Trump trial live: Michael Cohen to return to stand after testifying he did everything to ‘protect my boss’

This was Trump raging about the judge after yesterday’s session in court.

Interestingly, he walked off sharply when a reporter asked him when he would next be hitting the campaign trail rather than “mingling with wealthy donors”.

Incidentally, I feel this tweet covers a lot of useful territory regarding Trump’s appeal to his base in such moments.

Here’s Alex Woodward and Kelly Rissman with a comprehensive round-up of another busy day at Manhattan Criminal Court.

The former president expressed greater concern about the impact the Stormy Daniels affair story would have on his 2016 presidential campaign than how it would affect his wife, Michael Cohen said yesterday.

On the first day of his highly-anticipated testimony, Cohen recounted how Trump reacted when hearing the adult film star was preparing to come forward with allegations of an extramarital affair.

“He wasn’t thinking about Melania, this was all about the campaign,” Cohen told the jury.

Donald Trump’s New York hush money trial will resume at Manhattan Criminal Court on Tuesday after the defendant came face to face with his estranged former “fixer” Michael Cohen in Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom on Monday.

Cohen testified yesterday, slowly and calmly without making eye-contact with the defendant, that Trump feared “disaster” for his 2016 presidential campaign when his then-attorney first told him that Stormy Daniels was preparing to share her story about having sex with him in 2006.

“I thought you had this under control. I thought you took care of this,” Cohen said from the witness stand, recalling Trump’s enraged reaction to the news that the adult film star’s allegations had resurfaced.

“Just take care of it. ‘There’s a lot going on at the campaign at the time.’ Just take care of it,” the candidate said, according to Cohen.

“This is a disaster. This is a total disaster. Women are going to hate me. This really is a disaster. Women are going to hate me. Guys will think it’s cool, but this is a disaster for the campaign.”

Here’s more from Alex Woodward and Kelly Rissman in court.

At the risk of sounding like Susan Collins here, Trump’s social output his been (for the most part) more straight-laced than usual of late, suggesting he might at last be taking Judge Merchan’s jail threat seriously.

No attacks on Stormy Daniels or Michael Cohen, just clips from his New Jersey rally and favourable polling about how he is “crushing” Joe Biden in swing states, almost like a relatively normal politician.

That said, he is not entirely refraining from commenting on the case.

He is doing so indirectly, by quoting Fox News talking heads like Jonathan Turley, Tim Scott, Andrew McCarthy, Matt Whitaker, Marc Thiessen and Mark Levin.

Turley, incidentally, like some others on the same network, appears to be struggling for self-awareness.

Here’s Eric Garcia’s report on the positive polling Trump is citing.

On Wednesday, Greene brought her long-awaited motion to vacate to the floor in an effort to remove Johnson from the speaker’s chair. It failed spectacularly, with 196 Republicans and 163 Democrats voting to kill her resolution.

But she appeared unable to move on during an interview with Fox News on Sunday where she accused Mr Johnson “of being owned by the Democrats” after the rival party voted to protect him.

John Bowden reports from Washington, DC:

Guess who former defense secretary Jim Mattis is talking about…

With Donald Trump barred from publicly attacking the key witness in his hush money trial, his campaign brought to court a phalanx of Republican elected officials to speak for him.

“The thing that the president is prevented from saying, which is a disgrace, is that every single person involved in this prosecution is practically a Democratic political operative,” U.S. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio said outside the courthouse Monday during a morning break.

Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen took the stand on Monday to allege that the former president instructed him to silence stories that could have hurt his 2016 presidential campaign. Trump, who is balancing the demands of a felony trial with his third run for the White House, has been prohibited by a judge’s gag order from criticizing witnesses and already fined for violating the restrictions.

Bringing allies to court allowed Trump’s campaign to press his message without violating the gag order. It also gave those allies a high-profile platform to demonstrate loyalty to their party’s presumptive nominee and perhaps audition for higher office.

John Catsimatidis, 75, told The New York Post that the former New York City mayor’s ongoing “behavior” was making it increasingly difficult to welcome him back to the station.

“It’s pretty hard to bring him back,” said Mr Catsimatidis, a Republican donor and the founder of Gristedes Food.

“His behavior makes it very hard to reverse course. He makes it hard not to terminate him.”

Amelia Neath and Michelle Del Rey report: