Instead, the president seems to be soaring while Michael Avenatti, former media magnet and porn-star lawyer, has plummeted to the ground in a heap of ash that even composters won’t touch.

Avenatti has referred to himself as Icarus, but that’s a rather romantic self-appraisal. There’s a difference between flying too close to the sun and being a common crook. Last week, after a two-week trial that made hardly a ripple in the press, a jury of his peers found Avenatti guilty of attempted extortion, transmission of interstate communications with intent to extort and honest services wire fraud.

It’s a little ironic that the trial of Michael Avenatti, who not long ago commanded prime-time hits on CNN and MSNBC, was nudged aside by Trump’s own impeachment trial. Adding insult to injury, the once-dapper Avenatti spent much of the past year awaiting trial in solitary confinement, reportedly in the same New York prison cell once occupied by Mexican drug kingpin El Chapo.