Stormy takes the stand

A figure from Trump’s past takes the stand and exposes the hypocrisy of MAGA Christian Nationalists

“I was staring up at the ceiling, wondering how I got there,” she told the jury, adding that Mr. Trump did not wear a condom. - New York Times, May 7, 2024.

And so, it’s come to this: Silk Pajamas, an old man “posing” on his bed, a rolled-up newspaper nearby for spanking, Old Spice, and personal grooming tools variously described as gold tweezers or nail clippers (either way, ugh!) arranged on a shelf in the luxury hotel bathroom. 

The security guard at the door. A 27-year-old budding porn star, whose publicist convinced her it would be a good idea to dine with the 60-year-old reality show impresario inside his suite at a Tahoe Hotel during a golf championship. 

Golf. 

Sex. 

Part of his seduction technique was to tell her she reminded him of his daughter Ivanka, also blonde and “underestimated,” he said. Later, when they ran into each other at events like one for Trump Vodka, or when he called her on the phone to dangle the ever-alluring, never-granted prospect of appearing on his TV show, he called her “Honeybunch.” 

As I’ve mentioned before, the arrival of Trump as an avatar of America to the world, coincided with a shift in the matrix, a wormhole that led us into this Marvel Comic parallel universe. Andy Warhol saw it coming but somehow we missed the actual moment of the happening. 

So now, Stormy and Mr. Pecker face Defendant Donald, sitting at the defense table, one hand covering the other, protectively, as though shielding the vulgarian fingers from possible deep study and measurement, because if they are found scientifically shorter than normal what does that say for the rest of him. Bagman Michael Cohen, with his straight outta central casting Goombah accent, will soon take his place in the pantheon of caricatures on Centre Street.

The New York Times called Stormy’s too-detailed testimony about the sex “mortifying.” In her 2018 book (of course she’s written a book) she described his sexual equipment in far more vivid detail in a TMI download that once seen is never un-seeable. 

The jury would be tainted, prejudiced! if she were to go down there. 

Judge Juan Merchan, normally described as stoic and restrained, seemed to panic as she launched into the details, approached the event horizon, and he stopped her, ordering her personally to rein it in, warning the prosecution. 

Defendant Donald didn't like this one bit of course. Facing “Honeybunch” - or as he later called her for the benefit of his rally fans, “Horseface” - in person for the first time in decades, he fulminated and mumbled as she spoke, shaking his head and “cursing audibly.” Reporters picked up one of his mid-testimony growls - “bullshit” - he said to his lawyers as Stormy recounted him showing her a picture of Melania and telling her they didn’t actually sleep in the same bed.

According to the trial transcript released last night, after these outbursts, Judge Merchan called Trump lawyer Todd Blanche to a sidebar during a midday break to say the former president was possibly intimidating the witness. “I am speaking to you here at the bench because I don’t want to embarrass him," Merchan said, according to reports of the transcripts. "You need to speak to him. I won’t tolerate that.”

In Marvel MAGA-Land, it’s all fun and games, spectacle, circus, idiocy jacked on steroids, amplified on TV, all mind-blowingly garish, hallucinogenically lurid, even hilarious - until it really isn’t at all. 

The thing you need to remember about Stormy Daniels is that, like most women who step out in front of the Trump train, she spoke at great physical and financial risk. Besides years of the now obligatory MAGA death threats, she has been abused by Trump’s legal maneuvers, in cases too obscure to have made headlines, but which by their effect, would deter any normie female witness or victim from ever speaking out.

It’s a miracle, a testament to Daniels’ courage and audacity, that she walked into the courtroom and said her piece. Trump has beat her up in civil court already, not once but twice: first when a judge threw out a defamation suit her former lawyer (now convicted felon Michael Avenatti) filed on her behalf against Trump when the then-President said she was lying about being physically intimidated to keep silent. Trump won another case against her for breaking the NDA she signed when she took the hush money $130,000 from Michael Cohen, in exchange for silence. She now owes Trump nearly half a million dollars in civil penalties. 

Still, she strolled into court to tell a jury that she “kind of blacked out” when she saw Trump, after they had shared a room service dinner in his suite, stripped to his t-shirt, boxers and socks, “posing” on the bed. Daniels said she "felt like the room spun in slow motion" when she left the bathroom and saw Trump disrobed. "I felt the blood leave my hands and my feet almost like if you stand up too fast," Daniels says. "I thought, 'oh my God, what did I misread to get here?'"

She didn’t have a way out, though. “He stood up between me and the door. Not in a threatening manner. He didn’t come at me, he didn’t rush at me. Nothing like that," Daniels said. "There was an imbalance of power for sure. He was bigger and blocking the way. I was not threatened verbally or physically." 

