The spectacle of Stormy Daniels on the witness stand in a Manhattan courtroom this week sent one back to the image of Trump’s last female antagonist, E Jean Carroll, the advice columnist who famously sued Trump for sexually assaulting her, standing victorious outside another courtroom in January. Daniels, unlike Carroll, is not the plaintiff in this case. Nonetheless, Trump’s fortunes rest, to a large degree, on her credibility, a 45-year-old former porn star who the New York Times described this week as “a complicated and imperfect witness”. If Carroll – elegant, measured, articulate – was the perfect victim, Daniels is practically the archetype of the woman court systems tend to revile. And yet, on the strength of her opening testimony, she strikes me as Trump’s very worst nightmare.
This impression is extrajudicial. Daniels, who has already been rebuked by the judge for straying off topic, may prove too wayward a witness to achieve what Carroll did: the civil case equivalent of a guilty verdict against a man almost supernaturally able to avoid them. If we are looking beyond verdicts to the public image, however, Daniels is in some ways by far the more menacing foe for Trump. You couldn’t make up the details of her testimony this week, which sent court reporters scrambling to find sober ways to present her account of spanking Trump with a rolled up magazine and insisting on having sex with her without a condom. This is a woman willing to meet Trump at his preferred site of conflict – public humiliation – and on the evidence so far, he isn’t weathering it well.
Last year, during the Carroll hearing, the former president defaulted to the standard tittering, smirking, mocking performance he reserves for critical women – be they accusing him of rape or running against him for president. Accounts from the courtroom this week suggest this persona was no match for Daniels. The Associated Press reported that Trump “squirmed and scowled” during Daniels’ testimony. The Washington Post recorded him in the act of “angry, profane muttering”, which won Trump his own rebuke from the judge. “I understand your client is upset but he is cursing audibly,” said Judge Merchan to Trump’s lawyers. Upset! Go Stormy.
As with so many episodes involving Trump, this is a spectacular reversal of cultural norms. Women like Daniels tend not to prosper in court, where unruliness that might be considered rakish in a man is more likely to be read in women as a byword for trash. None of that quite applies here. One has always understood about Daniels that, at some deep level, she has Trump’s number and knows how to hit him where it hurts. If the narrative he constructed around the Carroll accusation was the classic too-ugly-to-rape defence, this won’t work with Daniels – 30 years his junior and a confident sexual operator who appears hellbent on depicting Trump as a pathetic little man. While they were having sex, she said on Tuesday, she recalled, “trying to think of anything other than what was happening”.
The lingering question, apart from what the magazine she allegedly spanked him with was (was it the Economist? Or, as all British people over a certain age immediately thought, a Woman’s Weekly? Was it, in a pleasing dramatic irony, a copy of the Enquirer?), is how will this land with his supporters? Trump has long capitalised on the idea that he is the kind of “pussy-grabbing” sexual aggressor who might enjoy sex with a porn star. Until now, we have never heard from the other side – and Daniels’ description of him as a man allegedly more interested in quizzing her on STD testing and whether sex workers are unionised, rather than actually having sex, replaces his swaggering self-image with a fussy, emasculated alternative. If Trump destroys women by reducing them to sexist tropes, Daniels has come back at him with exactly the same.
This manoeuvre, as Trump’s lawyers pointed out while asking for a mistrial (it was denied), has nothing to do with the facts of the case, which hinges on whether or not Trump paid Daniels $130,000 (£104,000) in hush money in the run up to the 2016 election, and then covered it up by falsifying business records. Trump and his team know what Daniels is doing – which is flatly, salaciously and in incredible detail – making an absolute mockery of him in front of the world. It is, they have argued, unfair. It is below the belt. It is unmistakably, compellingly, and as it may turn out, successfully, an approach borrowed from Trump’s own playbook.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
