In His First Day of Testimony, Cohen Testifies Trump Authorized Hush-Money Payment

The “Access Hollywood” tape, a recording of Mr. Trump talking about groping women with impunity, landed like a bombshell in 2016. Mr. Trump urged Mr. Cohen, his fixer, who was in London, to reach out to his contacts in the news media. Chris Cuomo, then with CNN, in a text exchange seen in court on Monday, told Mr. Cohen it would be “too late” if he waited long to defend Trump on TV, and said, “He is dying right now.”

Mr. Cohen said Mr. Trump described the language heard on the “Access Hollywood” tape as “locker-room talk,” a characterization he credited to his wife.

“The spin that he wanted put on it was that this is locker-room talk, something that Melania had recommended,” Mr. Cohen testified.

Then came Stormy Daniels and the possibility of her going public with an account of a sexual liaison with Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen said Mr. Trump told him that he had met Ms. Daniels at a golf tournament and that she liked him, and that women preferred him even over football stars, like those at the tournament.

Mr. Cohen pressed on, asking whether he had had sex with Ms. Daniels. Mr. Trump did not answer him, but called Ms. Daniels “a beautiful woman,” Mr. Cohen said. When Mr. Trump heard she was considering sharing her account, “he was really angry with me,” Mr. Cohen testified. Mr. Trump called the story a “total disaster” and said “women are going to hate me.”

“Guys may think it’s cool,” Mr. Trump said, according to Mr. Cohen, “but this is going to be a disaster for the campaign.”

Mr. Cohen said he had no control over Ms. Daniels’s story. “Just take care of it,” he says Mr. Trump told him.

To that end, Mr. Cohen established a bank account for Essential Consultants L.L.C., an entity he created in October 2016 and funded from his home-equity line of credit at First Republic Bank. He has previously said he did so to ensure his wife would not know about any transaction with Ms. Daniels. When checks were printed, per Mr. Cohen’s wishes, they included no address.

About two weeks before the 2016 presidential election, he wired the payment to Keith Davidson, a lawyer for Ms. Daniels.

To Gary Farro, a banker formerly with First Republic who was used to routine requests, the transactions stood out, he testified earlier in the trial.

“Every time Michael Cohen spoke to me, he gave me a sense of urgency,” Mr. Farro testified.

The Links Between Trump and 3 Hush-Money Deals

Here’s how key figures involved in making hush-money payoffs on behalf of Donald J. Trump are connected.

Cameras and audio recording devices have been banned from the Lower Manhattan courtroom that is hosting the first-ever criminal proceeding against a former president, creating something of a headache for the cable news anchors and producers assigned with covering a monumental event in American life via a decidedly visual and aural medium.

The testimony on Monday of Michael Cohen, Mr. Trump’s lawyer-turned-witness for the prosecution, was the kind of highly anticipated, high-drama moment that would make for riveting television if it could be watched live. Instead, anyone following along on TV was treated to a rolling graphic of text-based updates — essentially an on-air blog, with running updates based on real-time feeds sent by a reporter sitting in the courtroom — as anchors and legal experts pontificated on proceedings they could not see or hear.

Sketches, still photographs and footage of Mr. Trump walking in and out of the courthouse now typically fill the screens of the major cable news channels, as their on-air personnel narrate the day’s events. The coverage has the feel of a live baseball radio broadcast, with commentators creating word-pictures for their audience.

“We’ve been told that Donald Trump, as is his wont, is looking straight ahead in his seat, not to the right, where Michael Cohen is the witness,” the anchor Jake Tapper told CNN viewers on Monday morning after Mr. Cohen took the stand. “Cohen leans to his right, then stands up and identifies Trump in court.” He added later that Mr. Trump’s “eyes appeared closed, as Cohen is identifying him.”

Last week, Mr. Tapper, who has been among the lead faces of CNN’s trial coverage, decided that if he couldn’t share live images of the courtroom with his viewers, he would go for the next best thing.

