Donald Trump is facing some of the most serious threats to his financial empire in his long and tumultuous career. That’s his problem.

But the methods he’s using to get out of those troubles make him beholden to wealthy people with interests of their own—which, if reelected president, he would be in a position to advance. And that could be everyone’s problem.

Trump’s money woes begin with his urgent need for huge amounts of liquid cash—both to cover his never-ending legal fees and judgments, and to fund his campaign. A jury awarded the writer E. Jean Carroll more than $83 million in a defamation case in January. (Trump has posted a $92 million bond while he appeals the verdict.) In February, a judge in New York fined him nearly half a billion dollars in a civil fraud case involving property valuations. He owes legal fees for many other cases he’s involved in. Making matters worse, various aspects of his business suffered during his presidency because of negative publicity, and those troubles are compounded by the current weakness of the commercial real-estate market.

To make up for these challenges, Trump has turned to a few sources. He obtained a highly unusual bond from a California businessman for the civil fraud case, having convinced an appellate court to reduce the amount to $175 million. He has been using political donations to pay his hefty legal bills, and his campaign’s effective merger with the Republican National Committee creates a new stream of cash for those. He has also brazenly pleaded for cash from large donors, reportedly telling a gathering of oil executives that he would pursue favorable policies if they raised $1 billion for his campaign and he won in November. Finally, the Trump Media and Technology Group went public this spring, providing Trump with a potentially enormous windfall, at least on paper. (“It’s one of the most obvious worthless stocks I have ever seen,’’ Alan Jagolinzer, an accounting professor at the University of Cambridge in England, told The New York Times.) Each of these revenue streams gives leverage—financial, and perhaps psychological—over Trump to rich people whose fortunes could be affected by actions of the federal government.

[David A. Graham: Trump’s money problems are very real and very bad]

“He made very clear throughout his presidency, and in the plan since then, that he is very open to people currying favor with him by financing him in a variety of ways,” Noah Bookbinder, the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told me. Previously, someone looking for favor could donate to his campaign, schedule an event at a Trump golf course, or spend big at his hotel in Washington. Now the hotel is gone, but other possibilities have arisen.

“Donald Trump's finances and the ways of potentially influencing him have gotten more complicated than what we were talking about in 2016, and even 2020,” Bookbinder said. “It’s a whole new world of ways to potentially funnel money to Donald Trump.”

Trump’s ongoing trial in Manhattan, on charges that he falsified business records to cover up a hush-money payment, showcases a small-scale example of how this works. David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, testified that after he agreed to pay $150,000 to purchase and sit on the story of a woman who said she had sex with Trump, he was invited to a Trump Tower meeting with officials including FBI Director James Comey and future Cabinet-level officials, and later feted with a White House dinner. This is deeply embarrassing—for Trump, given the reason he was indebted to Pecker; for the officials, who were made to mingle with a tabloid publisher (“Here is David Pecker, he’s the publisher of the National Enquirer, and he probably knows more than anybody else in this room,” Trump joked, per Pecker’s testimony; the men didn’t laugh, he recalled); and for the country. As a matter of substance, it’s probably relatively harmless.

But if $150,000 gets you a meeting with the director of the FBI, what does $175 million get you?

That’s the question raised by Trump’s bond in his civil fraud case. A defendant who is appealing a judgment is obliged to either post the amount he owes or to get a bonding company to offer an IOU—assuring that if the appeal is unsuccessful, the penalty will be paid. Trump’s attorneys testified in court that they had tried and failed to obtain a bond for the full amount of more than $450 million, and persuaded an appellate court to reduce the amount to $175 million. Trump was then able to secure a bond—but rather than use a New York State bonding company, he got it from Knight Specialty Insurance, a California-based company. Knight is owned by Don Hankey, a relatively unknown billionaire who has made millions in subprime loans.

The bond was odd. Initial filings for it contained errors that had to be corrected. Knight wasn’t licensed in New York, and the attorney general’s office raised questions about whether the company had enough money to actually cover the bond. Justice Arthur Engoron, the judge in the case, only approved it after a hearing in which Trump agreed to place collateral assets under Knight’s control.

