After Mr. Cohen’s Substack essay, Ms. Carducci texted to ask why he was now publicly helping Mr. Trump undermine the cases against him. “I have attacked him and the administration 998 out of 1000 times,” Mr. Cohen replied in a text that she shared with The Times. “James and Bragg, and the entire system is broken and abusive. That’s the point I was making. I’m not going to be a puppet as I lived the abuse.”

By all accounts, including his own, Mr. Cohen was crushed and embittered by the events of the past several years. His life, as he put it on his radio show, was “shredded to pieces,” and he lost his sense of purpose.

“I know what it feels like to take hit after soul-crushing hit, to be bloodied and knocked to the dirt while a crowd of millions cheers for your destruction and then, then, to have to pick up the shattered pieces of your life, alone in the dark while the circus packs up and moves on to its next victim,” he said on his show. “I know the sheer suffocating terror of being turned into a public target sitting in silence while your family weeps, wondering if you’re ever going to survive the night.”

And yet after all that, Mr. Cohen turned back to Mr. Trump. “People have their sect, their team,” said Greg Ehrlich, a onetime friend who recalls first introducing Mr. Cohen to Mr. Trump. “It’s your identity. His identity was Trump. Then he got lucky and had a second life, which was against Trump.” But now, Mr. Ehrlich said, “he needs his identity, and his identity was Donald Trump.”

Indeed, when they finally had their bury-the-hatchet talk on the radio last month, Mr. Cohen sounded needy, anxious to reminisce about the old times with the Boss, but the Boss wasn’t having any of it. Distant and hardly warm, Mr. Trump focused on promoting the fiction that Mr. Cohen had recanted his testimony, making clear that their reconciliation was dependent entirely on that. “You took it back,” Mr. Trump said falsely. “I wouldn’t even be talking to you right now if you didn’t, to be honest.”