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Jay Shackford
In court, Stormy Daniels pulled a Trump on Trump
As Stormy Daniels testified in the hush money case, Trump’s angry response was unmistakable.
By Dana Milbank
Columnist/Washington Post
May 8, 2024
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NEW YORK — “A very revealing day,” Donald Trump said on the 15th floor of the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse here after his hush money trial adjourned for the evening on Tuesday.
And how.
The trial, which on Monday had been in the doldrums of bookkeepers’ testimony about general ledgers and accounts payable, exploded into its most memorable day yet with the arrival on the witness stand of adult-film actress Stormy Daniels herself.
For nearly a decade, Trump has been the nation’s main chaos agent: He causes the mayhem, and the rest of us have to react, adjust, adapt and try to stay calm. But for one day, somebody else was causing the chaos, and Trump and his lawyers were the ones who had to react and adapt. They had to ride out Stormy’s storm.
She was a worthy adversary. Daniels attacked her target with the very blend of vulgar accusations and insinuations without evidence that Trump routinely uses on others. In effect, she pulled a Trump on Trump. She was furious, out of control and uninhibited by what even prosecutor Susan Hoffinger, out of the jury’s hearing, referred to as her witness’s “credibility issues.” Trump, glowering from the defense table, tasted his own bitter medicine.
“I was on the bed ... I had my clothes and shoes off,” Daniels said of her alleged encounter with Trump in his Lake Tahoe hotel suite in 2006. “We were in the missionary position.”
The defense objected. The judge sustained it.
“Was he wearing a condom?” Hoffinger asked at one point.
“No.”
“Was it brief?” Hoffinger asked.
“Yes.”
Daniels testified that, before the sex, she had told a “rude” Trump that “someone should spank you,” and he rolled up a magazine for the purpose. “I swatted him ... right on the butt.”
She testified that Trump said of his wife, Melania: “Oh, don’t worry about that. We ... actually don’t even sleep in the same room.”
She testified that Trump had told her: “You remind me of my daughter because she’s smart and blond and beautiful, and people underestimate her as well.”
She intimated that Trump, while not threatening, exercised an “imbalance of power” over her and was “bigger and blocking the way” when she tried to leave the bedroom where she had found him on the bed in his boxer shorts. She said that she wasn’t drugged but “I think I blacked out,” that she endured the episode by “staring at the ceiling” and that she left shaking.
Daniels leveled these and more salacious allegations with a delivery that was almost Trumpian in its flourishes. She raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips in comic gestures of disbelief. She was quick to argue with Trump’s lawyers. She had an excuse for every inconsistency they tried to point out. And she was funny.
When Trump, after meeting her at a golf event, invited her to his hotel for dinner, she said her publicist reasoned that it would be “a great story,” and she added with a rueful smile: “Like, what could possibly go wrong?”
The overflow room, down the hall from the courtroom, erupted in laughter. “Quiet in the court!” yelled an officer.
Trump, who had been dozing his way through the first two weeks of his trial, was now wide-awake. He was shaking his head at her claims and appearing to say “bulls---t,” hectoring his lawyers and tugging at their sleeves to get their attention.
“I understand that your client is upset at this point, but he is cursing audibly, and he is shaking his head visually, and that’s contemptuous,” New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan admonished Trump’s lawyers at the bench, out of Trump’s earshot. “You need to speak to him.”
And that was before the testimony about the sex position and the condom.
Trump’s lawyers howled about how unfair it was to see their client, a once and perhaps future president, treated so rudely. “We are talking about somebody who’s going to go out and campaign this afternoon,” Todd Blanche said in arguing for a mistrial because of the “extraordinarily prejudicial” testimony intended only “to embarrass” his client and “to inflame the jury.”
Imagine somebody saying things only to embarrass and inflame!
Another irony-challenged Trump lawyer, Susan Necheles, attacked Daniels during cross-examination for posting something untrue on social media: “So when you tweeted that, that was false.”
Necheles also seemed blind to the avarice of her client, who had recently begun hawking Bibles, when she criticized Daniels because she “wanted to make some money” off her story about Trump. Necheles also condemned Daniels, who owes Trump more than half a million dollars in legal fees after her defamation suit against him was dismissed in 2018, for a tweet saying she would “go to jail before I pay a penny.”
“You don’t care about the court order, do you?” asked the lawyer for the guy twice held in contempt in this very case for violating a court order.
There’s no way to know whether the Daniels testimony will hurt Trump or only make him look persecuted. Jurors were visibly uncomfortable during parts of her testimony.
Daniels, by contrast, seemed to be having a blast. On the witness stand, she mugged for the jury, played with her hair and laughed at her own asides. (“People underestimate women, especially people in the adult industry, when they see blond hair and big boobs,” she said.)
