Highlights from closing arguments in Donald Trump’s hush money trial

Donald Trump’s lawyers and Manhattan prosecutors made their final pitches Tuesday to jurors who will decide whether the Republican will be the first former U.S. president convicted of a crime, squaring off over the strength of the evidence and credibility of the prosecution’s star witness as his hush money trial drew toward a close.

After listening to more than four weeks of testimony, the panel of New Yorkers sat attentively through closing arguments that stretched from morning until dinner time.

The jury could begin deliberating as early as Wednesday to decide if Trump is guilty of falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments during the 2016 presidential campaign to a porn actor who claimed she had sex with him. Trump says Stormy Daniels’ story is a lie and that he’s innocent of the charges.

▶ Catch up on key takeaways from closing arguments.

Following the longer-than-usual day in the courtroom, the former president did not give his typical post-court remarks to the press in the hallway.

Judge Merchan told jurors he’ll give them instructions on Wednesday before they start deliberating. Court will start at 10 a.m., the judge said, noting the long day on Tuesday.

Court will go until 4:30 p.m. and they’ll revisit scheduling and the length of days as the week goes on.

As is standard, Merchan reminded both sides to tell any guests that they won’t be permitted to leave the courtroom once he starts reading the jury instructions on Wednesday. Merchan expects those instructions will take about an hour, then jurors will be off to deliberate. Jurors appeared resilient but relieved to be going home as they marched out of the courtroom after the marathon day of summations.

He wrapped by imploring jurors to find Trump guilty of all 34 counts of falsifying business records.

Steinglass said Trump’s intent to defraud “could not be any clearer,” arguing that it would have been far easier for him to pay Daniels directly. Instead, the prosecutor said, he concocted an elaborate scheme and everything he and his cohorts did was “cloaked in lies.”

“The name of the game was concealment and all roads lead inescapably to the man who benefited the most: the defendant, former President Donald Trump,” Steinglass said.

“Donald Trump can’t shoot someone on Fifth Avenue at rush hour and get away with it,” Steinglass said, parroting Trump’s own long-ago remark, prompting an objection from Trump’s lawyer, which was sustained.

Steinglass spoke for over five hours.

In an acknowledgment of the length of his remarks, Steinglass reminded jurors that the judge would instruct them on the relevant laws “after the summation — that never ends.”

Steinglass also got an unintended laugh, including from some jurors, when he noted that “we’re basically beating a dead horse here” by going over certain evidence yet again. Amid the laughter, he dryly added: “That wasn’t supposed to be funny.”

He’s repeating many of the points he’s already made, albeit with more emphatic takeaways.

Highlighting a phone call between Cohen and Trump on Oct. 8, 2016 — the day after the “Access Hollywood” tape was made public — the prosecutor argued: “There’s just no way — no way! — Cohen wouldn’t tell Mr. Trump about Daniels in that phone call.”

Pointing to more calls, many around the time of key developments in the Daniels negotiations, Steinglass asked, “Is this timing all a coincidence?”

Cohen’s deal to buy Daniels’ silence briefly hit a wall in late October. Her lawyer was frustrated that she hadn’t been paid, Cohen testified. Steinglass showed phone records from that period, telling jurors, “What is clear is that Mr. Cohen is trying to reach Mr. Trump as soon as he learns the Daniels deal is off.”

With the deal back on, Cohen was again making calls to connect with Trump, Steinglass said.

“Just think of the timing of these phone calls, this is absolutely critical,” the prosecutor said. Cohen, he explained, “was seeking the final go-ahead.”

His voice peppier, the prosecutor is now zipping through his PowerPoint timeline, recapping the events he’s already discussed in detail.

He started with the August 2015 Trump Tower meeting in which Pecker said he told Cohen and Trump he’d be the “eyes and ears” of Trump’s campaign, rooting out negative stories about him, publishing positive pieces and smearing his opponents.

As Steinglass yet again resumed a summation that had already stretched beyond four hours and past 7 p.m., he accidentally referred back to remarks he’d made “yesterday.”

“Or earlier today,” he corrected. “It feels like yesterday.”

Merchan told Steinglass he faces a hard out at 8 p.m. All day, jurors have said they can work until that time, but not later, the judge said.

“Maybe you could have your colleagues hand you a note when it’s 8 o’clock and then at that point we really need to wrap it up,” Merchan told the prosecutor.

“Thanks for sticking with me,” Steinglass told jurors as he settled back in at the podium.

