Jonathan Alter

Contributing Opinion Writer

For months, we’ve known that the cross-examination of Michael Cohen would be the decisive moment of Donald Trump’s New York felony trial — the day we learned whether his defense team could plant reasonable doubt in the minds of jurors.

On Tuesday it became clear that the team was struggling with its most important task.

Todd Blanche, Trump’s lead defense lawyer, was like a baseball pitcher assigned to start Game 7 of the World Series after only two or three wins in his major-league career. Though a seasoned former federal prosecutor, he has little experience as a defense attorney — and it showed.

We’re only about a third of the way through Blanche’s cross, but so far, he’s too meandering and pleasant for the sharp-toned, rat-a-tat style necessary for the role.

Blanche spent more than an hour showing that Cohen, like Stormy Daniels last week, despises Trump, and this line of inquiry was entertaining if not informative. When he quoted Cohen calling Trump a “boorish cartoon misogynist,” Cohen wielded the same mild and effective rejoinder he used twice earlier: “Sounds like something I would say.” My kids would like to see me in that T-shirt.

Blanche spent a long time depicting Cohen as a publicity hound cashing in on his decision to flip on Trump. Guilty as charged. But Cohen’s unwise decision to make sport of Trump in an orange jumpsuit (and worse) earlier in the trial, while angering both the prosecution and defense, doesn’t relate to the falsification of business records at issue in the case. And Cohen made it clear that he was merely responding in kind to Trump’s childish posts, a few of which jurors have seen more than once. All told, an annoying waste of the jury’s time.

Blanche had trouble finding a rhythm. For instance, he asked Cohen if he had appeared on MSNBC shows anchored by Ali Velshi and Joy Reid. When Cohen said yes, Blanche had no follow-up.

But his real problem is that he has so little to work with. Cohen delivered devastating direct testimony all day Monday and again Tuesday morning, and he has been careful and low-key on cross.

Instead of attacking the prosecution’s case head-on, Blanche has been handcuffed by a client nursing a perverse desire to see Cohen’s insults — and his own — aired in open court.

At around 4 p.m. Tuesday, shortly before court adjourned for the day, Blanche began delving into why other prosecutors have passed on this case. That could be promising for him. But after all the runs the prosecution has already scored, he’ll have to strike Cohen out with the bases loaded to get back into the game.

Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

On a day when Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former fixer, testified about the price of loyalty to Trump, a group of Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota and Vivek Ramaswamy, a former presidential candidate, showed up at the courthouse to demonstrate their loyalty to Trump.

Sitting in the courtroom on Tuesday on my first day at the trial, I kept wondering what they were thinking as they heard Cohen, seeming every bit the weary, reluctantly reformed TV gangster, testify about his mafia-like interactions with Trumpworld.

He described how, after his home and office were raided by the F.B.I., Trump encouraged him, both through a “really sketchy” lawyer and through his own Twitter posts, to, in Cohen’s words, “Stay in the fold, stay loyal, don’t flip.” He described how once he decided “not to lie for President Trump any longer,” the then-president publicly attacked him.

Cohen now seems like a man whose life has been essentially wrecked — he went to prison, lost his law license, had to sell his New York and Chicago taxi medallions and is still on supervised release. Though his implosion has been particularly severe, he is far from alone; many people who’ve served Trump, no matter how faithfully, have been ruined in various ways by the experience.

Nevertheless, as Trump runs for re-election, Republicans are climbing over one another to get as close to him as possible. Toward the end of his testimony for the prosecution, Cohen was asked about his regrets.

“To keep the loyalty and to do things that he had asked me to do, I violated my moral compass, and I suffered the penalty,” he said. I’d like to know if Johnson, hearing this, had even a flicker of foreboding.

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Mara Gay

Editorial Board Member

Drowning deaths in the United States rose by more than 12 percent to an estimated 4,500 per year during the pandemic, according to grim new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The increase, from 4,000 per year in 2019, comes as this long-neglected public health crisis is slowly beginning to draw some attention from government policymakers.

“It’s moving in the wrong direction,” the C.D.C. director, Dr. Mandy Cohen, told The Times. The agency said more than half of Americans had never taken a swimming lesson.

The sobering data is an opportunity for President Biden and health officials to finally make drowning prevention a national priority.

Drowning is the leading cause of death for children ages 1 to 4 in the United States and the second leading cause of death by accidental injury for children 5 to 14. Tackling the issue has clear bipartisan appeal and would improve quality of life in every American community.

Despite the obvious need for action, federal, state and local governments in the United States have invested very little to prevent these deaths.

The rise in deaths has caught the eye of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose philanthropy told The Times this week it plans for the first time to direct millions of dollars to drowning prevention efforts within the United States to improve data collection and........

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