Stormy Testimony Shows: Trump’s Humiliation Is the Point of Bragg’s Prosecution Andrew McCarthy
As porn star Stormy Daniels’s testimony unfolds, what has always been obvious becomes even more explicit: The point of this trial is to bruise Donald Trump politically — to humiliate him with a tawdry sexual episode from nearly 20 years ago that is utterly unnecessary to prove the charges in the indictment (even as those charges have been distorted by Alvin Bragg, Manhattan’s elected progressive Democratic district attorney); and to brand Trump a “convicted felon” so that his Democratic opponent, President Biden, can refer to him that way in the run-up to the 2024 election, after which — probably a year or more after which — any convictions from this kangaroo court will be overturned on appeal.
Bragg’s prosecutors have elicited from the porn actress — she was 27 and Trump 60 at the time of their 2006 hotel-suite encounter — that Trump assured her that he and his wife did not sleep in the same bedroom; that she (Stormy) reminded him of his daughter Ivanka; that she told him to his face he was “rude,” “arrogant,” and “pompous”; that the now-former president and de facto Republican presidential nominee became more polite after she “spanked” him with a rolled-up magazine.
The slew of riveted New York Times star reporters assigned to cover the trial dutifully chimed in: “One of the undercurrents of this testimony is how mocking and derisive Stormy Daniels is of Trump. In her telling, she was experiencing him that same way in real time during that evening in 2006.”
Normal people will find the accounts of this spectacle nauseating, even if they are catnip for a certain kind of Trump obsessive. The big concession Bragg made, with the endorsement of his cat’s paw, Judge Juan Merchan, is that prosecutors would not ask Daniels to describe Trump’s genitalia. I kid you not.
Judge Merchan, natch, has admonished Daniels to slow down the pace of her recitation. He’s afraid she’s speaking too quickly and the jury might miss some of these, er, nuggets.
Just to remind you, the allegation in the indictment is that Trump fraudulently caused his business records to be falsified eleven years after this encounter. The encounter makes no difference to the proof of the charges. The state’s theory is that Trump’s records are false because they described as ongoing “legal services” what was actually the reimbursement of a debt to Trump’s lawyer (in connection with a legal transaction in which the lawyer did, in fact, represent Trump). Whether the debt arose out of paying Stormy for an NDA or some other obligation is of no moment to the question of whether the book entry “legal services” accurately describes the payments to Cohen.
It could not be more patent that Bragg is spotlighting the long-ago extramarital tryst by his party’s main opponent in the upcoming election to profoundly embarrass him. The Times, naturally, can’t help itself but pile on, noting that as Daniels testifies, “Trump whispers to his lawyer. He can’t stand feeling or appearing weak or powerless. But that’s exactly what he is here as Daniels is describing, in extensive detail, an encounter he continues to maintain didn’t happen.”
Even though Trump is not charged with having extramarital sex, which is not a crime, he has long denied the fling with Stormy. By the time her testimony is over, the jury will have again heard that she publicly denied that she had a sexual encounter with Trump (her lawyer, Keith Davidson, has already said as much). She’ll say she was lying because of what she took to be her obligation under the nondisclosure agreement, and because she feared retaliation. Consequently, whether the sex happened or not is now a live issue in the case, even though it should not matter to the case.
Were Trump to testify, he’d have to address it. The “did it happen” issue, even though extraneous, prevents Trump from giving testimony narrowly tailored to the charges. As a practical matter, the jury would expect him to address Stormy’s story. If the jurors believed Stormy’s version and concluded Trump was lying, they could convict Trump even though the question of whether it happened is irrelevant to the actual charges in the indictment. That could be yet another reason for Trump to opt out of testifying (in addition to Merchan’s pretrial rulings that Trump can be grilled about Judge Arthur Engoron’s “persistent fraud” finding in the civil fraud case, and about the jury’s defamation verdict in the E. Jean Carroll civil sexual-assault case). That is, the admission of Daniels’s testimony makes it more likely that Trump will rely on his Fifth Amendment privilege to decline to be a witness, and that his lawyers will argue that the prosecutors have failed to prove their case — whatever that case may be.
This is a bad day for Trump personally, and for his family. I imagine he and they will recover from it, though. Trump has been a public figure for decades, Stormy’s story has been out there a long time, Trump’s denials of it have never been convincing, and the deep flaws in his character have been priced in by the public for many years — they don’t move the needle either way.
It’s a worse day for the legal system in New York. To see it used so unabashedly for partisan political purposes is stunning. It won’t recover so easily.
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