 "Former US president Donald Trump. AP")
A risqué testimony by a prosecution witness peppered with salacious, titillating and graphic details of a sexcapade on one side. Scowl, audible curses and outrage on the defence side.
The venue: Courtroom 1530, 15th floor, New York County Supreme Court, Lower Manhattan, 7 May.
Rewind to 18 years ago. A 27-year-old porn actress has sex with a thrice-married 60-year-old real estate tycoon and the future POTUS in a suite in Lake Tahoe (straddling California and Nevada) in July 2006.
The porn star was Daniels and the cheating magnate, Trump, whose third wife, Melania, had given birth to their son, Baron, four months ago.
The sexual encounter first haunted Trump one month before his first presidential campaign in 2016. He allegedly paid $130,000 in hush money via his then-fixer lawyer, Michael Cohen, to Daniels to prevent her from leaking the lurid details, which could have derailed his White House chances.
Hush! Hush! Done and dusted, right?
No.
The sexcapade is back to unnerve Trump again eight years later and six months before his third presidential bid.
The charges are not about the Trump-Daniels fling. But her testimony is crucial because he wanted to hide it from voters in 2016. The prosecution has charged him with falsifying business records in the first degree by misrepresenting the amount Cohen paid to Daniels as legal fees and election interference by hiding the dalliance to boost his winning chances. Though falsifying business records is a misdemeanour in New York, the prosecution wants to prove that Trump committed a felony by violating election interference or tax laws.
Trump, the first former US president to be charged in a criminal case, has been smearing Daniels and disputing the scandalous scoop since The Wall Street Journal reported the pay-off in January 2018.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsDays before his 34-felony count indictment by a Manhattan grand jury on March 30, 2023, Trump posted on Truth Social: “I did nothing wrong in the ‘Horseface’ case. I see she showed up in New York today trying to drum up some publicity for herself. I haven’t seen or spoken to her since I took a picture with her on a golf course, in full golf gear including a hat, close to 18 years ago.”
However, Daniels claims to have “met with him numerous times after that and spoke to him on the phone countless times”.
In a sting operation on July 12, 2018, Daniels and two other strippers were arrested by four vice cops at a strip club, Sirens Gentleman’s Club, on Cleveland Avenue (Columbus, Ohio) for “improperly touching” a few customers, including an undercover female police officer. However, the charges were dropped after a few hours with prosecutors saying that a law barring dancers from touching customers and vice versa applied only to strippers regularly performing at the club.
In a federal civil lawsuit filed against the city and the officers, Daniels claimed that the cops were Trump supporters and the arrest was politically motivated. Finally, the suit was settled for $450,000 . In January 2020, two of the cops were fired and the other two temporarily removed after an internal affairs probe found that the arrest was improper.
Daniels’ testimony highlights two crucial things
Trump beaten in his own game
Honestly, Daniels aimed to earn fast bucks by trying to sell the sleazy story, not for a feministic cause or to represent Trump’s alleged victims.
On 10 May, the day after Daniels’ second cross-examination, the conservative daily tabloid New York Post (NYP) dug up a March 2018 picture of her pole dancing at Solid Gold strip club, in Pompano Beach, Florida, with the headline ‘STORMY: MAKE IT RAIN’ and the strap ‘Trump lawyers: Hu$tler Daniels just wanted money for Trump affair tale’.
But Trump’s obnoxiously sexual objectification of women and his raunchy, predatory comments, especially in NBCUniversal’s Access Hollywood episode in September 2005, and the sexual liaison with Daniels are now biting him back through her.
Trump revelled in his playboy image, formed at the New York Military Academy and bolstered when he became NYC’s real estate mogul and purchased the Miss Universe pageant.
Brash, domineering, vulgar and vile, he’s a male chauvinist who often bragged about his sexual encounters.
Most Americans see the Access Hollywood tape as the worst example of Trump’s sexual braggadocio in which he boasted that he “can do anything” to women because he’s a star and “grab them by their” genitals—amounting to sexual assault.
But the former president had been demeaning and dehumanising women as a mere source of sexual gratification for years even when outside the White House.
In 2001, when CNN’s then-commentator and Trump’s future sancho Tucker Carlson commented on his often-mocked stack of dark blonde/bright orange filaments flapping atop his head, he left a message the next day. “It’s true you have better hair than I do. But I get more p#@*y than you do.”