The strangeness doesn’t end there. Hankey told Reuters that he charged Trump below market rate for the bond. He also said he supported Trump politically previously and in the current election and called the case against him “unfair,” though he said they had never met. Hankey has a financial incentive to get in Trump’s good graces: Federal regulators have taken actions against companies he controls at least four times in the past decade, NBC News reported, including repeated fines levied by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. As president, Trump could shield Hankey’s business from enforcement. He has made political interference in the Justice Department a centerpiece of his campaign for president, and during his first term, the CFPB was moribund and shackled.

“If you look at the laws of what an in-kind contribution is, it is exactly this, when you give a goods or services for not the full price because you want to curry favor with a candidate,” Adam Pollock, an attorney in New York and former assistant attorney general, told me. “In this day and age, nobody ever prosecutes those kind of in-kind contributions anymore, ever. But there’s a reason those laws exist. It’s because you don’t want to provide that kind of untoward access of how money corrupts politics. And I think we’re all just so jaded.”

Worth noting is that if Trump loses the appeal, he will still have to pay the penalty, or else he faces the prospect of the state attorney general seizing assets. (If appeals courts affirm Engoron’s ruling, Trump and his sons will also be barred from serving as officers of a company in the state for several years, which could paralyze the Trump Organization’s operations as they exist.) Trump has already acknowledged that he doesn’t have sufficient cash. That’s not a huge surprise—many of his holdings are in real estate, which is not liquid—but it is a problem for him, especially because the market for some of the assets he holds, specifically his large portfolio of urban office buildings, is depressed right now.

So when Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent of Trump’s Truth Social site, became a public company earlier this spring, it seemed like a timely windfall for the former president. Trump has a knack for wriggling out of a jam, and this looks like yet another example. His stake in the company is estimated at about $6 billion. But experts told me that paper wealth like this doesn’t always translate to liquid assets. The company’s equity is trading more like a meme stock than anything related to its underlying fundamental value: The price has dropped, and analysts expect it to fall further eventually. Regardless, Trump is barred from selling shares for months and may be unable to use stock as collateral. Once he is allowed to sell, he will be unable to cash out quickly, as doing so would tank the share price. (The company faces other question marks related to its auditor, who has agreed to cease operations and been charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with “massive fraud.”)

This means that TMTG may not provide a miraculous cash infusion benefiting Trump, but it’s still a big gain for him. TMTG also illustrates other ways in which Trump is susceptible to financial leverage. The investor Jeff Yass was one of the biggest shareholders in the company that merged with Trump’s to go public. Assuming Yass still owns the shares, that gives him substantial sway in keeping the inflated stock price high, which would in turn help Trump’s net worth swell. Perhaps Yass would not have invested simply to aid Trump—or to cozy up to him. But he and his wife are already the biggest political donors so far this election cycle, with all of their funds going to conservative causes. A Trump campaign source told The New York Times that Yass was expected to donate to pro-Trump efforts; Yass said he never had and would not. Because many donations can be hidden, the truth is almost impossible to know.

[David A. Graham: Trump flaunts his corruption]

Yass is also a major investor in ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok. Trump was once a noisy critic of the Chinese-owned social-media platform. “As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” he said in 2020. He issued an executive order to do so if ByteDance didn’t sell TikTok, but the order was soon blocked by judges. When Congress, backed by the Biden administration, took up a law to do the same this year, however, Trump suddenly turned against it. “Just so everyone knows, especially the young people, Crooked Joe Biden is responsible for banning TikTok,” he posted on Truth Social in April. The reversal came shortly after a meeting with Yass.

The public has no way to know why Trump flip-flopped, and both Trump and Yass say they didn’t discuss TikTok at their meeting, but some skepticism is reasonable under the circumstances. “We don't know for sure whether [the meeting] resulted in Donald Trump changing his position,” Bookbinder told me. “But it's certainly something where the American people have to question that.” Any other person of means might also conclude that a good way to get Trump to take up a view that benefits them—including reversing a long-held position—is to make a large investment in him.

Meanwhile, many of the old methods of influencing Trump remain. A Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund invested $2 billion in a private-equity firm founded by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. Kushner has recently been raising money for the former president’s campaign. Serious questions also surround a development in Serbia led by Kushner and Ric Grenell, a former Trump-administration official who is rumored to be a candidate for secretary of state or national-security adviser in a second term. Serbian and American observers have charged that the deal, which did not move through typical channels, is an attempt to win favor with Trump. All involved parties deny it, naturally.

