At heart, the former adult film star obviously has her acting and knows how to hit where it hurts the most.
Stormy Daniels’ witness stand in a Manhattan courtroom this week brought us back to the symbol of Trump’s new female antagonist, E Jean Carroll, the consulting columnist who sued Trump for sexual assault, victorious in front of another courtroom in January. unlike Carroll, he is not the plaintiff in this case. Still, Trump’s fate depends, in large part, on his credibility, a 45-year-old former porn star whom the New York Times described this week as “a confusing witness. “”If Carroll — elegant, measured, eloquent — was the ideal victim, Daniels is almost the archetype of the woman that legal systems tend to vilify. And yet, from his initial testimony, it turns out to me to be Trump’s worst nightmare. .
This impression is extrajudicial. Daniels, who has already been reprimanded by the sentencing for straying from the subject, may turn out to be too capricious a witness to realize what Carroll did: the equivalent in a civil case of a guilty verdict as opposed to a max guy. supernaturally able to avoid them. Beyond verdicts and public image, however, Daniels is, in some tactics, Trump’s most menacing foe. The main points of his testimony also can’t be retrieved this week, prompting court reporters to scramble to locate sober tactics to give Trump his whipping narrative with a rolled-up magazine and insisting on having sex with it without a condom. This is a woman willing to meet Trump in his favorite confrontational position (public humiliation) and, based on the evidence so far, can’t take it well.
Last year, at Carroll’s hearing, the former president didn’t stick to the popular function of mocking, smiling and mocking that he reserves for female critics, whether they’re accusing him of rape or running against him for president. This week’s court accounts suggest that this character didn’t fit Daniels. The Associated Press reported that Trump “squirmed and frowned” at Daniels’ testimony. The Washington Post recorded him “muttering with anger and profanity,” earning Trump his own rebuke from the judge. “I sense that your consumer is upset, but he is swearing loudly,” Judge Merchan told Trump’s lawyers. Annoying! What a stormy one.
As in the men’s episodes involving Trump, this is a dramatic reversal of cultural norms. Women like Daniels have a tendency to not thrive in court, where indiscipline that might be considered vain in a man is more likely to be interpreted in women. as a synonym for garbage. None of that applies here. We knew from Daniels that deep down she had Trump’s number and knew how to hit him where it hurt the most. If the narrative he built around Carroll’s accusation was the typical “too ugly to rape” defense, it probably wouldn’t work with Daniels: 30 years. his minor and a self-confident sex operator who happened to decide to paint Trump as a pathetic little guy. While they were having sex, she said Tuesday, she recalled “trying to think of anything other than what was going on. “”
The question remains, but still, what was the magazine with which she would have whipped him (was it The Economist?Or, as all Britons of a certain age thought without delay, a Woguy’s Weekly?Was it, with dramatic and charming irony, a copy of the Enquirer?), how will it land among its followers?Trump has long capitalized on the concept that he’s the kind of sex abuser who “grabs your pussy” and might enjoy having sex with a porn star. Until now, we’ve never heard of the other aspect, and Daniels’ description of a man supposedly more interested in asking her about STD testing and whether sex staff are unionized, rather than having real sex, replaces her swaggering self-image with a difficult, alternative castrated image. If Trump destroys women by reducing them to sexist tropes, Daniels responds in precisely the same way.
This maneuver, as Trump’s lawyers pointed out in requesting a mistrial (which was denied), has nothing to do with the facts of the case, which depend on whether or not Trump paid Daniels $130,000 (£104,000) in secret cash in the race. until the 2016 election, and then covered it up by falsifying business records. Trump and his team know what Daniels is doing, which is categorical, lewd and incredibly detailed, mocking him in front of the world. This, they argued, is unfair. It’s under the belt. This is certainly a technique borrowed from Trump’s own playbook.