We all know that Trump is nothing more than projection. He says that everything, from his legal problems to the 2020 election is rigged. Guess what? He rigged The Apprentice:
The conversation turned to “The Apprentice,” Daniels remembered. Trump told her that she should be a contestant, to which she replied: “There’s no way that NBC would allow an adult actress on television.”
“He said, ‘You remind me of my daughter, she’s smart and beautiful and people underestimate her as well,'” Daniels said. She added that Trump offered to tell her what the show’s challenges were ahead of time: “I can’t have you win … but you can at least make a good showing.”
It was reality TV, which means it was scripted. He’s always lied and said it wasn’t.
Stormy Daniels just testified that Trump showed her a photo of Melania, and when Stormy said she's beautiful, Trump responded: "We don’t even sleep in the same room." pic.twitter.com/QOyCEzFe2K
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) May 7, 2024
The trial was pretty banal this morning, even though important:
How do you prove a defendant caused others to make false business records where those with direct knowledge of his intent and involvement are limited to the defendant, a man now in jail for perjury, and Michael Cohen?
You surround Michael Cohen’s expected testimony with a mountain of circumstantial evidence, an already substantial pile to which prosecutors just added excerpts from Trump’s books How to Get Rich and Think Like a Billionaire.
Those excerpts reveal Trump as a micromanager who advised never taking one’s eyes off his checkbook, advertised he negotiated the price of everything “down to the paper clips,” trusted Weisselberg wholly, and boasted that he even loved signing checks.
And best of all for the prosecutors? They are Trump’s own easy-to-digest, New York Times-bestselling words, perhaps amplified or made snappier by his ghostwriter, Meredith McIver, but nonetheless his.
He has said many times that he liked to sign checks because that was how he kept tabs on what was being spent. Apparently, he kept doing it while he was in the White House.
Within 15 minutes of her testimony beginning, Daniels had guided the jury to the hotel suite in Lake Tahoe where she has said she and Trump had sex. “Does Mr. Hefner know you stole his pajamas?” she recalled asking Trump after seeing his silk sleepwear. He peppered her with questions, she said, about her job—about unions, residuals, and STD testing—which she thought was “very cool.” But he kept cutting her off, and she asked him, “Are you always this rude?”
Daniels said she had come to the suite for dinner and didn’t realize that Trump intended to sleep with her. It concerned her that he didn’t wear a condom, she testified, but she didn’t mention it, because “I didn’t say anything at all.” She testified that it was dark out by the time she left the suite, and her hands were shaking as she tried to put her gold, strappy heels on. Daniels has always said the sex was consensual but awkward and, for her part, reluctant. When she was asked on the stand why she didn’t say no to Trump, she repeated, “I didn’t say anything at all.”
At the defense table, Trump stared straight ahead.
The trial, in these first few weeks, has flitted between the dry details of financial records and the intrigue surrounding a historic sex scandal. Before Daniels testified, with the pendulum set to swing back toward her side of the matter, Trump’s attorney Susan Necheles argued to the judge that “this case is a case about books and records” and sought to limit the details of the alleged tryst that would be admissible.
Merchan seemed to understand. “We don’t need to know the details of the intercourse,” he said. After Daniels began testifying, he seemed frustrated when she went beyond the confines of the questions asked of her, reminding her a few times not to elaborate unprompted. The condom detail, for instance, was one that led Trump’s lawyers to call for a mistrial, a request that Merchan did not grant.
They were also upset that Daniels had told the story that she was threatened in a parking lot saying that it was prejudicial. The judge said he was surprised they didn’t object at the time and that he would have the jury disregard it. Hookay.
Necheles was tough on Daniels, painting her as a liar and extortionist. Having been warned by the prosecution to keep her answers short, she denied it all. A taste:
During a fiery cross-examination in the New York hush-money trial, porn star Stormy Daniels fought back against a defense lawyer’s accusations that she has a vendetta against Donald Trump.
“Am I correct that you hate President Trump?” defense lawyer Susan Necheles demanded early in Tuesday afternoon’s questioning.
Daniels looked directly at Necheles, her voice crisp as she answered.
“Correct,” Daniels said.
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“And you want him to go to jail?” Necheles pursued.
“If he’s found guilty, yes,” Daniels snapped back.
The tense exchange came after nearly four hours of direct testimony, in which Daniels described the one-night-stand she says she had with the then-Apprentice star in 2006.
Necheles raised her voice as she confronted Daniels with a tweet in which Daniels called Trump an “orange turd”— and about a nearly half-billion dollars in legal fees she owes after unsuccessfully suing Trump for defamation.