That Trump would seek these bailouts should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with his business career. When he has struck serious financial difficulties in the past, he has sought and usually found some new source of funds. In 1990, for example, with Trump’s casino in Atlantic City foundering, his father walked onto the floor and bought $3.5 million in chips. (This turned out to violate state rules.) Later, when others had cut him off because of his habit of not paying his debts, he found in Deutsche Bank a willing lender. But DB was no more successful in dealing with Trump. An old joke goes that if you owe the bank $1 million, the bank owns you, but if you owe the bank $100 million, you own the bank. Trump defaulted on more than $600 million in DB loans.

When he was fined in the civil fraud case earlier this year, Trump found that none of his old lenders, including DB, were willing to help. His new sources of cash knew Trump’s history of stiffing those he owes, but they may have calculated that they stand to gain something far more valuable than repayment with interest: the power of the federal government at their beck and call.

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Michael Cohen is an admitted liar and a convicted felon who is openly fueled by a thirst for revenge against Donald Trump. That he is so frank about his motives and past may actually make his testimony seem more credible to jurors.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The real meaning of Trump’s “unified Reich” post Reaganomics is on its last legs. The panic over smartphones doesn’t help teens.

Revenge of the Fixer

For the past week in New York, Michael Cohen has been a valuable—and fraught—star witness in Donald Trump’s criminal trial. The defense has tried to portray Cohen, Trump’s ex-lawyer and fixer, as a jilted lackey—which he openly is. To get a sense of his animus toward his ex-boss, look no further than his T-shirt depicting Trump behind bars, his admission in court that he once called Trump a “Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain,” and his two memoirs—Disloyal and Revenge—that trash the former president for his many transgressions.

Still, Cohen’s openness about his past and his motivations—in part forced by the public and criminal nature of his previous offenses—may actually make him seem more credible to a jury. His argument in court boiled down to: I committed crimes at Trump’s behest—and suffered consequences—because I would have done anything for him. That transparency made him appear like “the agent who was held accountable, whereas the principal has escaped accountability,” James Sample, a law professor at Hofstra University, told me in an email.

In 2018, Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for crimes that included lying to Congress about plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow and violating campaign-finance laws by making hush-money payments—one of which went to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels. He testified that, during the 2016 election, when she was considering publicizing the story of her alleged 2006 sexual encounter with Trump, Trump ordered Cohen to “take care of it.” In turn, Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 of his own money, which he claimed was later reimbursed by Trump.

On the stand, Cohen largely remained calm, though he had some shaky moments. He admitted during cross-examination that he had stolen tens of thousands of dollars from the Trump Organization, pocketing some of the money earmarked for a tech company. (When a prosecutor later probed him, he said that he had been angry because his bonus was cut.) The defense repeatedly tried to assail Cohen’s credibility—an obvious way to undermine a man who had previously lied under oath. Cohen testified that he had spoken with Trump in October 2016, via Trump’s bodyguard’s phone, about paying off Daniels. Attempting to ding Cohen on the details of the call, the defense insisted that Cohen hadn’t spoken with Trump and had actually discussed a different matter with the bodyguard, but Cohen stood by his testimony. Trump’s lawyers also called into question Cohen’s money-related stake in the trial. Cohen admitted that he has a financial interest in the outcome of the trial, because he writes and podcasts about Trump, but added that an acquittal would be better for him economically because it would give him “more to talk about.”

A common paradox lies at the heart of Trump’s criminal case, Sample told me: “To get at the truth in prosecuting criminal enterprises often requires relying on liars.” In most cases, being a convicted felon would make a witness far less credible. But the fact that Cohen has already served time in prison for admitting to crimes related to hush-money payments actually adds to his credibility as a witness here, Valerie Hans, a professor at Cornell Law School and an expert on juries, told me in an email; jurors won’t have to wonder if Cohen is testifying as part of a plea deal to avoid prison time for those charges.

In contrast to the prosecution’s parade of witnesses, Trump’s defense team presented only two witnesses before resting its case earlier today. (Trump himself did not testify.) One of the witnesses was Robert Costello, a lawyer who once did some legal work for Cohen. He was positioned to be a Cohen-antagonist, and he claimed that Cohen previously told him that Trump “knew nothing” about the hush-money payment to Daniels. But in the process of trying to impugn Cohen, Costello “succeeded in impugning himself,” Sample told me. The judge scolded Costello after he reportedly told the courtroom to “strike” something from the record and continued to speak after objections were sustained. “The circus-like debacle of Costello’s testimony is a microcosm of why the defense called so few witnesses,” Sample explained.

