Michael Cohen learned that membership in Trump’s inner circle has a harsh cost | Sidney Blumenthal

When, in the early days, Donald Trump's diehard fans failed to show up in front of 100 Centre Street at the Manhattan courthouse to clamor about the rank injustice of the case of The People of the State of New York v Donald J Trump, the lonely defendant roused himself from his fitful slumbers to choreograph a dance of the marionettes. The political delegations that started appearing on 14 May attired for perfectly flattering cosplay in Trump matching red ties was a refrain of surrogates echoing insults and imprecations that if the former president were to mutter himself would earn him further contempt of court citations.

Trump assembled around him a miniature court and hierarchy that populated a desolation row. In the front row were seated Eric Trump and his wife, Lara Trump, now installed as the co-chair of the Republican National Committee. There were the senators and congressmen, the failed presidential candidates and hopeful running mates who repeated Trump's scripted talking points against the judge, the prosecutors and the justice system. There were the Fox News anchors, Jeanine Pirro, who exchanged smiles and nods with Trump, and Laura Ingraham, reprimanded by court officers for staring through forbidden binoculars as though she were on safari. There was former Trump White House adviser Boris Epshteyn, indicted in the Arizona fake electors scheme.

The carnival of the Trump vassals was a pop-up court society that formed below the authoritarian ruler. Their ranked serfdom revealed the status pyramid. Like the witnesses, whoever they have been, the trial has dramatized the web of the only kind of relationship Trump knows: master and servant.

Day after day, Trump's underworld has been peeled away. His main line of defense is that the people he has chosen to associate with are sleazy, corrupt and dishonest, and therefore cannot be believed. Illustrating their rotten characters proves Trump must be innocent. Their offense is that they no longer serve him. The reams of hard physical evidence, meanwhile, must be ignored. Trump's projection reached its risible apogee when his lawyer accused Stormy Daniels of profiting from selling merchandise, which she batted away with a quip: "Not unlike Mr Trump."

The courtroom drama has more than legal implications. While the testimony and evidence may nail Trump on 34 felony charges of business fraud, the trial has painted a vast canvas of human bondage. As the prosecution has built its case, each and every person called to the stand has described their own strange master-servant relationship with Trump.

There was David Pecker, publisher of the National Enquirer and other tabloids, who oversaw the "catch-and-kill" hush-money operation to suppress information about Trump's dalliances and to crank out smears of his opponents. "I felt that Donald Trump was my mentor," he testified.

There was the former teenage model and ingenue from Greenwich, Connecticut, Hope Hicks, whose association with the Trump Organization began by promoting Ivanka Trump as a fashion icon, and was elevated to Trump's campaign press secretary and a White House counselor. When the Access Hollywood tape was disclosed a month before the election of 2016 on 7 October - "grab' em by the pussy" - Trump "wanted to make sure that there was a denial of any kind of relationship", Hicks testified. She ordered the campaign staff: "Deny, deny, deny."