For much of the past year, Michael Cohen has maintained a transient existence, trapped between two competing worlds. Until April, when F.B.I. agents came knocking on his door, Cohen had been an indefatigable defender of Donald Trump, his longtime patron and primary legal client. Nowadays, Cohen is more likely to be defending himself—from the media, from federal prosecutors, from Trump allies in Washington who, perhaps, worry that he will turn on them given his extensive dealings with the president over the years. And indeed, a switch seems to have flipped in Cohen’s own head. From his suite in the Loews Regency hotel, the nondescript Park Avenue tower in which he has been living as his apartment undergoes repairs, Cohen vents with friends about how his life has been turned upside-down. The quintessential Trump loyalist, who once told me he would take a bullet for the president, has even stopped describing himself as Trump’s personal attorney.

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As Cohen’s legal fate hangs in the balance, he has begun to profoundly reconsider his relationship to the most important business associate of his career. He has not spoken to the president, who recently referred to him in the past tense, in months. Lately, Cohen’s friends have begun suggesting that he could change his narrative by cooperating with Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation—to effectively become the John Dean of his generation. “For months, every article written about Michael was calling him a thug, a moron, someone who was all mobbed up,” one friend of Cohen’s told me. Now, “he has all these people telling him that he could change the course of the midterms, or 2020.”

Cohen is still adjusting to his place in this new world, often musing about how best to protect his family—and, potentially, to rehabilitate his image—by repositioning himself in the vortex between Trump and prosecutors. And, recently, that meant fighting back through the media. At the end of last week, Cohen got his hair freshly shorn and picked out a black suit to wear for his first on-the-record interview. On Saturday afternoon, ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos entered Cohen’s suite at the Regency, where the two men spoke for 45 minutes. The interview was initially supposed to be on-camera, but at the advice of Cohen’s counsel, Guy Petrillo, they stuck to an audio-only format. Petrillo, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, once headed the organization’s criminal division—the very unit currently investigating Cohen. According to a person familiar with the discussions, Petrillo suggested that the interview shouldn’t be about the theatrics. Ultimately, only a few photographs were released.

Cohen has said very little publicly since the search warrants were executed in April, and what he told Stephanopoulos adhered to what he has been expressing to friends privately for months—that his wife, daughter, and son have his “first loyalty and always will;” that he puts them first and plans to continue to keep them top priority, even if prosecutors or Trump turn the screws. In May, people familiar with his thinking told me that Cohen was saying, “I’d die for my wife and my kids. And this is all ruining their lives.” Last month, a longtime friend of Cohen’s told me that “for years, he was under the spell of Trump, but all of this is happening now because of him. And Michael’s family is telling him that. The people who love and care about him are telling him that. That spell maybe is starting to wear off.”

Cohen has not been charged with any wrongdoing, nor has he met with prosecutors, but the government has been looking into his business activities, including his dealings in the taxi industry and the hush-money settlements he negotiated with women who claim to have had affairs with Trump. As he told Stephanopoulos, “Once I understand what charges might be filed against me, if any at all, I will defer to my new counsel.” He added, “To be crystal clear, my wife, my daughter, and my son, and this country have my first loyalty.”