Before break, Steinglass showed jurors a series of Trump’s social media posts lashing out at Cohen after his former lawyer defected, which the prosecutor argued was not only designed to punish the former fixer but to signal to other potential witnesses: “Cooperate and you will face the wrath of Donald Trump.”

He also cited lawsuits Trump had filed against Cohen and Daniels as other examples of intimidation.

“The defendant wanted everyone to see the cost of taking him on,” Steinglass said.

A related argument about threats Daniels said she faced after going public prompted Trump’s lawyers to object. Blanche called it “extraordinarily prejudicial.” Steinglass stressed that he wasn’t suggesting Trump was behind the threats, but Merchan told him to move along anyway. The sides argued briefly over that issue while the jury was out of the courtroom for the final recess of the day.

The prosecution’s summation, which began around 2 p.m., is still going. Judge Merchan said this would be the last recess of the day.

After a brief bench conference, Steinglass is continuing his closing argument. The prosecutor had interrupted himself as the clock neared 6:30 p.m., asking the judge if he should “power through” or stop.

After the bench conference, Steinglass returned to the podium and asked jurors: “You good to go a little bit longer?” They appeared amenable, to which the prosecutor replied with a satisfied: “Alright.”

Had Trump truly been in the dark on the plan to repay Cohen, as the defense contends, Steinglass argues the admittedly frugal businessman would’ve balked at signing $35,000 monthly checks to him. Trump signed nine checks to Cohen totaling $315,000 in 2017, his first year as president.

Trump was aware that Cohen was serving as his personal lawyer, but that Cohen was hardly doing any legal work for him, Steinglass said. Yet, he didn’t object when he came across the $35,000 monthly checks that were sent to the White House for him to sign. Cohen said after leaving the Trump Organization in early 2017, he wasn’t drawing a salary as Trump’s lawyer.

“No, he just signs it. Every month. And he never once picks up that phone. He never once makes further inquiry,” Steinglass said, arguing that even as president, Trump “remained involved even with minor decisions.”

Adding to the seeming artifice of the repayment plan, Cohen sent his last invoice — which stated it was for services rendered in December 2017 — to Trump’s lieutenants at the Trump Organization at 9:11 a.m. on Dec. 1, 2017, Steinglass said.

“How do you rack up $35,000 worth of legal services in 11 minutes?” Steinglass asked.

Steinglass seems to be trying to stay on the good side of the jury — and cognizant of the length of his presentation.

“I know what you’re thinking. Is this guy going to go through every single month’s worth of checks?” he quipped at one point as he ran through ledger after ledger.

He’s also tried to pepper his closing with occasional humor.

At one point, as he talked about how much money Cohen was making, he said Trump’s former fixer “was making way more money than any government job would ever pay.”

“And don’t I know that,” he added.

The aside drew smiles and chuckles from some of the jurors.

Surely, if they had, the frugal and detail-oriented Trump would have asked questions about the $35,000 checks to Cohen that came to him to sign, the prosecutor asserted.

“Don’t buy this bogus narrative that the defense is selling — that the defendant was too busy to know what he was signing,” Steinglass urged jurors. “The defendant’s entire business philosophy was and is to be involved in everything, down to negotiating the price of the light bulbs.”

The prosecutor argued the defense’s characterization of the payments to Cohen as being for legitimate legal expenses is undermined by Trump’s own tweet and the fact that Trump didn’t pay Cohen anything in 2018, despite Cohen performing legal work for Trump that year.

“You’d have to think that despite this mountain of evidence none of that actually happened,” Steinglass said, rhetorically asking jurors: “Does anyone believe that?”

Steinglass seized on a 2018 Trump tweet in which the then-president described the arrangement with Cohen as “reimbursement” while insisting it was unrelated to Trump’s candidacy.

“Mr. Cohen, an attorney, received a monthly retainer, not from the campaign and having nothing to do with the campaign, from which he entered into, through reimbursement, a private contract between two parties, known as a non-disclosure agreement, or NDA,” Trump wrote at the time.

Steinglass said that while the payments didn’t come out of campaign funds, “the payment has everything to do with the campaign.”

“And yet they still try to argue that the payments to Cohen in 2017 were for legal services rendered — because to say anything else is to admit that the business records were false, and they can’t do that,” the prosecutor said of his counterparts at the defense table.

Steinglass is telling the jury that Cohen did little work for Trump in 2017, despite the checks he was receiving. Trump’s lawyers contend the payments were for legal services Cohen provided that year.

