Donald Trump shared an almost Shakespearean late-night Truth Social post reflecting on why no one in the world has it quite as hard as he does.
“I am an innocent man who has been horribly treated,” Trump, the first convicted felon to assume the presidency, wrote in a mournful 212-word screed at around 12.08 a.m. on Tuesday.
Trump’s trials and tribulations before the judicial system appear to have been what prompted his midnight ruminations.
“When a Star Witness totally recants, and in every way reveals that he was pressured and coerced to give testimony, and when the Prosecutor admits that this Witness was the single reason that the case was brought, there was no other, how can that Case not be immediately dismissed?” he mused.
The president then delved deeper into just two of the thousands of court cases he has faced throughout his business and political career: the civil fraud claims brought against him by New York Attorney General Letitia James, and the notorious “hush money” criminal proceedings brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
James’ 2022 case saw Trump found liable for inflating the value of his properties and net worth over more than a decade. A New York Jury also found him guilty in May 2024 on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a $130,000 payment to pornstar Stormy Daniels, with whom he is alleged to have had an extramarital relationship.
That conviction makes him the only felon ever to have assumed the office of U.S. president.
Trump’s comments about a “Star Witness” in those cases refer to his former attorney Michael Cohen, who served roughly one year of a three-year sentence in federal prison between 2019 and 2020, followed by a period of home arrest, after pleading guilty in 2018 to campaign finance violations, tax evasion, bank fraud, and lying to Congress.
Cohen claimed at his sentencing that he had committed those crimes because he was in thrall to the president. “My weakness can be characterized as a blind loyalty to Donald Trump, and I was weak for not having the strength to question and to refuse his demands,” he told the judge.
The attorney, who later cooperated with James and Bragg’s cases against Trump, struck a very different tone in a Substack post earlier this January, claiming that prosecutors in both of the New York cases had leaned on him to shape his evidence to fit the result they wanted.
He said that from his very first meetings with them, he “felt pressured and coerced to only provide information and testimony that would satisfy the government’s desire” to convict Trump, adding that James’ office in particular “made clear the testimony they wanted was testimony that would help them go after President Trump.”
Cohen has since announced he’s planning on applying for compensation from the Trump administration’s new $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” for MAGA political allies claiming unjust prosecution under the Joe Biden administration.
Trump appears to have taken his former attorney’s statements to mean that the only witness propping up either case has now buckled, leaving prosecutors with nothing, and that the courts are therefore obliged to throw both out and turn the law on James and Bragg instead.
“Now that his testimony is wiped away, and the unAmerican, Political Charade ‘Cases’ are even further discredited, they should be put out of their misery, and dismissed, once and for all,” he wrote.
He insisted that “Our Constitution, and the Rule of Law, demand immediate and swift dismissal, as well as for the Perpetrators of the Radical Left Lawfare and Weaponization to be held criminally responsible for their terrible misdeeds.”
Cohen has not recanted his sworn testimony in either case. A grievance aired on Substack does not, under U.S. law, constitute a retraction under oath. The trial record remains untouched.
The attorney was also not the “single reason” either case was brought. James’ civil fraud case drew heavily on years of Trump’s own financial statements, with his criminal conviction brought off the back of business records and testimony from multiple witnesses.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
