For the first time in five years, Donald Trump and his former attorney and fixer Michael Cohen on Tuesday entered the same room.

But instead of meeting, as they did for years, in the gilded halls of Trump Tower or inside the White House's Oval Office, Trump and Cohen sat feet away from one another in a New York City courthouse as the longtime loyalist testified against his former boss at a civil fraud trial threatening the existence of the Trump family’s decades-old business empire.

“Heck of a reunion,” Cohen quipped to reporters as he made his way to lunch after his first round of testimony on Tuesday.

“I haven’t seen him in years,” Trump said during the lunch break. “You know his record. It’s a horrible one.”

The GOP 2024 frontrunner attended the Manhattan trial for a sixth day this month, despite not being required to do so, to see for himself what Cohen had to say. Cohen didn't look at him as he first took the stand.

“He’s a proven liar,” Trump said before entering the courtroom at the day’s start, claiming Cohen was only testifying to “get a better deal” with prosecutors. While Cohen pleaded guilty to tax evasion, lying to Congress and campaign finance violations in 2018, he has already served prison time and is not facing legal consequences connected to the civil trial. He has not cut a deal with the New York state prosecutors working the case.

“We’re not worried at all about his testimony,” Trump added later in the day. 

Cohen’s appearance was delayed from last week by an unspecified health issue.

“This is not about Donald Trump vs. Michael Cohen or Michael Cohen vs. Donald Trump," Cohen said as he arrived at the courthouse. "This is about accountability, plain and simple.”

During the trial on Tuesday, Trump posted on social media favorable quotes Cohen gave to media outlets in the years prior to turning on his longtime boss. He also attacked the judge, Arthur Engoron, and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

“If we had any other Judge, this case would have been thrown out years ago. He is a Radical Left Democrat who is totally controlled by Letitia James and her Thugs,” Trump wrote on Truth Social during a break.

Engoron has already implemented a gag order on Trump for attacking a member of his court staff and fined him $5,000. Attacks on Engoron and James’ team are not covered by the gag order.

The trial stems from James' lawsuit alleging that Trump and top executives at his company, the Trump Organization, conspired to pad his net worth by billions of dollars on financial statements. They were provided to banks, insurers and others to make deals and secure loans.

Trump denies any wrongdoing. He says his assets were actually undervalued, and he maintains that disclaimers on his financial statements essentially told recipients to check the numbers out for themselves.

Engoron already has ruled that Trump and his company committed fraud, but the trial involves remaining claims of conspiracy, insurance fraud and falsifying business records.

“This is a disgrace,” Trump said at one point after Engoron said he would hold the former president’s lawyers to their estimated time they said they would need with a witness who testified prior to Cohen on Tuesday, according to a New York Daily News reporter in the room.

After Cohen took the stand and began answering questions about his career and criminal convictions, Trump at times whispered to his lawyers. At other points, the former president hunched forward in his seat, watching intently, or leaned back with crossed arms.

Cohen testified that he only ever took orders from Trump during his time at the Trump Organization and that he would work with the company’s Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg to reverse engineer property valuations and increase them on paper to Trump’s liking. 

"I was tasked by Mr. Trump to increase the total assets based upon a number that he arbitrarily elected,” Cohen testified. “My responsibility along with Allen Weisselberg was to reverse engineer the different asset classes, increase those assets, in order to achieve the number that Mr. Trump had tasked us with.”

Asked what that number was, Cohen replied: “Whatever number Trump told us to.”

Weisselberg served 100 days for tax fraud earlier this year and testified earlier this month in the civil trial.

Trump has derided the case as a “sham,” a “scam” and “a continuation of the single greatest witch hunt of all time.” The ex-president argues that the case is part of an effort by James and other Democrats to drag down his campaign.

In another possible legal blow to Trump, nearly 1,000 miles away in Atlanta, attorney Jenna Ellis pleaded guilty on Tuesday to a felony charge over efforts to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia.

Ellis, the fourth defendant in the case to enter into a plea deal with prosecutors, was one of 18 charged alongside Trump.

Trump, Cohen said, would summon him and Weisselberg and say, for example: “I’m actually not worth four and a half billion dollars. I’m really worth more of six.”

Cohen said he and the finance chief would then “inflate the value” of Trump properties by pegging them to “comparable” real estate that was actually different — brand-new developments with higher ceilings, more sweeping views and no rent regulation, for instance.

Insurance company executives were shown the inflated statements, where the combination of extremely high values and low liabilities could net Trump more favorable premiums, Cohen testified. Plus, he said, Trump would deliberately show up about three-quarters of the way through his deputies' meetings with insurers and spark a conversation to the effect that he was rich enough to self-insure if he couldn't get a good premium.

Drawing emphatic head-shaking from Trump, Cohen said Weisselberg indicated that he spoke to Donald Trump Jr. and siblings Eric and Ivanka Trump before preparing their father's financial statements.

The two sons are defendants in the lawsuit and deny wrongdoing. An appeals court dismissed Ivanka Trump from the case in June.

Cohen spent a decade as Trump’s fiercely loyal personal lawyer before famously breaking with him in 2018 amid a federal investigation that sent Cohen to federal prison. He is also a major prosecution witness in Trump’s separate Manhattan hush-money criminal case, which is scheduled to go to trial next spring.

James has credited Cohen as the impetus for her civil investigation, which led to the fraud lawsuit being decided at the trial. She cited Cohen’s testimony to Congress in 2019 that Trump had a history of misrepresenting the value of assets to gain favorable loan terms and tax benefits.

Cohen gave copies of three of Trump’s financial statements to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. Cohen said Trump gave the statements to Deutsche Bank to inquire about a loan to buy the NFL’s Buffalo Bills and to Forbes magazine to substantiate his claim to a spot on its list of the world’s wealthiest people.

Earlier this month, Trump dropped a $500 million lawsuit that accused Cohen of “spreading falsehoods,” causing “vast reputational harm” and breaking a confidentiality agreement for talking publicly about the hush-money payments. A Trump spokesperson said the former president was only pausing the lawsuit, while campaigning and fighting four criminal cases, and would refile later.

Cohen took the stand after William Kelly, the attorney for Trump’s longtime former accounting firm, Mazars USA. The firm cut ties with Trump last year after James’ office raised questions about the reliability of his financial statements.

Kelly said that the firm’s decision was based on the attorney general’s lawsuit and on Mazars’ own investigation, which suggested that the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, had provided “compromised” financial statements. Mazars said it hadn’t found any “material discrepancies” in the statements as a whole, however.

Defense lawyer Jesus M. Suarez suggested that the accounting firm abandoned its longtime clients to get in the attorney general’s good graces and head off potential legal problems for the firm. But Kelly insisted “there was no currying favor.”

“It was being a good corporate citizen and explaining what we do,” he said.

Trump's attorneys had sought to delay the trial on Tuesday, arguing that a rash of coronavirus cases in James' office had put the former president's health at risk.

Trump lawyer Christopher Kise said it was “frankly irresponsible” not to postpone the proceeding. Another defense attorney, Alina Habba, objected to sharing a “contaminated” microphone with members of the attorney general’s office.

James' office, in a statement, said it had taken all steps to notify the relevant parties and had followed health guidance, adding that defense lawyers could wear masks if concerned. Trump and the attorneys at the defense table with him didn't don masks.