The Emperor Had Very Few Clothes

At the hush-money trial of former President Donald Trump in Manhattan, Stormy Daniels’ story is, in a sense, a proxy battle for the actual debate about bookkeeping: If you believe Daniels’ accounting of the affair she alleges they had, then you must find Trump—who denies any such encounter—unbelievable. If you don’t believe Daniels, then it becomes much easier to accept the defense narrative that this is all one big con.

The sexual encounter that Daniels described in precise and disturbing detail under oath this week is technically irrelevant to the questions at hand. But she is the hook for the story that no one can ignore. And with no television cameras allowed inside, people will go to great lengths to hear her out. In the courthouse, I met a man who’d shown up at 3:30 a.m. just to snag a seat in the overflow room. “It’s Stormy,” he explained. He didn’t need to say anything else.

Daniels is the star. So at Thursday’s cross-examination, the defense set out to destroy her. Susan Necheles, who is also representing Trump in two federal cases, handled the task. She spent a long time trying to get Daniels to say that her motivation for telling her story publicly was born from personal malice toward the president because of political beliefs, and a desire to make as much money as she could. Daniels’ various money-making ventures during the Trump years, we heard, included a role on the reality TV show Surreal Life and a national tour in which she appeared at strip clubs, which Necheles insisted on calling the “Making America Horny Again” tour as many times as possible. (Daniels insisted that wasn’t her slogan—and just “what a club in North Carolina called it.”)

Various exhibits that followed detailed Daniels’ merchandise deals. It was a cornucopia of bad Yankee Swap gifts: there was a comic book, Stormy Daniels Political Power; a black-and-purple #TeamStormy t-shirt; and a “Stormy Saint of Indictments” candle, which sold for $40 but which Daniels said she only received $7 per item on.

“You’re celebrating the indictment by selling things from your store,” Necheles said.

“Not unlike Mr. Trump.” Daniels replied.

“You’re selling your own things,” Nechelis continued.

“I’m not gonna sell anybody else’s things.”

“You’re bragging about getting Trump indicted,” Nechelis said again.

“I got President Trump indicted?” Daniels responded.

It went on like this for a while—the attorney for a man who sold steaks at the Sharper Image attempting to undercut another person’s credibility by asking if there was anything she wouldn’t attach her name to for a price. But in the process of trying to tear Daniels down, Trump’s team also managed to humanize her, by highlighting the demeaning language and threats Daniels had been subjected to for speaking out. At one point, in an attempt to show that Daniels was taking credit for Trump’s legal troubles, the defense pulled up a tweet from late March in which she referred to herself as “the best person to flush the orange turd down”:

Exactly! Making me the best person to flush the orange turd down https://t.co/jYZTm2SOfK

— Stormy Daniels (@StormyDaniels) March 27, 2024

Daniels noted that she was merely responding to someone who had called her “THE HUMAN TOILET.”

“So when you’re saying you were the best person to flush the orange turd down,” Necheles asked, “you weren’t referring to Trump?

“If someone’s gonna call me a toilet then I can say I can flush somebody!” Daniels said. 

It wasn’t the most convincing denial, strictly speaking—of course the “orange turd” was Trump.  But exchanges like that also offered a glimpse of Daniels’ vulnerability. It sucks to find yourself on the receiving end of threats and taunts. She sounded tired of dealing with the abuse. 

“I’m also not a toilet,” Daniels repeated, a bit later. “I’m not a human toilet.”

Trump, faced with the prospect of jail time for future violations of a gag order, sat quietly, sometimes with his eyes closed, through all of this. But it was a narrative he would have recognized because it amounted to a variation of the story Trump and people like him always roll with—she was just a crazy, money-grubbing you-know-what.

The defense’s line of questioning got more personal as the morning went on. At one point, Necheles honed in on Daniels’ life in New Orleans, where she recently moved into a 19th-century home in the Garden District that, she previously claimed, was possessed by a “very dark non-human thing with tentacles.” Daniels was making money, Necheles suggested, “by telling people that you have the ability to communicate with ghosts and dead people.” Daniels confirmed that she does Tarot card readings and recently collaborated with a team of paranormal investigators.

“You also claimed that you lived in a house in New Orleans that was haunted,” and that “ghosts attacked your boyfriend,” she said.

It was the cross-examination, not the witness, that lacked coherence.

Daniels acknowledged that the house had “a lot of interesting and unexplained activity,” but went on to tell the court that “a lot of the activity was completely debunked as a giant possum that was under the house.” 

Necheles kept pushing, though, in a way that went beyond the charges of being opportunistic. 