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“You didn’t take any money out of your pocket to pay President Trump did you?” the lawyer asked, referring to more than $500,000 in legal fees Daniels owes Trump after losing the federal court case.
“You’re choosing not to pay President Trump?” the lawyer demanded. “You have said publicly you’re not going to pay President Trump?”
Daniels was asked about her tweets from 2022, in which the porn star said she’d go to jail before paying Trump. In one tweet, Daniels had vowed, “I’ll never give that orange turd a dime.”
“You call him names all the time!” Necheles shouted, in what was more an accusation than a question.
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“Yes,” Daniels answered quickly. “Because he made fun of me first.”
“So one of you started it, but you continue it?” Necheles asked, her voice still loud.
“Correct,” Daniels answered defiantly.
At another point, Necheles accused Daniels of cashing in on a false “claim” of sex.
“You’ve been making money by claiming you had sex with Mr. Trump for more than a decade, right?” the lawyer asked.
“I’ve been making money by telling my story about what happened to me,” Daniels answered.
“And that story has made you a lot of money, right?” Necheles demanded.
“It has also cost me a lot of money,” Daniels answered.
There was more of this and it will continue on Thursday. What a day.
I think the prosecution elicited all this detail about the sexual encounter as a way to build Daniels’ credibility when the defense tries to say that she made the whole thing up to extort poor innocent Donald Trump who would never have done such a thing. (That seems to be his position anyway.) But there’s been so much testimony about how concerned they were about the women coming forward during the campaign (and McDougal may yet take the stand as well) that his protestations aren’t going to hold much water on that. And Stormy had a lot of details, even saying that she kept her bra on and they were in “missionary” and she was staring at the ceiling asking herself how she had so misread the situation. Those details are important.
This is how Stormy Daniels recalled her sexual encounter with Donald Trump in 2023, speaking to me for @NYMag: pic.twitter.com/HjZe9UNFkP
Several members of the general public who on Tuesday attended one of the most intense days of testimony in Donald J. Trump’s trial described the proceedings as riveting, and said they found the star witness, Stormy Daniels, to be credible.
“Just an authentic individual,” Hamilton Clancy, 61, an actor who lives on the Upper West Side, said on Tuesday about Ms. Daniels. He was among the people who lined up early for a coveted seat in the courtroom, which was otherwise packed with journalists.
Mr. Clancy said that in addition to Ms. Daniels’s believability, he was surprised and impressed with Justice Juan M. Merchan’s calm demeanor.
“He was so low-key, so even-keeled,” Mr. Clancy said. “You see how fair the guy is.”
Mr. Clancy and his spouse, Karen Kitz-Clancy, arrived in line at 5:20 a.m. for their seats in the overflow courtroom. It is Ms. Kitz-Clancy‘s 63rd birthday, and this is how she wanted to spend it.
“It was absolutely thrilling,” she said. “We were in the room where it happens.”
Also in the overflow room was Seth Slade, 59, a paralegal who lives in Woodside, Queens.
“I thought she’s a compelling witness,” he said of Ms. Daniels. “It seemed like the judge wanted to move it along.”
Johnson: President Trump has done nothing wrong… it has to stop and you’re going to see the Congress address this in every possible way because we need accountability. All these cases need to be dropped because they are a threat to our entire system pic.twitter.com/Vvg6pQRU52
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, expert on authoritarianism, succinctly analyses what statement and I think it’s right on:
This as yet another loyalty performance for an audience of One, who is addressed as though he is still the head of state. We are also dwelling in the “upside-down world” of authoritarianism, as I call it. “Accountability” means stopping investigations into abuse of power, and “a threat to our entire system” = a threat to Republican plans to convert America to an autocracy under Trump’s lead. That’s the most telling phrase.
This is what it’s all about. The “you can believe me or you can believe your eyes” and “I know you are but what am I” and the rest of these crude descriptions of the intensely frustrating inversion of reality in which these people live is all in service of authoritarianism. Trump isn’t an intellectual or an academic and neither are most of his followers. They are authoritarians who are simply following their own instincts.
It’s not uncommon among our species. It’s just that the American system of government was supposed to be a structural impediment to permitting it as a form of government, which is not to say that it has succeeded in the past. (Uhm… slavery, Jim Crow, internment etc.) But this is different because they are using these openly dictatorial tactics to shut down dissent and brainwash half the country into believing that up is down and black is white.