Cohen’s history of fealty to Trump, and his willingness to bully and lie, is well documented. That his past would be an asset may seem strange—but the prosecution is banking on him. After Memorial Day weekend, the jury will convene and begin their deliberations. Their decision to convict or acquit a former president will largely hinge on whether or not they think they can trust the word of Michael Cohen.

Related:

Michael Cohen, mediocre hero Trump’s alternate-reality criminal trial

Today’s News

Trump’s defense rested its case in his New York criminal trial. Closing arguments are set to begin next week. Rudy Giuliani and 10 other Trump allies pleaded not guilty to conspiracy, forgery, and fraud charges in an Arizona criminal case related to their alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential-election results. One man died and multiple passengers suffered injuries when a Boeing plane flying from London to Singapore encountered severe turbulence; the aircraft plummeted roughly 6,000 feet within the span of five minutes.

Evening Read

Illustration by Nick Little for The Atlantic

The Big AI Risk Not Enough People Are Seeing

By Tyler Austin Harper

“Our focus with AI is to help create more healthy and equitable relationships.” Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder and executive chair of the dating app Bumble, leans in toward her Bloomberg Live interviewer. “How can we actually teach you how to date?”

When her interviewer, apparently bemused, asks for an example of what this means, Herd launches into a mind-bending disquisition on the future of AI-abetted dating: “Okay, so for example, you could in the near future be talking to your AI dating concierge, and you could share your insecurities. ‘I just came out of a breakup. I have commitment issues.’ And it could help you train yourself into a better way of thinking about yourself” …

What Herd provides here is much more than a darkly whimsical peek into a dystopian future of online dating. It’s a window into a future in which people require layer upon layer of algorithmic mediation between them in order to carry out the most basic of human interactions: those involving romance, sex, friendship, comfort, food.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The voters who don’t really know Donald Trump Higher education isn’t the enemy. Scientists are very worried about NASA’s Mars plan.

Culture Break

Billie Eilish wears sunglasses and squats in front of a blue gradient background

Listen. Billie Eilish’s new album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, sustains a mood of longing that is very now, Spencer Kornhaber writes.

Watch. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (out now in theaters) proves that this blockbuster franchise keeps evolving for the better, Shirley Li writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Among the many absurd details of the hush-money case are the alliterative, somewhat zippy pseudonyms that Daniels and Cohen apparently used in a nondisclosure agreement. Trump went by “David Dennison,” and Daniels was called “Peggy Peterson.” Earlier in the trial, Keith Davidson, Daniels’s former lawyer, testified that he had come up with the monikers—and that David Dennison was the name of a real person on his high-school hockey team.

— Lora

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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This is The Trump Trials by George T. Conway III, a newsletter that chronicles the former president’s legal troubles. Sign up here.

Not all that long ago, I thought that the trial currently being held in The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump would be the last one I’d want to see as the first one tried against the former president. It seemed the least serious of the cases against him. Here’s a man who tried to overthrow American democracy by launching a coup to stay in power. A man who allegedly stole dozens of boxes of classified national-security documents from the White House, some containing secrets about other countries’ nuclear-weapons capabilities, then lied about the documents, concealed them, and obstructed a federal investigation about them.

I thought I would have strongly preferred the cases about those matters to have gone first, particularly the secret-documents case, which substantively would be a lock, were it not for the judge overseeing it. But I feel the need to admit error. The truth is, I’ve come around to the view that People v. Trump is, in at least some ways, the perfect case to put Trump in the dock for the first time, and—I hope, but we’ll see—perhaps prison.

Because this case really captures Donald Trump. The legal commentariat have been engaged in an odd debate about what to call it. “The Stormy Daniels case.” “The hush-money case.” “The porn-star-hush-money case.” (Personally, that’s always been my favorite, and I think it sounds even better in German—Pornostarschweigegeldrechtsfall.) The more legally precise would like it to be known as “the New York business-records-falsification case,” because that’s what the New York penal code says it is. Some high-minded people I know prefer “the New York election-interference prosecution,” because it involves the concealment of a matter that might well have affected the outcome of the 2016 presidential race.