She spoke so rapidly and conversationally that Hoffinger asked her several times to slow down, and then the judge asked her to slow down.
Daniels would apologize to the court stenographer — then race right on. The judge sustained objection after objection and at one point raised his own objection when the defense didn’t. “The witness was a little difficult to control,” he said when the jury was out of the room.
He sent Hoffinger to talk to Daniels, asking that she “stays focused” and “does not provide any unnecessary narrative.”
It was about as useful as asking Trump, before his rambling, 90-minute rally speeches, to stay focused. But Daniels tried. When the lawyers went before the judge for a sidebar conference, she called to Hoffinger: “Is that better?”
Daniels wore an all-black outfit for her testimony. On the stand, she pulled up her jacket sleeve, revealing a tattooed forearm. She crossed her legs and adjusted her hair clip, which appeared to attach a brown extension to her blond mane.
Before Daniels even took the stand, Necheles objected to her “testifying about any details of any sexual acts.” The prosecutors said they had taken care “to omit certain details that might be too salacious.” But Daniels was not easily muzzled.
She portrayed Trump, naturally enough, as a sleazy old man. “I knew he was probably as old or older than my father,” she said of Trump, 32 years her senior. When she arrived at the hotel penthouse to meet him, “he was wearing silk or satin pajamas ... that I immediately made fun of him for and said, “Does [Hugh] Hefner know you stole his pajamas?”
Trump, according to her testimony, asked if she had a boyfriend and inquired about the labor and health-insurance practices in the adult-film business. She volunteered that her employer had a condom-mandatory policy for its actors (Trump, at the defense table, angrily shook his head at this) and offered to show him her clean test record for sexually transmitted diseases (“he waived that privilege”). She testified that she found cheap “Old Spice and Pert Plus” in the billionaire’s leather toiletry bag, and “I thought that was both amusing and odd.”
She said she did a “jump scare” upon finding Trump on the bed after she emerged from the bathroom: “I wasn’t expecting someone to be there, especially minus a lot of clothing.” She said she “laughed nervously” and said “I need to go.” Trump, who had dangled the possibility of putting her on “The Apprentice” reality TV show as a contestant, now, according to Daniels, snapped at her: “I thought you were serious about what you wanted, if you ever want to get out of that trailer park.”
Daniels added: “I was offended because I never lived in a trailer park.”
The defense objected.
“Sustained.”
When the sex act was over, she testified, Trump called her “honey bunch” and told her that they should “get together again.”
Daniels detailed other meetings between the two and many calls over the next couple of years. (Trump was always dangling the prospect of an “Apprentice” appearance, she said.) She described her attempt to sell the story of their encounter, she said, until she was threatened in a parking lot and told to keep quiet about it.
Then Hoffinger took her through the rest of the well-known tale: Trump’s presidential run, the “Access Hollywood” recording, the alleged hush money and nondisclosure agreement brokered by Trump fixer Michael Cohen, and finally the bad lawyering Daniels received from her famously disgraced attorney, Michael Avenatti.
Necheles, in her cross-examination, was slashing. But Daniels was quick on her feet.
“Am I correct that you hate President Trump?”
“Yes,” Daniels admitted.
“And you want him to go to jail, right?”
“I want him to be held accountable.”
Necheles read aloud a Daniels tweet saying “I’ll never give that orange turd a dime,” producing laughter on the 15th floor. “You despise him, and you made fun of how he looks.”
“Because he made fun of me first.”
“That story has made you a lot of money,” Necheles said.
“It has also cost me a lot of money,” Daniels replied.
Acidly, Necheles said that Daniels deduced that “if you want to make money off President Trump, you better talk about sex, right?”
That wasn’t her thinking, Daniels responded, then added: “Although, that does seem to be the case.”
Trump’s lawyers, whose cross-examination continues on Thursday, will be able to point to inconsistencies that undermine Daniels’s credibility. Also, it isn’t at all clear that the lurid details she introduced into the trial record will be relevant as the jury decides about the allegations of hush money and falsified records deployed as Trump successfully kept the Daniels story away from the public in the final weeks of the 2016 election.
But in another sense, Daniels’s testimony, salacious and otherwise, seemed thoroughly credible — and relevant to the current moment.
Credible, because, even in small details, she appeared to be describing the Trump everyone recognizes. “He’d ask me questions and then not let me finish the answer,” she said, “almost like he was trying to one-up me, which was really just hilarious when you think about it."
Relevant, because Americans can expect a return of similarly tasteless episodes if voters elect Trump this fall, for that is his specialty. Nobody comes off well in this trial: not Stormy Daniels, not Michael Cohen, not the craven Trump lawyers and not the prosecutors who elicited the vulgar testimony. But there is one person above all who has turned this story, and so much else in today’s politics, into tawdry spectacle — and that is the defendant.
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