I would guess that nobody is more surprised than Donald Trump that his lies were so easily believed by massive numbers of Americans. But he knows it now and he will use it. He is a sociopathic narcissist and nothing will stop him once he obtains presidential power again. I just hope some of these sycophants like Mike Johnson, who isn’t as stupid as Trump, understand that in order to demonstrate power, dictators often sacrifice loyalists just to show they can. Some of the biggest MAGA bootlickers are going to find themselves thrown to the wolves, just wait and see.
As you hear all about Trump’s encounter with Stormy Daniels, get a load of this:
Former Trump aide John McEntee promised a ban on pornography was coming in the United States in a recent interview with Daily Wire host Michael Knowles. McEntee had a senior position in the Trump White House and is a key contributor to the infamous Project 2025, a collection of policy proposals to transition the United States to Christian nationalist authoritarianism in the first 180 days of Trump’s second term.
“You bring up the elephant in the room,” McEntee told Knowles, “which is a stain on not only society but the entire dating culture as well, which is pornography. Whenever America bans that, which will be happening at some point, everyone will be much better off.”
The Project 2025 plan specifically lists a ban on pornography stating, “[Pornography] is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.”
“The minute that goes away, this country will flourish,” McEntee told Knowles.
McEntee was Trump’s body man who was fired because he couldn’t get a security clearance and rehire in 2020 to be the director of the personnel office. He was a very powerful staffer in that role and remains a favorite Trump confidante.
After leaving the White House, McEntee received seed money from billionaire tech investor, and Trump supporter, Peter Thiel to create a dating app for conservatives called “The Right Stuff.” McEntee subsequently gained a large following on social media promoting the dating app with short videos reciting pithy MAGA talking points while out at restaurants.
In the interview with Knowles, McEntee, now the CEO of a dating app, also said he was “rethinking the 19th Amendment,” which gave women the right to vote, after being shown a TikTok video about feminism.
This person will be a powerful member of the new administration. He won’t be able to do anything about the 19th Amendment but the fact that he thinks this is important is relevant. As for the desire to outlaw porn — good luck. I don’t think even Donald Trump is shameless enough to push that one.
Fox host: What's wrong with Congress? Why can't you secure the border?
GOP Rep. Self: The problem is the Republicans, not the Democrats. My Republican colleagues are unwilling to vote to secure the border pic.twitter.com/kvTgylCBT1
I wonder if that actually penetrates the minds of the average Fox viewers.
And then there’s this:
Marjorie Taylor Greene demands Mike Johnson defund the DOJ: “The American people are being forced to pay for the DOJ…I want it ended…And I think our Republican speaker can make that happen…Stop Jack Smith prosecution, stop all funding to the DOJ.” pic.twitter.com/rVFflaQDkX
— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) May 7, 2024
Apparently, she is demanding that Mike Johnson commit to her personally that he won’t ever fund Ukraine again, that he defunds the DOJ and never again passes a bill without majority GOP support. I’m sure he agreed since none of that’s relevant until after the election at which point they’ll vote for leadership again anyway.
But sure, let’s put them in charge of the House again.
As Donald Trump’s criminal trial continues in Manhattan, it appears we will hear today from the adult-film actress at the heart of the hush-money payments allegedly covered up by Trump and his convicted “fixer’ Michael Cohen: Stormy Daniels (Stephanie Clifford) . What made the payments criminal, prosecutors allege, was disguising repayments to Cohen as legal fees. The scheme was intended to influence the 2016 presidential election.
Note:
Trump isn't getting advanced notice of witnesses because of his gag order violations. Apparently, this is his reaction after learning about what reportedly is a significant one on deck. https://t.co/kKrixNo1z5
The Associated Press noted on Monday that the prosecution presented the jury with documents from the Trump Organization and testimony from former controller, Jeffrey McConney, who heard about payments to Cohen from Trump CFO Allen Weisselberg. But he was unaware of what they were for:
A bank statement displayed in court showed Cohen paying $130,000 to Davidson, Daniels’ lawyer, on Oct. 27, 2016, out of an account for an entity Cohen created for the purpose.
Weisselberg’s handwritten notes about reimbursing Cohen were stapled to the bank statement in the company’s files, McConney said.
Those notes spell out a plan to pay Cohen a base reimbursement of $180,000 — covering the payment to Davidson and an unrelated technology bill. That total was then doubled or “grossed up” to cover the state, city and federal taxes Weisselberg estimated Cohen would incur on the payments.
Weisselberg then added a $60,000 bonus, for a total of $420,000, according to the notes. That money was to be paid out in 12 monthly installments of $35,000 each.
