By spring, however, the dynamic began to change. Shortly after the feds came knocking in April, Cohen’s attorneys and Trump’s attorneys showed up in court to argue that they be allowed to review the seized material and determine if anything should be considered privileged. A judge in the Southern District acceded to the request, but ruled that the parties would have to split the cost. This decision essentially set off a bitter exchange regarding who would foot the bill—whether the Trump Organization and family would cover Cohen’s legal bills, or if Cohen himself would be responsible. (The Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment.)

The dispute over payments, which could amount to tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars, exacerbated tensions between former legal allies now turned inward. On April 26, when Cohen was due to appear in court to talk about the privilege review, Trump phoned into Fox & Friends and insisted that Cohen had only handled a “fraction” of his legal work. When I called Cohen for comment, he hadn’t yet seen what the president had said; the fire alarm at the Loews Regency hotel, where he was living at the time, was going off, and he was distracted. He pulled up a clip of the interview on a cell phone. “I truly don’t even know what to say,” he said repeatedly. “He knows I’m about to go to court.” Agitated, he hurried me off the phone. A week later, after Giuliani told Sean Hannity that Cohen had, in fact, been reimbursed for the $130,000 payment to Daniels—something Cohen had publicly denied more than once—he was similarly silent and baffled. “I don’t have any clue why they did this,” he told me. “I can’t even figure it out. It makes everything harder.”

Soon afterward, Cohen started telling friends that he was angry; that he knew Trump wouldn’t have his back; that he believed Don Jr. and Jared Kushner and Giuliani were making a concerted effort to drag him through the mud; that he would consider cooperating with investigators. By June, he began speaking to criminal-defense attorneys who had worked in the Southern District. In early July, nearly a year after he professed his unbreakable fealty to Trump, he told ABC’s Stephanopoulos that his loyalty was now squarely with his own family. By the end of August, he stood up in federal court and read from prepared notes so that he could stay focused, deliberately implicating the president as he pleaded guilty.

Trumpworld is an island of misfits, a place where people like Cohen and Bannon and Roger Stone and Don Jr. and Paul Manafort and Kushner and Omarosa Manigault Newman get hired and settle into a herky-jerky rhythm and a sense of paranoia. Many operate under the recognition that they may one day be thrown under the bus by their boss, that they may be pressured to lie on his behalf, or to vouch for him on things they know not to be true. One generous explanation as to why Cohen and Newman recorded conversations and maintained detailed accounts of what they knew—credible or otherwise—is that they understood that they would need them for posterity.

As dysfunctional as this ecosystem may be, however, it’s one that appeared as a sanctuary to outsiders, many of whom seemed to recognize that a place in Trumpworld was their only possible path to power. And this presumably explains why so many former Trump loyalists have a difficult time abandoning their perch.

Mueller’s investigation, of course, has changed that calculation, and the looming sentencing, this December, alters it for Cohen perhaps more than anything. As people close to him have told me, Cohen knows he is going to prison. He has been taking necessary steps to prepare for that eventuality. And his discussions with Mueller, they said, aren’t motivated by thinking he could somehow get out of that. As the person familiar with his thinking told me, “in this chapter of what he has gone through, we are seeing the decision to reset his life and express his deep concerns about Trump’s suitability as president.”