Judge Merchan describes Michael Cohen’s antics as rendering him powerless

Michael Cohen is back on TikTok, using the Trump trial to troll for dollars.

Cohen appeared in a T-shirt showing Donald Trump in an orange jumpsuit and asked for more followers.

He also announced his candidacy for Congress, which would allow him to take one of the seemingly few oaths that the serial perjurer has not violated.

Who would have thought that District Attorney Alvin Bragg calling a porn star to the stand would be the moral high ground for key witnesses?

Next will be a disbarred, convicted perjurer who is still seeking to make money off the case.

Fortunately, you are no longer required to put your hand on the Bible in swearing to tell the truth and nothing but the truth.

Otherwise, it might burst into flames.

Cohen previously pledged not to discuss the trial after many of us objected to Judge Juan Merchan’s gag order as unconstitutional, particularly as Cohen has continued to attack Trump while defending the gag order for his own protection.

Cohen’s prior promise lasted only a couple of days.

For Judge Merchan, this is precisely what he was warned about.

He has stubbornly enforced his poorly written and excessively broad order on Trump.

Trump is now appealing the gag order and Cohen is doing his best to undermine not just his residual credibility but that of the court.

Between the lurid testimony of Daniels and the continued antics of Cohen, Merchan looks completely feckless, if not farcical, in his own courtroom.

There is an old fable of a scorpion who wants to cross a river and convinced a hesitant frog to carry him on its back.

After all, if he stung the frog in the river, they both would die.

When the frog asks the stinging scorpion why he would doom them both, the scorpion replies: “I couldn’t resist the urge. It’s in my nature.”

Cohen has always been open as a grifter.

The problem is not Cohen.

He continues to act to his nature.

The problem is a political and legal system that enables him as a serial liar.

It is a system that continues to call Cohen to the stand and ask him to swear to God to offer the “truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” without a joke drum roll before his punchline.

Yet Cohen now wants to take an oath of office in the legislative branch.

He seems to collect oaths the way some collect animal heads for a trophy wall.

The question is whether other members could suppress laughter when he swears that he is taking the oath of office “without . . . purpose of evasion.”

Jonathan Turley is an attorney and professor at George Washington University Law School.