This morning, prosecutors questioned Sally Franklin, a VP and executive managing editor for publisher Penguin Random House about a Trump title: “Trump: How to Get Rich.”
From of a chapter: "Sometimes You Still Have to Screw Them"
"For many years, I’ve said that if someone screws you, screw them back. […] As it says in the Bible, an eye for an eye."
The best minds of the MAGA generation were not destroyed by madness. They’re empowered by it, revel in it, slather themselves in it. The T-partiers were pikers by comparison. They pretended that their beef with Barack Obama was taxation and his birth certificate. Alt-right street fighters tacked “based” to the front of their monikers to signify their antipathy towards their fellow Americans. The Party of Trump is an orgy of debasement.
The talent competition at Donald Trump’s VP pageant over the weekend involved limbo. How low could they go? Lick his shoes? Lick the bottom of his shoes? Digby profiled some of the contestants on Monday.
Then we come to the dog-executing, based governor of South Dakota, Krispi Gnome, and her latest memoir. And its anecdotes and edits. And her “Face The Nation” interview.
James Parker proposes additional memoirs and their edits (in her voice) at The Atlantic:
It has been brought to my attention that my memoir The Truth: My Life, How It Really Happened, and What It Means for America—for which I conducted more than 500 hours of interviews with myself—contains an anecdote in which the late Samuel Beckett mails me his Nobel Prize for Literature medal and insists, in a long and heartfelt letter, that I deserve it more than he does. This anecdote has been adjusted.
It has been brought to my attention that my memoir Just the Facts: Everything I Ever Did and the Order I Did It In—for which I embedded with myself on a series of dangerous solo military missions—contains an anecdote in which, after a boozy lunch with King Charles III, I invent the iPod. This anecdote has been adjusted.
It has been brought to my attention that my memoir You Better Believe It: All My Realest Adventures—for which I accompanied myself on many trips to palaces, embassies, medieval mountain hideaways, global HQs, elite conferences, celebrity meditation retreats, and secret underwater laboratories—contains an anecdote in which I win Season 14 of Survivor but turn down a subsequent offer (from Jeff Probst himself) to host the show. This anecdote has been adjusted.
It has been brought to my attention that my memoir The Honesty Gospel—for which I observed myself over seven sessions of ketamine therapy, supervised by myself—contains an anecdote in which I am visited by the archangel Gabriel. No adjustment has been made to this anecdote.
It has been brought to my attention that my memoir No BS: Straight Talk From the Mouth of Reality—for which I spent several months on the set of a documentary about me, directed by me, and starring (as me) both Steve Martin and Eva Longoria—contains an anecdote in which I ask the late J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Listen, Bob, are you sure you want to split the atom?” This anecdote has been adjusted.
The CDC really should be looking at whether this GOP mind virus is contagious. We know already it is a clear and present danger to the republic.
ICYMI: Trump's response to ABC asking him why he wasn't more prepared for the coronavirus was, "Well, I'll be honest, uh, I have a lot of things going on."
Trump also made a case during that same event with health care workers that covid testing wasn't really necessary. This was during the period when he routinely suggested that testing caused cases and not, you know, the virus. https://t.co/Zbfy8nI0Bp
Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) and his wife were indicted last week on conspiracy and bribery charges. The Justice Department alleged that Cuellar took nearly $600,000 in bribes from an Azerbaijani government-controlled oil company and a Mexican bank. In return, prosecutors allege that Cuellar agreed to “influence U.S. foreign policy in favor of Azerbaijan” and advance the bank’s interests in the U.S., per the indictment.
You would think that would make Trump very happy and he’d be calling for Cuellar to resign immediately in order to help the GOP congress maintain their at least a two vote margin. (They only have one at the moment.)
Trump’s rare defense of a vulnerable Democratic lawmaker runs counter to Republicans’ desire to pressure Democrats to call for Cuellar’s removal. The National Republican Congressional Committee plans to accuse Democrats of a double standard if they stay mum on Cuellar following their pressure on ex-Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) to resign, Politico reports.
Cuellar, who has denied wrongdoing, said that he still plans to run for re-election. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Trump endorse him.
As Dave Weigel observes, the “law and order candidate” has a big soft spot for crooked politicians — except his rivals, of course (who aren’t actually criminals.)
Since Feb. 2020, when Trump commuted the sentence of disgraced former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, the Republican presidential nominee has shown support and empathy for Democrats convicted or charged with public corruption.