The prosecutor pointed to Cohen testifying he did only about 10 hours of legal work that year.

“Mr. Cohen spent more time being cross-examined at this trial than he did doing legal work for Donald Trump in 2017,” Steinglass quipped. “Do you think there’s any chance Donald Trump would pay $42,000 an hour for legal work by Michael Cohen?”

But Cohen didn’t suffer, Steinglass said, noting he got a “cool title” that helped him reel in lucrative consulting clients.

Steinglass argues the case has “smoking guns” — in the form of handwritten jottings by former Trump company finance chief Allen Weisselberg and ex-controller Jeffrey McConney.

The two documents show calculations related to the payments Cohen got in 2017. They included his reimbursement for the $130,000 he’d paid Daniels, as well as an unrelated reimbursement, a bonus, and money to cover taxes, according to testimony.

While the defense suggested that Cohen was the driving force in the decision to style the payments as fees for legal services, the Weisselberg and McConney notes are “overt manifestations” that that’s not so, the prosecutor argued.

“They are the smoking guns. They completely blow out of the water” the defense’s claims that the payments were for legal work, Steinglass said.

As the prosecution’s summation resumes, Steinglass turned from the hush money arrangements before the 2016 election to the alleged effort to mask Cohen’s reimbursement for the Daniels payout.

“Even after Mr. Trump got elected, he still had to make sure that no one found out about the conspiracy,” the prosecutor maintained.

With closing arguments stretching into the evening, he fired off two posts on Truth Social before entering the courtroom.

“FILIBUSTER!!” read one. It was followed a few minutes later by: “BORING!”

While Manhattan famously has a night court that handles arraignments — first court appearances of those recently arrested — it’s quite unusual for state court trials here to run as late as 7 p.m. or 8 p.m.

The judge has been consulting with high-level court security officers, among others, about the plan.

The court is taking a 20-minute break. Before sending jurors out of the courtroom, Judge Merchan thanked them for making arrangements to stay later than usual.

Merchan says some jurors have made child care and other arrangements allowing them to stay until 7 p.m. or 8 p.m.

“I think right now we’re going to try to finish this out tonight,” he said.

The judge also noted that all of the jurors still looked alert. “I don’t think we’re losing anyone,” he observed.

Responding to the defense’s argument that Trump was concerned for his family in the wake of the “Access Hollywood” leak, Steinglass told jurors it’s “no coincidence” that Stormy Daniel’s alleged sexual encounter with Trump “happened in 2006” but the payment to Daniels didn’t happen until the eve of the 2016 election. That’s because “the defendant’s primary concern was not his family but the election,” Steinglass argued.

Seeking to blunt any questions about the fact that Trump didn’t sign the deal with Daniels — Cohen did — Steinglass argues that the aim was to avoid a paper trail to Trump.

“That’s kind of the whole point, right, to keep him out of it, to keep him away from the documentation?” he suggested.

Steinglass is recapping the details of the back-and-forth between Daniels’ representatives and Cohen over the payoff deal.

Steinglass is supplementing his detailed recitation with phone records, text messages, encrypted communications and excerpts of testimony, seemingly trying to reinforce his theme that there’s a “mountain” of corroboration for the allegations at hand.

Meanwhile, Trump is taking in this leg of the summation with his head back and his eyes closed — a strategy he’s employed throughout the trial.

Steinglass stressed that to understand the case against Trump, jurors need to understand the climate in which the deal to pay off Daniels was made — just after the “Access Hollywood” tape leak had “caused pandemonium in the Trump campaign.”

“It’s critical to appreciate this,” Steinglass said. At the same time he was dismissing his words on the tape as “locker room talk,” Trump “was negotiating to muzzle a porn star,” the prosecutor said.

“Stormy Daniels was a walking, talking reminder that the defendant wasn’t only words. She would have totally undermined his strategy of spinning away the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape,” Steinglass said.

Steinglass reminded jurors how Hope Hicks, then the campaign’s communications director, testified that news coverage of the “Access Hollywood” tape knocked a Category 4 hurricane out of the headlines.

The prosecutor dubbed the tape a “Category 5" hurricane.

Steinglass has resumed delivering his closing argument, focusing now on the publication of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape in October 2016 and the fallout for Trump’s campaign, with just weeks to go before Election Day.

Blanche smiled broadly as he trailed just behind the former president.

Before the break, Steinglass stressed that Cohen’s secret recording, in which he was allegedly briefing Trump on a plan to buy the rights to McDougal’s story from the National Enquirer “shows the defendant’s cavalier willingness to hide this payoff.”