"Next thing I know I was on the bed," she testified. She didn’t remember taking off her own clothes, dissociated. She told the jury she found herself in the missionary position - a detail too far for Merchan, who stopped her, right there. 

Afterward, she said, "it was really hard to get my shoe on because my hands were shaking so hard. … I just left as fast as I could. That was it," she says. And : "I told very few people that we had actually had sex because I felt ashamed that I didn’t stop it," Daniels said.

For the defense, the damage was done. Trump’s lawyers saw an opening for appeal. Stormy appeared to be suggesting non consensual sex, “extremely prejudicial” and grounds for a mistrial. 

Sexual assault is not charged here. The case, as the lawyers reminded the jury repeatedly, is not about sex or coercion but about money and paper and ledgers and accounting and ultimately, a campaign finance violation. 

Trump lawyer Susan Necheles (a female lawyer was dispatched to handle the cross examination, naturally) objected to Daniels testifying about explicit sexual details, because “this is a case about books and records.” 

But is it really? 

In her testimony yesterday, Daniels explicitly denied the sex was nonconsensual, but in an interview with New York Magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi when the story of the hush money first broke, she described something close to rape. She said she tried to step around Trump, to get out and he blocked her. 

“He was like, I thought you wanted to be a director. Sometimes you have to do whatever it takes? And I knew his bodyguard was outside the door... It was an out-of-body experience. I was lying down on the bed with him on top of me, naked. I was just there, my head on the pillow. There was no foreplay, and it was one position. Missionary. We kissed and his hard, darting tongue pushed in and out of my mouth. I thought, He's even a terrible kisser. I lay there as he fumbled his dick into me. I was surprised he didn't even mention a condom ... He wasn't aggressive, and I know for damn sure I could have outrun him if I tried, but I didn't."

It’s been 12 years almost to the day that another national politician sat as a defendant in another trial involving sex and hush money. John Edwards’ career was already tanked, over within months if not days of the news media learning he’d not only had an affair with a campaign consultant, but used campaign money to hide her and the child he fathered. 

Edwards would never run for office again. 

Defendant Donald is, by some polls, the leading candidate for President. 

It’s a measure of how far we’ve got into the realm of trashy, slapdash plot, that Defendant Donald’s core political supporters, the claque propping him up, are people who also adamantly support outlawing pornography and making heterosexual monogamy the core of American society (Project 2025). 

One of these supporters, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, stepped forward on the day before Stormy testified to reiterate his full support for Defendant Donald. “President Trump has done nothing wrong,” Johnson said on C-Span, adding that Congress would (not clear how) step in to save him. “It has to stop and you’re going to see the Congress address this in every possible way because we need accountability. All these cases need to be dropped because they are a threat to our entire system.” 

Johnson, the crazed Bible-belter, has even strapped on a high-tech purity/chastity belt to himself and his own teen son. Both he and his son are signed up to the Covenant Eyes porn surveillance app service. It scans “all the activity on your phone or your devices, your laptop, tablet, what have you … then it sends a report to your accountability partner,” Johnson told a group of Louisiana Baptists in 2022.  

“My accountability partner right now is Jack, my son,” he told the flock, flogging the app. “If anything objectionable comes up, your accountability partner gets an immediate notice… I’m proud to tell you my son has got a clean slate,” the lawmaker said in the talk. “It’s really sensitive, it’ll pick up almost anything, it looks for keywords, search terms, and also images, and it will send your accountability partner a blurred picture of the image.”

Coddled, aided, and abetted by hypocrites like Johnson who regard him as the sinful means to a godly end, Trump can’t believe he has to sit through this. Trump has been bleating rage constantly, at rallies and on social media posts, ripping into the judge and the legal system in a way that no defendant in America would not be jailed for. Yesterday was no exception. “I have just recently been told who the witness is today,” he posted before Daniel’s testimony. “This is unprecedented, no time for lawyers to prepare. No Judge has ever run a trial in such a biased and partisan way. He is CROOKED & HIGHLY CONFLICTED, even taking away my First Amendment Rights.”…

After deleting that, Trump showed up for the trial and read from a piece of paper to TV cameras. “We paid a lawyer expense payments. We didn't put it down as construction costs, the purchase of sheetrock, the electrical cost, the legal expense that we paid, we put [it] down as legal expense. There is nothing else you could say.”

Of course, there is a lot more to say, and one of those things is about the bravery of women like Stormy Daniels, always “underestimated” especially by rich oafs who travel with gold tweezers and lurk around luxury golf championships, women whose silence, coerced by physical threat or bought or, as in this case, both, is always taken for granted.