Days before he left office, Trump commuted the sentence of former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick; now a resident of Georgia, Kilpatrick attended a Trump rally in Michigan last week. He considered pardoning the late former New York legislative leader Sheldon Silver, then in prison on corruption charges, and only stopped after an overwhelming backlash from state Republicans. In September, Trump called last year’s indictment of New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez an “attack” by Biden, “because he wasn’t getting along too well with the Democrats.”
And over the weekend, Trump welcomed Blagojevich to donor events in Palm Beach, Fla., where the self-proclaimed “Trumpocrat” shared a stage with potential Trump running mates and got singled out for praise in a speech first reported on by the New York Times. Trump repeated an argument he’d made for years about Blagojevich: He had the right enemies.
“A lot of people thought it was unfair,” Trump said in Aug. 2019, when he was considering commuting most of the 14-year sentence Blagojevich got after soliciting bribes for a U.S. Senate appointment. “And it was the same gang, the Comey gang and all these sleazebags, that did it.
He’s not a party man. He’s a Trump man and he sees any politician accused of crimes as a mirror of himself — obviously innocent and railroaded by the Deep State — unless they are opposed to him personally. He’s a criminal and he relates to other criminals.
Kristi Noem’s story about killing her dog made headlines across America. But it wasn’t news to people who worked on her first book, where the tale made it into a draft of the memoir before the publishing team nixed it.
Then, as now, Noem wanted the story in because it showed a decisive person who was unwilling to be bound by namby-pamby niceties, while others on the team — which included agents, editors and publicists at Hachette Book Group’s prestige Twelve imprint, and a ghostwriter — saw it as a bad-taste anecdote that would hurt her brand. The tale was ultimately cut, according to two people involved with the project…
It’s been a busy week for that communications team, and not just for Cricket-related reasons. The book’s fact-checking has also been called into question: Last week, the Dakota Scout reported on a passage of the book in which Noem claims to have met the dictator of North Korea while she was serving as a backbencher in Congress. The improbable meeting never happened.
That first book did very well, setting her up as a national figure. Now she has a different team and a new right wing imprint. Apparently, they agreed with her assessment that dog-killing is an awesome way to demonstrate blood-thirsty Trumpism — and Trumpian lies — and they let her freak flag fly.
She has said that there will be corrections, implying that she knew nothing about this, but has no explanation as to why she read the book aloud for he audio book and didn’t correct it then.
The author of this piece is a political editor at Politico and he goes in depth into the world of campaign books and it’s pretty gross. You should read it all.
Noem’s new book — which doesn’t officially publish until May 7 — meets that standard: Whatever you think of putting down a dog for attacking a neighbor’s chickens, the decision to keep the story in the book also seems to show a political culture so devoted to shocking establishment nostrums that it fails to recognize how loving dogs is a pretty mainstream piece of American culture. (I wrote an entire book about the lengths Americans will go to for their pets, and found it’s the rare factor in our national life that knows no party.)
And beyond the Cricket story, possibly making up an easily disprovable memory about meeting Kim Jong Un — or else confusing one of the world’s most recognizable tyrants with some random other person — is a quality-control problem altogether different from the usual one in which pols fill books with lame cliches. Newspapers and magazines stand behind the things they put out, but in book-publishing, the veracity of a work is entirely on the writer.
[…]
If I were editing a memoir by some public figure in or out of politics, and it included a story about intentionally killing their dog, I would absolutely include it — it’s a fascinatingly unusual tale, so different from the typical self-aggrandizing autobiographer, one that raises huge questions and reveals something about character. I bet audiences would agree.Of course, thinking of the audience in terms of readers rather than voters is why I’m a writer, not a PR ace.
It remains to be seen if this brouhaha turns the book into a best seller and if it does you can bet the publisher will be happy about it. I assumed that Noem’s political career has been grievously harmed by this and not just because of the book but because of her bizarre media appearances trying to defend it. However, I must admit that I’m not entirely sure about it now. Trump effusively praised her over the weekend and Fox didn’t seem overly concerned. This may just make her more beloved than ever among the MAGA cultists because she’s seen as really sticking it to the libs, especially when she said Biden’s dog should be shot as well. Of course, a lot of MAGAs also love their dogs so who knows?
And there’s also the fact that she’s a woman and GOP women are always trying to walk that line between being hard and remaining feminine. Her Real Housewife of Mar-a-Lago makeover was designed to give her cover for the latter but puppy killing may have veered too far into the “hard” category.
In a normal world, this wouldn’t be a question and my instinct has been to say that she’s toast. But now I’m wondering. Could it make her more popular than ever? It’s actually possible.
