Cohen after hush money verdict: ‘I will never be a punching bag to Donald Trump or anyone’ 

Former President Trump’s ex-fixer Michael Cohen took a swing at Trump Friday, after his former boss was convicted in the criminal hush money case.

“I want peace,” Cohen said Friday to host Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House.” “You can’t have peace when Donald Trump is around, because one of the things he talks about in many of his books, it’s a common theme, if you hit him, and that’s in his mind that he’s being hit, he needs to strike back at you 10 times harder.”

“He needs to hurt you 10 times harder,” the former attorney continued. “And, so long as the two of us exist on this planet at the same time, he will constantly seek to hurt me and I will never be a punching bag to Donald Trump or anyone.”

Trump became the first former president to be a convicted felon Thursday, after a New York jury found him guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records related to a payment made to an adult film star in the early days of the 2016 election to hide an alleged past affair, which he denied.

The former president railed against the trial and Judge Juan Merchan shortly after the verdict was read, calling it “rigged” and “disgraceful.”

Cohen was largely considered a star witness in the trial and has major centrality in the case. The counts Trump faced were related to reimbursements to Cohen, who paid porn actor Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about the alleged affair, which she claimed happened in the early 2000s.

When asked by Wallace how he was “doing,” Cohen replied: “Hanging in there.”

“I had the pleasure of watching the press conference today, was wondering whether or not that gag order was still actually in place, because, once again, Donald just violated — he doesn’t care about the law, he doesn’t care about anything, other than venting, like a petulant child,” Cohen said, seemingly referencing a Friday post-conviction press conference from Trump.

The former president was placed under an expanded gag order, which was upheld after an appeal, barring him from making public statements about witnesses, prosecutors, court staff or the judge’s family. Merchan has already fined Trump over $9,000 over his social media posts and campaign attacks that he ruled violated the terms of the order.