Stormy Days
Today is the second day of the Stormy Daniels testimony in the Donald Trump falsification of business records case in Manhattan. Everyone is debating the importance of the Stormy Daniel testimony to the Trump case. We have all heard ad nauseam that it matters not whether anyone believes the sexual encounter actually occurred in 2006 between Trump and Stormy (my rhetorical question is, who among us does NOT believe that it did happen?), and yet Stormy has been asked to describe the encounter and did so in a degree of detail that has created yet again more debate about its advisability. She is now being cross examined about just about everything she has said and done over the past decade. She was just now asked if when called a “toilet” by some social media troll, she referred to Trump as an orange turd. All very highbrow stuff.
Some people including the New York Times have called Stormy’s testimony is a “linchpin” of the trial, which seems wholly inconsistent with the broader view that this is a documents case which hinges on the manner in which Trump and his minions falsified documentation of the $130,000 hush money payment to Stormy with the intent to commit a felony by contravening state and Federal election law. There certainly is a need for the prosecution to establish that the reason Trump made the payment at all was his attempt to influence the election. That was certainly well established by the David Pecker and Keith Davidson testimony and yet the prosecution still felt that it was important for the jury to hear from Stormy, presumably to bring to life the salacious nature of the encounter and the damaging nature of potential release of that story in the pre-election 2016 environment. Naturally, the defense on cross examination is doing everything they can to throw into question her character and her credibility, but for the life of me, I can’t understand how it really benefits justice. I know that the defense wants to do anything to get one juror to think there is some doubt that Trump did what he is accused of doing in terms of making and concealing those payments to Stormy and that he did so to improve his electoral prospects. The point I don’t see is the benefit of impugning a person like Stormy who has spent a life on the seedier side of the tracks (there is little to contest that point given her work in the adult film industry). In addition, it seems to me that any character assassination of Stormy should rub off on Trump since he very clearly had some form of relationship with Stormy and had a few nice photos taken of the two and she ended up in Trump’s Rolodex. Shouldn’t the public be offended that their President associated with people of low character?
Having spent a lifetime on Wall Street and have, unfortunately, interacted with many smarmy characters. I am not proud to have worked with a convicted felon during my years at Bankers Trust, a man who when he got into the job I vacated in favor of him, tried to defraud the people of the state of New York by channeling what should have been public funds to his businesses to make himself look good. I was not proud to have almost entered into a deal with a high profile Forbes 400 guy who was convicted of defrauding a client (I had to testify against him in court). I was not proud to have given VC funding to a 23-year-old kid who was convicted of embezzlement. I was not proud to have worked for a CEO who was as evil as any person I have ever met. I was not proud to have worked for another man who was the original blood diamond merchant and who has been put on the OFAC list by the U.S. Treasury and sanctioned as a friend of Putin. And I have not been proud to have been friends with another convicted felon who I visited in the Federal penitentiary. In other words, I too have rubbed up against many people who would be characterized as smarmy. But then again, I am not running for or serving as the president the the United States.
While there has undoubtedly been sexual dalliances by people occupying the White House since the nation began, they have usually only come out as suspicions long after the fact and usually after the respective term of office. Starting with Bill Clinton, the sexual encounters and scandals have become contemporaneous and publicized in a manner to unseat the president. I recall feeling that I didn’t particularly care if Clinton had consensual sex with an intern even though they had vastly different power status. In life, status mismatches occur in every way, shape and form. There are plenty of magnificently beautiful women who have a sexual power advantage over men and I’m not sure anyone would accuse them of something dastardly in parlaying that into a sexual encounter. What bothered me a great deal about the Clinton scandal was that he chose to lie directly about it all to the American public. To me, that made it unforgivable. Do I care that Trump had extramarital affairs before he was president? Not really. Do I feel if unveiled it should derail his candidacy? That is totally up to the electorate to decide. Some people will consider it a breach of a character standards that matters to them, others (like me) won’t care about that. What does matter to me is any efforts to obscure or hide that fact in an illegal manner such as by making a hush money payment that gets misreported so as to protect your campaign image.
We are not the first country to have politicians caught in sexual or even criminal activities and scandals. The U.K. and Italy, to name just a few, seem to go through this every few years. So, I’m not so sure that I am so terribly embarrassed as an American to see this dirty national linen getting aired. I understand the need for the public to get some salacious enjoyment in powerful people’s transgressions and for some journalists to want to exploit all of that. That all strikes me as somewhat of fair game. What is not to be expected is a president feeling that he is above the law and that he can breach any laws he wants in pursuit of his political ambitions and bamboozle the electorate. What I see is a man who spent years cutting legal corners as a businessman and more or less getting away with it most of the time. He was further bolstered in this belief of his immunity by a corrupt lawyer like Roy Cohn who taught him to ratchet up his game by doubling down on any and all of his misdeeds and lies. And the more this worked, the more his behavior and the outcomes reinforced this modus operandi. Then he found that lying in the business world was not so different from lying on the campaign trail, and then in the White House and then after the White House once he realized that his popularity eclipsed his formal political term of office.
I know we like to call this the Stormy Daniels Hush Money trial, but to me the stormiest part of the whole affair is the shame that what would have been the proverbial “nail in the coffin” in 2016 is just a forgone conclusion and a prurient sideshow in 2024. If that isn’t an indicator of the stormy days ahead of us in 2024, I’m not sure what does.