Trump’s grotesque fixation with the p-word made headlines again in the August 2000 issue of the now-defunct Maximum Golf magazine. Michael Corcoran, who profiled him, recalls that when Trump saw a young woman enter his Mar-a-Lago resort, he said, “There is nothing in the world like first-rate p#@*y.”
In his 1997 book Trump: The Art of the Comeback, he wrote: “Women are really a lot different than portrayed. They are far worse than men, far more aggressive …”
On 9 November, 1992, he told the New York magazine: “You have to treat ’em [women] like shit.”
Now, the connection between the tape and Daniels is back causing nightmares to Trump, whose Access Hollywood comments had triggered a maelstrom in his camp during the campaigning after The Washington Post published a video and an accompanying story on October 7, 2016.
When David Pecker, the then-CEO of the National Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc (AMI), allegedly told Cohen on October 25 that AMI wouldn’t buy Daniel’s bombshell, he opened a bank account for his company Essential Consultants, LLC, the next day and wired $130,000 from his LLC to her attorney Michael Avenatti a day later.
The non-disclosure agreement (NDA) between “Peggy Peterson” (Daniels) and “David Dennison” (Trump) was ready on October 28 and Cohen received its signed copies on November 1—but Trump never signed the NDA.
After the tape fiasco, Trump couldn’t afford another blow to his White House chances with Daniels going public about their one-night stand. In fact, the tape “served as the catalyst for consummating” the Daniels pay-off, Manhattan prosecutors told Judge Juan Merchan in a partial court filing before the hush money trial. But Merchan didn’t allow playing the tape citing concerns of undue prejudice against the defence.
The Trump camp was also alarmed by Daniels’ testimony with his defence team terming it irrelevant and prejudicial and seeking a second mistrial. “It almost defies belief that we’re here about a records case,” Trump’s lead lawyer, Todd Blanche, told the Judge.
Indeed, a married man having sex with a porn star is not illegal and to pay a person for silence is not inherently criminal. But the Judge said that the prosecution produced Daniels as a witness because Trump had denied having sex with her.
Trump felt threatened and hid the affair from the beginning after knowing that Daniels wanted to sell the juice to the National Enquirer. That’s why he didn’t sign the NDA, which made it mandatory for Daniels to pay $1 million to him per instance if she breached the contract.
In March 2018, then-White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders told the media that Trump had won an arbitration proceeding against Daniels barring her from speaking about the affair. “This case has already been won in arbitration,” she said.
Trump’s motive(s) for trying to silence Daniels raises several questions.
1. Why would Trump file the arbitration proceeding if Daniels was lying?
2. Why would Cohen intimidate and coerce Daniels into denying her relationship with Trump?
3. Why would Trump pay $130,000 to Daniels if there was nothing to hide?
4. How would Daniels know the
shape and size of Trump’s manhood
, as vividly described in her book Full Disclosure, if they didn’t have sex?
5. Why would Trump’s defence team seek two mistrials, one after another, and the removal of the gag order in the hush money case?
Nothing would rile a misogynist more than a porn star endangering his personal and political career by first making their sensational copulation public and then narrating its juiciest details under oath.
The day after her jolting testimony, the NYP displayed the 2006 snap of Trump and Daniels at the Lake Tahoe celebrity golf tournament on the cover with the headline ‘DEMS GIVE DON… THE FULL LEWINSKY’ and the strap ‘Judge lets Stormy humiliate Trump, but voters don’t care’.
The NYP report mentioned how Daniels “confronted a dour” Trump “with salacious details about their alleged tryst”. The report also detailed how an angry Trump shook his head and cursed audibly and the Judge warned Blanche about his client’s behaviour.
His scowls and audible curses during her testimony showed that he was infuriated—Daniels beat Trump in his own game by strongly pushing back.
For instance, when Trump’s attorney, Susan Necheles asked Daniels if it’s true that she made a lot of money in the last 10 years by claiming she had sex with Trump. “That story made you a lot of money, right?” she asked. “It has also cost me a lot of money,” Daniels replied referring to the legal costs.
Necheles even alleged that the pay-off was an extortion by Daniels. “You are looking to extort money from President Trump,” she asked. “False,” Daniels shot back. “That’s what you did, right?” Necheles repeated her allegation. “False,” Daniels shot back again.
