Trump lawyer Todd Blanche treated jurors as if they were deaf or slow. “THAT. IS. A. LIE!” he bellowed at them.

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Republican officeholders didn’t rain denunciations on Trump? Party elders didn’t discuss replacing him as the GOP nominee? Blanche must have supposed that these jurors have been sequestered. In a cave. For 10 years.

Eight years ago, Trump himself worried aloud that the “Access Hollywood” episode would cost him the election (and it may well have, if not for WikiLeaks and James Comey): “If 5 percent of the people think it’s true, and maybe 10 percent,” Trump said in one clip from a rally that prosecutors later played for the jury, “we don’t win.” Blanche was also suggesting that Trump’s own former White House assistant, Madeleine Westerhout, perjured herself in the trial when she testified about conversations at the Republican National Committee, where she then worked, about replacing Trump on the ticket.

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Blanche seemed to think that if he provided the jurors with punctuation instructions for his sentences, they would take his nonsense as fact.

The large number of documents in evidence showing that the Trump Organization falsified records to show that the hush money reimbursement payments going to Trump fixer Michael Cohen were “legal expenses” as part of a “retainer”?

“The payments were compensation to him — period,” Blanche said. “There is no falsification of business records — period.”

Euphemistically calling the reimbursements payment “for services rendered”?

“That’s a true statement — period,” Blanche said.

The absence of anything resembling a retainer agreement for which Cohen was supposedly being paid?

“Cohen was President Trump’s personal attorney — period.”

The huge volume of documentary evidence showing Trump’s involvement in the payments?

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“There is no way that you can find that President Trump knew about this payment at the time it was made without believing the words of Michael Cohen — period,” Blanche said.

Did Blanche realize he used that device 13 times in his closing argument — question mark? Or that his own delivery, like his client’s, relied rather more on exclamation points? He treated jurors as if they were deaf or slow. “PER-JURE-EEE!” he yelled at them. “THAT. IS. A. LIE!” he bellowed. Despite all the evidence presented of a sexual encounter with Daniels, Blanche still maintained (no doubt at his client’s insistence) that Trump never had sex with the porn actress, “a woman who claims that something happened in 2006.”

Blanche closed his argument after three hours Tuesday with a final, audacious whopper: “You cannot send somebody to prison — you cannot convict somebody — based upon the words of Michael Cohen.” As Blanche well knows, these jurors don’t have anything to do with deciding punishment, prison or otherwise, and the judge had specifically ordered lawyers not to include anything about punishment in their arguments.

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Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass howled an objection, and, when the jury had left the room, he complained about the “wholly inappropriate effort to cull sympathy for their client.” At this, Blanche raised his eyebrows twice, in a show of self-satisfaction.

Justice Juan Merchan, echoing Blanche’s own annotated punctuation, admonished the lawyer: “It’s simply not allowed — period. It’s hard for me to imagine how that was accidental in any way.”

But Trump’s defense relied on the very un-Trumpian belief that everything happens by accident. Before this trial, Trump had never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like, from QAnon and the “deep state” to the “big lie” about the 2020 election and his latest fantasy about a corrupt judge and state prosecutors secretly controlled by the Biden administration.

Yet his irony-challenged lawyer’s closing argument portrayed prosecutors as the conspiracy mongers. “In life, usually the simplest answer is the right one,” said Blanche, whose client has surely never uttered such words. “There was no conspiracy,” Blanche told the jurors, again and again, and “it doesn’t matter if there was a conspiracy to try to win an election. Every........

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