Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The forecast today calls for more Stormy weather
Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.
We begin today with Dana Milbank of The Washington Post lauding the ability of Stormy Daniels to give the shoe salesman a taste of his own medicine.
For nearly a decade, Trump has been the nation’s main chaos agent: He causes the mayhem, and the rest of us have to react, adjust, adapt and try to stay calm. But for one day, somebody else was causing the chaos, and Trump and his lawyers were the ones who had to react and adapt. They had to ride out Stormy’s storm.
She was a worthy adversary. Daniels attacked her target with the very blend of vulgar accusations and insinuations without evidence that Trump routinely uses on others. In effect, she pulled a Trump on Trump. She was furious, out of control and uninhibited by what even prosecutor Susan Hoffinger, out of the jury’s hearing, referred to as her witness’s “credibility issues.” Trump, glowering from the defense table, tasted his own bitter medicine. [...]
Trump’s lawyers howled about how unfair it was to see their client, a once and perhaps future president, treated so rudely. “We are talking about somebody who’s going to go out and campaign this afternoon,” Todd Blanche said in arguing for a mistrial because of the “extraordinarily prejudicial” testimony intended only “to embarrass” his client and “to inflame the jury.”
Imagine somebody saying things only to embarrass and inflame!
I agree with Milbanks’s overall take that Ms. Daniels was able to give Trump a taste of his own medicine. However, Milbanks also makes Daniels delivery of her testimony sound, in a word, “hysterical” in a way that sounds misogynistic and inconsistent with other times that Daniels has told her story of her encounter with Trump.
Besides, as MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace pointed out repeatedly on her show yesterday, it’s likely that Trump paid $130,000 to keep those “vulgar accusations and insinuations” quiet; he’s too cheap for that, generally, the evidence shows.