Stormy Daniels testimony was lurid and powerful – but Trump voters don’t care | Donald Trump trials
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Stormi Daniels may have found sex with Donald Trump short, unimaginative and regrettable, but porn star captivated the nation with a salacious and lengthy retelling of the encounter in a New York court this week.
Daniels’ damning testimony in Trump’s fraud trial infuriated the former president, who watched from a few feet away. But her account only confirmed what most Americans already knew about a man considered a sexual predator and seems unlikely to change many votes in November’s presidential election.
New York State prosecuted Trump for fraud for using his business, the Trump Organization, to pay Daniels $130,000 in hush money days before the 2016 election. She did go public two years later with the book “Full revelation,” in which she claims she once had sex with Trump.
The former US president continues to deny the meeting, but polls show most Republicans believe he is lying. They don’t care either.
Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said many Trump voters may have been consumed by unusually grim testimony about a fraud trial, but he doubted it would make much of a difference in the outcome of a Trump-Biden runoff.
“When the details of Stormy Daniels finally came out during the Trump presidency, people just instinctively knew it was true. Just like people knew instinctively that Bill Clinton was fooling himself because he had done it so many times before. People are not stupid. But in this age it doesn’t matter much. Twenty years ago, Trump wouldn’t even have been the Republican nominee. Now it’s not moving the needle at all,” he said.
Daniels spent more than seven hours on the witness stand describing her meeting with Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe in 2006. She was a hostess at a hospitality tent operated by the pornographic film company Wicked Pictures.
Trump, who was 60 at the time and had a newborn son with his wife of less than a year, invited Daniels, who was 27, to dinner. She went ahead on the advice of her publicist, who said: “What could possibly go wrong?”
Daniels told the court how she went to meet Trump at his penthouse, expecting to go to a restaurant, only to find him in satin pyjamas. She said her evening went from playfully slapping a magazine with Trump’s face on the cover to her alarm when she found him sprawled out in bed, stripped down to his underwear.
Daniels said he then forced her to have sex.
“I was staring at the ceiling and wondering how I got there,” she told the jury.
The judge stopped Daniels’ rapid-fire testimony at times, telling her that jurors should not know that the couple had sex in a missionary position with Daniels holding her bra, or that Trump did not use a condom. But by then they had heard it, and, like almost everyone else at court and throughout the country, were unlikely to forget it.
Daniels said the sex “was short,” though it apparently wasn’t short enough.
“I was ashamed that I didn’t stop him, that I didn’t say no,” she said.
All but the president’s staunchest supporters are likely to recoil at Daniels’ account that during all of this Trump told her she reminded him of his daughter Ivanka.
That night, late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel joked, “I feel like we should shut it down just for that,” to applause from the audience.
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Daniels’ testimony also overshadowed mundane but more relevant evidence about the mechanics of the alleged fraud, even though the prosecution’s key witness, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, has yet to testify. Cohen handled paying Daniels to buy her silence and already did served 13 months in prison after pleading guilty to tax evasion and violating campaign finance laws in the deal.
Still, Sabato is skeptical that even evidence that Trump stole from his own company will do much for his support.
“The group of American voters who cared deeply about such issues and who put Bill Clinton through the wringer are white evangelical Christians. And now we have the orange Jesus in their view. They have long since excused Trump for everything,” he said.
Instead, the trial only reinforced the view among many Trump supporters that he is the victim of a conspiracy in power. Eight in ten Trump voters believe the fraud investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg was rigged to frame the former president.
Rick Scott, a Republican senator, appeared in court Thursday to argue that Trump is being persecuted only because he is running for the White House again, calling the process “purely political persecution.”
The verdict in the case may be another matter. Ann ABC News/Ipsos poll this month showed that while 80% of Trump supporters would support him if he were convicted of a crime, 16% would reconsider their support and 4% would move away from the former president.
Given the thin margins by which swing states are decided in presidential elections, Sabato said that could prove enough to sink Trump’s bid for another term in the White House.
On the other hand, it appears increasingly unlikely that the former president will be tried before the election on the multiple charges — ranging from the misuse of classified documents to his role in the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 — that he faces in Florida, Georgia and Washington DC.
“What Trump did in the dossier case is absolutely outrageous, but people don’t care,” Sabato said. “The only one that would have an impact is the case of January 6, because people don’t fully understand that this is an attempted coup d’état. You have enough focus on that in the process and then you take one or 2% off Trump that could probably decide the election. But now it won’t take place until November, so he slipped away.
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