“This shows the defendant suggesting paying in cash,” the prosecutor said as he showed jurors a transcript of the September 2016 recording. “It doesn’t matter if that means a bag of cash or no financing, no lump sum. He’s trying to do it in a way that leaves no paper trail, that’s the whole point.”

“This tape unequivocally shows a presidential candidate actively engaging in a scheme to influence the election by reimbursing AMI for the McDougal story,” Steinglass added. He argued that’s why the defense has tried so hard to discredit it.

Trump left the court for the recess. As he returned, he turned his head to chat with Blanche. The defense attorney smiled broadly as he trailed just behind the former president.

Steinglass is taking issue with the defense’s efforts to cast doubt on a September 2016 recording that Cohen made of a conversation with Trump in which the two are allegedly heard discussing a plan to buy the rights to former Playboy model Karen McDougal’s story from the National Enquirer.

Steinglass said the defense had gone to “laughable lengths” to try to undermine the recording, which he described as “nothing short of jaw-dropping.”

Cohen had testified that the recording, which cuts off before the conversation finishes, was interrupted when he received an incoming call.

Defense lawyer Todd Blanche had tried to frame the recording as unreliable and suggested it was actually about a plan to buy a collection of material on Trump that the National Enquirer had been hoarding — not McDougal.

He also questioned whether Trump mentioned a dollar figure that he might have to spend, as Cohen and prosecutors contend, or whether he said something else.

Steinglass said joking texts between McDougal’s lawyer Keith Davidson and then-National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard about hypothetical ambassadorships were clear evidence that they knew the deal would benefit Trump’s presidential campaign.

“Throw in an ambassadorship for me. I’m thinking Isle of Mann,” Davidson wrote on July 28, 2016, referring to the British territory Isle of Man.

“I’m going to Make Australia Great Again,” replied Howard, who hails from Australia.

All joking aside, Steinglass said: “It’s a palpable recognition of what they’re doing. They’re helping Trump get elected.” The prosecutor said the text messages underscore that “Trump is looming behind everything that they’re doing.”

Digging further into the two sides’ dispute over the “catch-and-kill” allegations, Steinglass said it doesn’t matter that McDougal preferred a deal that would help her career while not airing her claims of a Trump affair, as her lawyer and others testified.

“Her motivations are totally irrelevant. The question is: What is the defendant’s motivation?” the prosecutor said, adding that that motivation “was to serve the campaign.”

Trump denies any sexual involvement with McDougal.

Steinglass pushed back on Blanche’s contention that the National Enquirer’s deal to bury the Trump Tower doorman’s bogus story wasn’t a form of catch and kill.

Steinglass noted that the National Enquirer amended its source agreement with doorman Dino Sajudin so that he would be paid the agreed upon $30,000 fee within five days of signing the document — instead of upon publication of the story, as had been previously drafted.

“The only reason to kill a bogus story,” certainly wasn’t to act in a financially responsible fashion or satisfy the tabloid’s investors, Steinglass argued, but to be “in service of the defendant’s campaign.”

Steinglass called the National Enquirer’s work on Trump’s behalf “one of the most valuable contributions that anyone ever made to the Trump campaign.”

“This scheme, cooked up by these three men, could very well be what got President Trump elected,” Steinglass said.

Batting back Blanche’s argument that “every campaign in this country is a conspiracy to promote a candidate” and that Trump’s alleged efforts to suppress negative stories were no different, Steinglass said they actually were “the subversion of democracy.”

The purpose of the effort, Steinglass argued, was “to manipulate and defraud the voters, to pull the wool over their eyes in a coordinated fashion.”

They’re watching Steinglass just as they did Blanche earlier Tuesday. Several jurors take notes — others are locked in, looking on at the prosecutor as he makes his argument.

After Trump’s lawyer insisted to jurors that the case rested on Cohen and that they couldn’t trust him, Steinglass sought to persuade the group that there is “a mountain of evidence, of corroborating testimony, that tends to connect the defendant to this crime.”

He pointed to testimony from Pecker and others, to the recorded conversation in which Trump and Cohen appear to discuss the McDougal deal, and to Trump’s own tweets.

“It’s not about whether you like Michael Cohen. It’s not about whether you want to go into business with Michael Cohen. It’s whether he has useful, reliable information to give you about what went down in this case, and the truth is that he was in the best position to know,” the prosecutor said.

Steinglass accused the defense of wanting to make this case all about Cohen.