“Isn’t it a fact that you were the one who attacked your boyfriend?”

Objection. Sustained.

“Didn’t your boyfriend question your sanity?”

Objection. Sustained.

You could be forgiven at times for thinking that you tuned into the wrong trial. Necheles even found an odd way to suggest that Daniels’ career making “sex films”—in case anyone needed the reminder—was somehow indicative of a natural liar. 

“You have a lot of experience in making phony stories about sex appear to be real, right?” Necheles probed.

“Wow, that’s not how I would put it,” Daniels responded. “The sex in those stories is very much real—just like in that room,” she said, referring to her fling with Trump.

Nacheles kept going, suggesting that Daniels was skilled at writing and memorizing dialogue, and could therefore have fabricated such an episode.

“If that story was untrue I would have written it to be a lot better,” Daniels replied.

Necheles was, on some level, just doing the kinds of things that defense attorneys do—attacking a star witness from every conceivable angle. But the sum of this barrage was reversed: It was the cross-examination, not the witness, that lacked coherence. Trump’s insistence on denying the affair is a weight they can’t shake.

And the former president has fired enough attorneys (another ex-attorney, Michael Cohen, was set to testify later in the week) that his team must always keep his vanity in mind. At one point, Necheles asked Daniels to confirm that Trump had, in fact, played very well at the golf tournament where they met. It was hard to think that such a question was truly aimed at the people seated in the jury box.

The big problem for the Trump team’s efforts to expose Daniels as a fabulist is that her story is pretty consistent. One of the most striking things about the cross-examination was how small it felt. At one point, Necheles and Daniels spent roughly 20 minutes debating the meaning of the word “dinner.” In interviews, testimony, and published accounts, Daniels has repeatedly stated that Trump invited her to have “dinner” but that she never actually got any food. But in a 2011 interview with InTouch Weekly, Daniels was quoted as saying that they had dinner, with no suggestion that food was not in the offing.

This was treated like a smoking gun. The story had changed, because it was all made up to begin with, Necheles alleged. Daniels maintained that it was nothing of the sort: Just because the interview did not explicitly mention that she was starving did not mean that they, in fact, ate. She went to dinner, but the food never came. The absence of an absence did not imply a presence. We were heading into deep philosophical grounds.

Again and again, Necheles returned to this age-old and unanswerable question: Is testimony delivered under oath during lengthy examination and cross-examination more or less reliable than quotes supplied, with the help of a publicist, to InTouch Weekly? Daniels seemed a little confused at why the defense kept harping on edited quotes in a supermarket tabloid.

“This is an entertainment magazine—it is very short and frivolous!” Daniels said.

Later, during redirect, when Necheles lodged yet another objection, Daniels let out an audible sigh and snuck in what seemed like one final dig.

“I’m so hungry,” she said.

Daniels was compelling and at times riveting. The Trump team would say she was acting. I think it’s a bit fairer to say that she was performing; surely they know a showman when they see one. But as I watched the Stormy Show on Thursday, it was hard not to think about how small the stage for this dramatic testimony was—and how differently this story might be playing out if the trial was on TV.  

Unlike his two impeachments and the January 6th hearings, most people will have to resort to secondhand accounts of the case, because New York is one of just two states that completely bar video in the courtroom. If you wanted to see the first criminal trial of an ex-president in American history as a private citizen, you had to physically get yourself to Lower Manhattan before dawn and stand a few feet away from some guy holding a puppet. Even then, you would most likely watch the whole thing from the overflow room—an otherwise empty courtroom with three not-big-enough screens; the real pros bring binoculars. Photography, video, and audio recording are strictly prohibited. Four cops patrolled on foot—and I mean really patrolled it, pacing around the aisles to make sure no one was surreptitiously breaking the rules.

There is a weird irony to all of this. Trump is the ultimate tabloid creation and this is the ultimate tabloid trial—the most camera-ready of all the cases against him. With Daniels there to guide you, the trial moves beyond the paperwork and gets at the tawdry essence of the man: a sleazy mogul unbound by the rules, who dangles his power before others to get what he wants. 

On a different timeline, Daniels’ testimony would be playing on loop on MSNBC and CNN. (You would probably never hear the end of the phrase “I am not a toilet.”) The fact that a major party nominee’s criminal trial is happening behind closed doors, and on closely guarded screens, is a quietly world-altering occurrence. Trump, who’s never met a rule he’s not comfortable blowing past, is being saved once more by an outdated set of norms.

Correction, May 10: An earlier version of this story misstated the gender breakdown of Trump’s legal team.