Mr. Tapper, a semiprofessional cartoonist who once wrote a comic strip for the Washington newspaper Roll Call, opened a drawing app on his iPad and drew his own courtroom sketches. “Art is interpretive, obviously,” he told viewers, before presenting his images of Mr. Trump, Stormy Daniels, Justice Juan M. Merchan and other key figures. (Mr. Tapper also called out the talents of the regular courtroom artists covering the trial, including Jane Rosenberg and Christine Cornell.)

“We have to seize any opportunity to bring this story to life, taking viewers and listeners into this closed courtroom with the resources at our disposal,” Mr. Tapper wrote in an email message on Monday. “Whatever we can do to bring this to life for audiences will make a difference in how they understand the history playing out.”

TV journalists do have a few helpful tools at their disposal.

Justice Merchan agreed that journalists who snagged seats inside the courtroom could transmit updates from their laptops, allowing for instantaneous updates. (In the courtroom, the sound of fingers clicking on keyboards tends to increase during big moments of testimony.)

In some previous high-profile trials with no cameras, such as the Martha Stewart case in 2004, journalists resorted to other methods, like sprinting out of the courtroom to make phone calls to relay details to editors and producers.

Transcripts of the Trump trial are also released on a relatively expedited basis, shortly after the end of the day’s proceedings, which has allowed legal experts to review testimony in full ahead of their appearances on prime-time cable shows.

One of those experts is Jeffrey Toobin, the veteran legal journalist who helped pioneer television court reporting during the O.J. Simpson murder trial in 1995, a fully televised spectacle that gripped the nation for weeks. In an interview, Mr. Toobin, who is analyzing the Trump trial for CNN, said that the lack of cameras had distinctly changed how this trial had been perceived and absorbed in the culture.

“If there were cameras in the courtroom, it would be O.J.-level,” Mr. Toobin said. “The faceoffs between Cohen and Trump, and Stormy and Trump, would have been the defining television images of the year, if not the decade. Those pictures just don’t exist.”

Mr. Trump’s trial has still garnered a lot of attention, Mr. Toobin said, and he acknowledged that “the stakes for the future of the republic are higher here than they were with O.J.” But he said he did not expect the relatively obscure figures of this Trump case, like the judge and the lead lawyers, to achieve the same level of fame as their counterparts in the Simpson trial, like Lance Ito and Johnnie Cochran.

“The lawyers become a lot less famous this way,” Mr. Toobin joked.

When the day ended, Mr. Trump calmly left the courtroom, as is typical of many criminal defendants. He strode toward reporters and a camera stationed in the hallway and gave a minute-long statement attacking the case, the judge and the proceedings. Then he exited the building and went home.

Still, in his message to followers, Mr. Trump depicted himself as a firebrand who angrily fled the proceedings over perceived injustice. “I’m DONE with the election interference,” he wrote. “Joe Biden & the LIARS in the media can spread LIES LIES LIES — all while I’m stuck in court and GAGGED!”

Such exaggerated portrayals have become typical for Mr. Trump and his presidential campaign in the weeks since the start of the trial in which he is accused of falsifying business records related to a hush-money payment to a former porn star.

As Mr. Trump sits in New York for the first criminal trial of a former president, he and his campaign have sent a blitz of emails and text messages to his supporters that depict a highly dramatized account of his actions inside the courtroom, where proceedings are far more prosaic than he describes.

The Trump campaign’s emails often contain kernels of truth. The former president is, for example, under a gag order that keeps him from attacking witnesses, jurors and others.

But the messages often elide details or nuances in order to support Mr. Trump’s broad assertions that his trial is a politically motivated “witch hunt.” Despite his claims of forced silence, the gag order has not prevented Mr. Trump from sharing his perception of the case.