“It isn’t. That’s a deflection,” he said. “This case is not about Michael Cohen. It’s about Donald Trump.”

Steinglass used a bit of stagecraft to challenge the defense’s assertion that Cohen was lying about the subject of an Oct. 24, 2016, phone call in which he says he told Trump the Daniels payoff was being finalized.

Steinglass demonstrated a hypothetical version of the phone call, showing jurors how Cohen could’ve covered multiple subjects in less than a minute.

Cohen said he called Trump’s bodyguard that night because he knew they’d be together and that’s how he sometimes got ahold of Trump.

Trump’s lawyers, citing phone and text message records, contend the true nature of the call had to do with harassing phone calls Cohen was dealing with, and that he was calling the bodyguard, Keith Schiller, to talk about that issue.

“To them, that is the big lie,” Steinglass said, characterizing the defense argument.

Cohen’s actual call to Schiller’s phone number lasted 96 seconds, according to phone records. Steinglass showed, with his hypothetical, that Cohen could’ve spoken to Schiller about the prank calls, asked him to pass the phone to Trump and then discussed the Daniels deal with Trump, all in 49 seconds.

As he finished the demonstration, Steinglass took a swipe at his own acting skills, telling jurors: “Sorry if I didn’t do a good job.”

One juror cracked a slight smile as Steinglass acted out the hypothetical call.

“We didn’t choose Michael Cohen to be our witness. We didn’t pick him up at the witness store,” Steinglass said. “The defendant chose Michael Cohen to be his fixer because he was willing to lie and cheat on the defendant’s behalf.”

The defense portrayed Cohen as a lying opportunist who has profited off his hatred of Trump. Prosecutors, on the other hand, are suggesting that the disbarred attorney had little choice but to parlay his history with Trump into books, a podcast, merchandise and more.

“I’m not asking you to feel bad for Michael Cohen. He made his bed,” Steinglass told jurors. “But you can hardly blame him for making money from the one thing he has left, which is his knowledge of the inner workings of the Trump Organization.”

Daniels’ at times “cringeworthy” testimony about a sexual encounter she says she had with Trump in 2006 was vital because it “only reinforces his incentive to buy her silence,” Steinglass said.

The prosecutor said Daniels’ account of her hotel-suite meeting with Trump — replete with details of the décor and what she saw when she snooped in Trump’s toiletry kit — was full of touchstones “that kind of ring true.”

“Her story is messy. It makes people uncomfortable to hear. It probably makes some of you uncomfortable to hear. But that’s kind of the point,” Steinglass said.

He told jurors: “In the simplest terms, Stormy Daniels is the motive.”

“We don’t have to prove that sex actually took place, but the defendant knew what happened in that hotel room and the extent that you credit her testimony, that only reinforces his incentive to buy her silence,” Steinglass argued.

He said that, of course, the jury should take Cohen’s past dishonesty into account.

“How could you not?” he asked.

But he said that Cohen’s anger is understandable given that, “To date, he’s the only one that’s paid the price for his role in this conspiracy.”

Cohen, Steinglass argued, did Trump’s bidding for years, was his right-hand man, and then, when things went bad, was cut loose and thrown under the bus.

“Anyone in Cohen’s shoes would want the defendant to be held accountable,” he argued.

Seeking to rebut the defense’s claim that Stormy Daniels was trying to “extort” Trump, Steinglass noted that her representatives initially sought to sell the story to media outlets, not to Trump. The prosecutor also cited Daniels’ testimony, where the actor explained why she felt going public was the best way to protect herself and her family from pressure to stay silent.

Regardless, allegations of extortion are “not a defense to election fraud,” the prosecutor said.

“You don’t get to commit election fraud or falsify business records because you believe you’ve been victimized,” he told jurors.

Trump is sitting at the defense table with his body angled toward Steinglass, listening as the prosecutor speaks.

He’s sitting between his attorneys Emil Bove and Todd Blanche, who gave the defense’s closing argument earlier in the day.

He speaks from the same podium that Blanche used, looking directly at jurors from a position between the prosecution and defense tables.

“This case, at its core, is about a conspiracy and a cover-up,” Steinglass said as he began his remarks.

Prosecutors have presented “powerful evidence of the defendant’s guilt,” he said.

Merchan tells jurors that Blanche’s comment asking jurors not to send Trump to prison “was improper and you must disregard it.” He said jurors are not to consider possible punishment in their deliberations and that sentencing decisions are solely up to him.