As a slew of Republicans went to the hush-money trial to show their fealty to their boss, the president tried to rise above it

Donald Trump last week turned his New York fraud trial into a political circus and a platform for his election campaign while Joe Biden struggled to persuade voters that they’re wrong about the economy.

Trump engineered a parade of leading Republicans to demonstrate their allegiance outside the courthouse in downtown Manhattan even as his trial laid bare the swamp that is the former US president’s professional and personal life.

Meanwhile, Biden has spent the trial trying to get Americans to pay attention to his claim to have done much more for the economy than Trump ever managed, even though polls show many voters do not believe it.

Trump has been obliged to sit in silence through his trial for allegedly falsifying business records to claim that $130,000 in hush money paid to the porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election, after she claimed to have had sex with the then businessman a decade earlier, were legal expenses. A gag order has forced Trump to curb his natural inclination to attack the judge, the judge’s family, the prosecutor and the leading witness against him, his former lawyer Michael Cohen.

But Trump worked his way around the order, while demonstrating the strength of his grip on the Republican party, by summoning a parade of Washington politicians to stand in front of the court and say what he could not.