And the fund-raising emails frequently insist that the charges he faces are part of a larger “election interference” effort orchestrated by President Biden, a baseless claim that lacks evidence. The New York case is being overseen by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, who operates outside the Justice Department’s purview.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, defended the fund-raising emails and said that “more and more Americans are chipping in every day to support President Trump as they watch him get politically persecuted by Joe Biden and the corrupt Democrats in this sham show trial.”

In the campaign’s telling, Mr. Trump is so aggrieved by the case against him, the conduct of the prosecutors and the decisions of the judge, Justice Juan M. Merchan, that he can barely keep himself from bursting out of his seat as each day concludes.

But the kinds of outbursts he describes would be violations of expected decorum. During court proceedings, Mr. Trump’s demeanor has been relatively restrained, even if he sometimes appears irked by testimony.

Mr. Trump has on occasion conferenced with his lawyers, once making comments that were audible enough to draw an admonition from Justice Merchan. But he has generally kept still and quiet, even appearing to nod off or close his eyes.

At least five fund-raising messages have claimed that Mr. Trump has “stormed” in or out of the courtroom. Reporters covering the trial have said that his movements are more subdued.

On at least six occasions, Mr. Trump has emailed his supporters to announce an imminent “emergency press conference.” In one message this month, he explained, “I’m bypassing the lying FAKE NEWS media and delivering a message directly to THE PEOPLE.”

But those “emergency” news conferences refer to the remarks that Mr. Trump has habitually made as he enters court in the morning and leaves in the afternoon. His comments differ little from what he has said in interviews on the campaign trail. And they are delivered to reporters, in front of a camera that has been stationed outside the courtroom for the duration of the trial.

Still, such exaggerations are consistent with the larger strategy that Mr. Trump and his team have used as they face the unprecedented reality of a major presidential candidate contending with four separate criminal cases.

Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist, said the Trump campaign’s emails about the trial reflected the need for it to contend with a constant stream of headlines about the former president’s legal troubles.

“Most campaigns are trying to get themselves in the news; the Trump campaign is sort of uniquely the news,” Mr. Wilson said. “And so they’re in a lot of ways making lemonades out of lemons.”

Central to that effort, he said, was a level of dramatizing certain events. The campaign’s messaging, Mr. Wilson said, “is not the court stenographer — it’s not the New York Times coverage of what’s happening in the courtroom.”

The Trump team has for more than a year tried to use the investigations into Mr. Trump to boost political support among his conservative base.

After Mr. Trump was indicted last spring in Manhattan, polls showed a bump of support for him among Republicans. The former president frequently claims on the stump that each indictment has made him only more popular. And his campaign reported raising millions of dollars after his fourth indictment, in Georgia, when it sent out solicitations using a mug shot that the authorities took there.

A Trump campaign official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss data that was not yet public, said the campaign was raising approximately $1 million each day of the Manhattan trial. Such numbers cannot be independently verified until campaign finance reports are filed, weeks after the trial ends.

Mr. Trump’s emails during the Manhattan trial contend little with the facts of the case or the daily details of the courtroom. But his campaign has been aggressively sending fund-raising solicitations that revolve around the gag order in the case.

Last month, before a hearing on whether he had violated the gag order, he wrote what he told supporters was his “farewell message,” claiming that “if things don’t go our way, I could be thrown in jail.” But at the time, prosecutors had asked the judge only to fine Mr. Trump $1,000 for each violation.

Justice Merchan ultimately found Mr. Trump in contempt of court and fined him $9,000 for nine violations of the gag order. Then, last week, he held Mr. Trump in contempt of court again over another violation, warning Mr. Trump that he might face jail time if he continued to violate the order.

The judge made clear he viewed that penalty as a last resort. “The last thing I want to do is put you in jail,” Justice Merchan told Mr. Trump.

Hours later, the Trump campaign sent an “emergency” fund-raising bulletin. The subject line: “They want me in HANDCUFFS.”

Kate Christobek contributed reporting.