricade fencing; and a full-time media encampment populated by local, national and international journalists and pundits covering the latest “trial of the century.”
Trump himself, an old hand at making himself the center of attention, has bridled at being a criminal defendant in Trump-like fashion. He’s delivered twice-daily rants to hallway pool reporters — with Blanche at his side and a gallery of supporters looking on — about a “rigged” case and a “conflicted” judge with Democratic family ties. He continued to do that this morning in a series of Truth Social posts, railing at the judge and calling the proceedings a “KANGAROO COURT.”
He’s tested the limits of Merchan’s gag order against public statements about trial witnesses, jurors and others, and he complained about the “icebox” of a courtroom on the 15th floor he’s forced to sit in while he wants to be somewhere else campaigning for president.
This morning, however, Trump walked into the courtroom shortly before 10 a.m. without pausing to talk to reporters. It was the second time in a row, including his quick exit on Tuesday night, that he skipped a routine that had become one of the trial’s running subplots.