A conviction and Trump’s election prospects
Daniels’ crucial testimony was bolstered by Cohen’s direct implication of Trump. “We need to stop this from getting out,” he had said about the danger of Daniels leaking out their one-nighter, Cohen testified, implicating the presumptive GOP nominee.
Will Daniels’ testimony and a conviction affect Trump’s electoral chances?
First, Daniels’ testimony is important, but the details of that night were already in the public domain and hardly impacted Trump’s rating during the presidency.
A March 2018 POLITICO/Morning Consult poll after Daniels revealed the details on 60 Minutes on CBS News showed that he had a 42 per cent approval rating compared to 44 per cent in the previous week. Forty-six per cent of the voters said that the Daniels story didn’t change their view of Trump. Besides, 42 per cent of the voters were against Trump’s impeachment in the hush money case.
Trump’s record with women was known but many voters overlooked it. Women voters in 2016 were already aware of the Access Hollywood shocker and 15 women alleged before the election that Trump kissed, groped or sexually assaulted them. Yet 39 per cent of women voted for him in 2016 and 44 per cent in 2020.
The focus of the hush money case—the least important of the four indictments—isn’t Trump’s character but falsifying business records about Cohen’s reimbursement.
Polls show that Americans had formed their opinions even before the hush money case trial started and several of them weren’t even interested in it.
Only around 33 per cent of Americans think that Trump did something illegal in the hush money case, according to a new survey by the Associated Press and NORC at the University of Chicago from April 4 to 8. Fifty per cent think that he shouldn’t be president if convicted of falsifying business documents to cover up the pay-off, meaning the other half still thinks he is fit to be lead the US despite a conviction.
Among Republicans and Republican-leaning registered voters, 45.8 per cent expect Trump to be found either guilty on all counts (8.7 percent) or guilty on some counts (37.2 per cent) while 40.7 per cent expect him to be found not guilty on all counts, according to a Suffolk University/USA Today survey conducted from April 30 to May 3. A Marist/NPR/PBS NewsHour poll conducted from April 22 to 25 showed 55 per cent of Americans didn’t follow the trial closely or at all. A SSRS/CNN poll from April 18 to 23 found that 51 per cent weren’t following the trial closely.
Second, Trump knew about the high probability of getting indicted in the hush money case and had already set the narrative of “You (Republicans) are being targeted and I am your messiah”, charged his support base and started raising millions. “Today, I am your warrior; I am your justice,” he said during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland. “And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” In the week after the indictment, his campaign raised more than $13 million.
Trump’s narrative forced his GOP rivals to back him for the fear of losing out Republican voters. He was leading his nearest rival, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, 49 per cent-23 percent after the indictment in compared to 44 per cent-30 per cent before the charges, two Reuters/Ipsos polls in March and July, respectively, showed.
Trump seems to be in a ‘win both heads and tails’ situation if the case flips to a conviction or an acquittal.
A conviction will add ballast to his false narrative of a “deep state”, a political witch-hunt and a justice system working against him—he will become a martyr for his supporters. Even when he violated the gag order for the 10th time and was warned of jail by the Judge, Trump said outside the court, “Our Constitution is much more important than jail. It’s not even close. I’ll do that sacrifice any day.”
Trump’s has played out his alleged victimhood perfectly. An April 18-23 CNN/SSRS poll showed that only 13 per cent nationwide believe that he is being treated like other criminal defendants. Besides, 45 per cent of Americans feel that the charge of falsifying business records is irrelevant to his fitness for the presidency compared to 39 per cent last year.
Even if Trump is convicted and jailed, he can run for president.
Article II mentions only three requirements to become president: the person must be a natural-born citizen of the US, 35 years or older and a resident of the US for, at least, 14 years. There is no other criterion.
Lyndon LaRouche, a fringe candidate, was convicted of tax and mail fraud in 1988 but contested for the White House from jail in 1992. The Socialist Party nominated Eugene Debs in 1920 while he was incarcerated for violating the Espionage Act—one of charges under which Trump was indicted in the classified documents case.
An acquittal in the hush money trial will be a political windfall convincing his supporters that he was persecuted but managed to beat insurmountable odds.
The writer is a freelance journalist with more than two decades of experience and comments primarily on foreign affairs. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.