NEW YORK — Donald Trump told reporters on Wednesday he wanted to attend his Manhattan fraud trial to draw media attention to how “corrupt” the New York attorney general’s high-stakes case against his family real estate empire is — and then he hit the road.

“Why attend? Because I want to point it out to the press, how corrupt it is — ’cause nobody else seems to be able to do it,” Trump said outside the courtroom, railing against the judge and attorney general Letitia James before leaving the courthouse.

After he addressed the media, court officials began taking down some of the barriers installed over the weekend after Trump announced his last-minute decision to attend, beginning to return the lower Manhattan courthouse to its normal state. James confirmed to journalists: “The Donald Trump show is over.”‘

“This was nothing more than a political stunt — a fundraising stop,” James said. “Now, we can continue to focus on the trial, and we are confident justice will be served.”

Trump is expected to return to the trial in a few weeks to testify.

Trump turned up at the trial for opening arguments Monday, less than a week after state Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron found him and his sons and top executives liable for James’ chief fraud claim and ordered he be stripped of his New York business certificates.

By the second day, he’d earned himself a gag order for firing off an inflammatory Truth Social post about Engoron’s principal law clerk, Allison Greenfield, infuriating the usually cool-tempered jurist.

The limited gag order barred Trump and everyone involved in the case from “posting, emailing, or speaking publicly” about his court staff. Trump didn’t mention Greenfield in an early morning social media post on Wednesday or in comments to reporters, reserving his ire for Engoron and AG James, whom he disparaged outside the courtroom as “a political animal.”

Inside the courtroom in the morning, Trump appeared to be closely following testimony from his ex-accountant, Donald Bender, jotting down notes on “Trump” letterhead and whispering to his attorney, Alina Habba. He has sought to blame Bender for his fake financial statements.

The Trump Org’s former longtime accountant with Mazars was a crucial witness in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s 2022 case against Trump’s company and former CFO Allen Weisselberg, leading to their convictions. Bender testified in that case and has maintained at the AG trial that his job was to compile information Trump and his company gave him in annual financial statements — not to audit the information they gave him.

During a tedious line of questioning under cross-examination, Trump lawyer Jose Suarez meticulously went line by line through records tallying the value of Trump-owned properties, skeptically asking Bender if he noticed anything amiss.

Bender repeated the same line repeatedly: “Nothing came to my attention as part of my compilation procedures.”

After disregarding requests by the judge to streamline the questions, an agitated Engoron called out Suarez for wasting time.

“This is ridiculous!” Engoron boomed. “Reporters, I’m pounding the bench again!”

James seeks to recover $250 million in “ill gotten gains” in the case and to permanently bar Trump and his top execs from heading a New York business. She says they intended to defraud banks and lenders by ballooning the value of Trump-emblazoned properties to line their pockets with at least $100 million in unearned interest.

Trump’s side says their illegal business practices had no victims and that the banks he dealt with were richer for it. As in all of his cases, Trump has accused the AG of exacting a “witch hunt.”

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