The Stormy Daniels Testimony Spotlights Trump’s Misogyny
Donald Trump has often loved to talk about his sexual prowess. He boasted to Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush about grabbing women’s crotches nonconsensually. He called the New York Post and begged them to run a headline bragging that Marla Maples, then his girlfriend and later his second wife, considered their relationship the “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had!” He bragged that he had so much sex that avoiding venereal diseases was “my personal Vietnam.”
But the former president is suddenly shy about sex this week. It’s the third week of his trial in Manhattan on charges that he falsified business records to cover up hush money paid to a woman who says she had sex with him. That woman is Stormy Daniels, a porn actor and director, and today she testified in the trial, much to Trump’s consternation.
[Quinta Jurecic: Trump’s misogyny is on trial in New York]
At the start of proceedings today, Trump’s lawyers fiercely objected to Daniels’s presence—particularly to the danger that she would divulge “any details” of sex between the two. Trump also angrily posted and then deleted a missive on Truth Social about Daniels testifying. (He denies that any sex occurred.) Daniels has indeed been nauseatingly graphic about the encounter in other forums, but a prosecutor assured Judge Juan Merchan that the witness would not describe any “genitalia.”
And she did not, though she did at one point describe the position in which she says they had sex. Trump’s lawyers, and sometimes Merchan of his own volition, repeatedly objected to prosecutors’ lines of questioning or to Daniels’s answers. The vibes were weird all around. Daniels had to be repeatedly asked to speak more slowly, by both the prosecutor and the judge. Reporters in the courtroom observed that Merchan seemed more on edge than at any other point in the trial so far.
What Daniels described was less graphic and less prurient but perhaps more repulsive and more revealing about Trump. My colleague Quinta Jurecic wrote at the outset of the case that the real subject of the trial was Trump’s misogyny, raising the question: “Is this really the kind of man you want to be your president?” The day’s testimony was a window into just what kind of man that is, one dripping with sexual entitlement and presumption.
[David A. Graham: Judge Merchan is out of good options]
Daniels recounted a dinner appointment with Trump in Lake Tahoe in 2006 that she thought was about either socializing or business; it dawned on her too late that the goal for him was sex.
One clear implication from Daniels’s testimony was that for Trump, this was nothing unusual. He simply expected that if a woman was around him, he was getting laid—not without consent, exactly, but not entirely with it, either. There was no conversation, Daniels testified: “I didn’t say anything at all.” After all, as Trump said in the Access Hollywood tape, “when you’re a star they let you do it.” In the same tape, he bitterly recalled hitting on another woman unsuccessfully. The failure rankled because it ran against his usual pattern.
The two met at a golf tournament. After an initial introduction, Trump’s bodyguard approached her and asked if she’d have dinner with Trump. She demurred, profanely, but came around because she wanted to get out of another obligation. Besides, her publicist asked her, “What could possibly go wrong?”
Daniels was directed to meet Trump in his penthouse room. This should have been the first sign of trouble: She said he met her wearing silk or satin pajamas that reminded her of Hugh Hefner. She asked him to get dressed in normal clothes, and he did.
[Read: The cases against Trump—a guide]
Their conversation over dinner sounds, bluntly, to be weird. Among the topics were how often Daniels was tested for STDs, and what protocols were for filming (her company always required condoms). In what maybe should have been another warning sign, they also talked about Trump’s sleeping arrangements with his third and current wife, Melania (Daniels said he said they didn’t even sleep in the same room).
At one point, Daniels scolded Trump. “Are you always this rude? Are you always this arrogant and pompous?” she asked. (No one would have to ask today.) “Like you don’t even know how to have a conversation.” But she also testified that unlike many other people, he seemed less interested in the salacious side of the porn business and more curious about the financials. “He was very interested in a lot of the business aspects of it, which I thought was very cool,” she said. “These were very thought-out business questions."
Eventually, Daniels was ready to head out and went to the bathroom. But when she emerged, she found Trump on the bed, in a t-shirt and boxers. He was between her and the door. She moved to leave, but he blocked her—not in a threatening manner, she said, though she also noted that he was larger than her and she was aware of the power dynamic. The next thing she knew, they were having sex.
[Sophie Gilbert: Four more years of unchecked misogyny]
Trump had gotten what he wanted. The two kept in touch for years, with him repeatedly dangling but never delivering on the prospect of Daniels appearing on The Apprentice. She said he never asked her to keep quiet about their hook-up, though she also didn’t discuss it widely, she said, because she was ashamed. It was only later, as Trump was running for president in 2016, that her hush-money deal was arranged.
Last year, my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote that a second Trump presidency would produce four years of unchecked misogyny. “I don’t believe Donald Trump hates women. Not by default, anyway,” she wrote. “The misogyny that Trump embodies and champions is less about loathing than enforcement: underscoring his requirement that women look and behave a certain way, that we comply with his desires and submit to our required social function.” Daniels’s account of her encounter with him showed exactly how that can work. It’s not that Trump bore any malice toward Daniels (that came later); it’s that she mattered to him only as a vehicle to sex.
By now, Trump has gotten a great deal more than he expected or wanted that day in his Tahoe penthouse. Following a lunch break today, his attorneys argued for a mistrial on the basis of Daniels’s answers. Merchan refused but said several times that some things that came up would have been “better left unsaid.” The newly demure defendant would surely agree.