All these locutions work, but what the case is really about is Trump’s modus operandi—lying. He’s a matryoshka doll of mendacity. He lies, usually lies some more, and then often lies about the lies he’s previously told. He told at least 30,573 lies while president, by The Washington Post’s count. He lies almost whenever he opens his mouth, even when truth would better serve him. To be sure, his other criminal cases involve lies—lies about the 2016 election, lies about the military secrets he stole. But the alleged lies in People v. Trump strike at the core of his moral putrescence—and Trump knows it. They are lies allegedly meant to cover up a tawdry man’s tawdry behavior. The case truly embodies Donald Trump. And for that reason, I think, it deeply disturbs him.

That’s what stood out to me last Thursday as I sat in court watching the second day of the cross-examination of the prosecution’s witness, Stormy Daniels, who had taken the stand to testify that she’d met the defendant at a celebrity golf tournament on the south shore of Lake Tahoe in 2006, that he invited her to his room at Harrah’s hotel and casino there (ostensibly as a prelude to dinner), that she (rather unenthusiastically) acceded to his advance, that they then (rather briefly) had sex, and then that, 10 years later, days before the defendant won the 2016 presidential election, she was paid off by the defendant’s fixer and lawyer, Michael Cohen, to keep her mouth shut about it all. (Trump denies having had sex with Daniels, and he also denies having falsified records in an effort to suppress reports of the liaison.)

Strictly speaking, Daniels’s testimony wasn’t necessary—particularly the details about the sex. The case is about whether Trump caused the falsification of business records at his business, and whether that falsification was intended to cover up another crime (among other offenses, violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act). Daniels has absolutely nothing to say about the Trump Organization’s business records, and the fact that she was ultimately paid the hush money isn’t in dispute. The sex strictly doesn’t matter: If Daniels and Trump didn’t have sex—as Trump maintains—but the facts alleged by the New York County District Attorney’s Office were otherwise the same and proved, Trump could still be found guilty of a Class E felony under the New York penal law.

But as we have so often seen over the past nine years, Trump’s instinctive, narcissistic mendacity came into self-defeating play once again—this time by making Daniels’s testimony more significant than it had to be. It’s hard to imagine that many sentient, honest human beings could believe Trump’s denials of having congressed with Daniels. Yet Trump continues to insist on denying it—not only in public, but in court. And not only is sex not an element of the crime, but his strongest defense—the one he could actually skate on—will be to argue that there is insufficient evidence that he knew his people were falsifying business records. This defense faces many problems—including that Trump personally signed (on the Resolute desk!) some checks (made out to Cohen) in packets with false backup attached. Still, Trump would have been best off having his lawyers focus their efforts on the question of his knowledge and intent regarding the payments.

As usual, though, this defendant just couldn’t help himself. The prosecution was entitled to put on evidence of the sex to establish Trump’s motive for the payoff and cover-up. The defendant could have had his lawyers not dispute the point, even stipulate to it. What’s the harm? His political supporters stand by him even though he’s already a civilly adjudicated sex offender, so why would they care one whit about what he did consensually for a couple of minutes with an adult-film actor once upon a time in Stateline, Nevada? Had he not insisted on contesting the point, Daniels might not have had to testify, or at least she might have been on and off the stand in a flash. Because, again, what ultimately matters in the case happened mostly in New York City in 2016.

Trump’s insistence on pointlessly contesting Daniels’s veracity entitled the prosecution to draw her account out even more than it otherwise could have—not only to establish a record on why Trump would have been motivated to hush Daniels up (because sex), but to bolster her credibility with detail of her recollection (about sex). As Justice Juan Merchan later told the defense counsel in denying their motion for a mistrial:

Your denial [of a sexual encounter] puts the jury in a position of having to choose who they believe: Donald Trump, who denies there was an encounter, or Stormy Daniels, who claims there was.

Although the People do not have to prove that a sexual encounter actually did occur, they do have the right to rehabilitate Ms. Daniels’ credibility and to corroborate her story, which was immediately attacked [by the defense] on opening statements.

The more specificity Ms. Daniels can provide about the encounter, the more the jury can weigh to determine whether the encounter did occur and, if so, whether they choose to credit Ms. Daniels’ story.

The result, thanks to the defendant, was the introduction of more evidence that made him look like a duplicitous clod. There were limits, to be sure. Merchan warned the prosecutors before Daniels took the stand that “we don’t need to know the details of the intercourse.” (The universe thanks you, Your Honor.) Accordingly, and in contrast with how some characterized it, Daniels’s testimony wound up not being very “graphic.” As the prosecution later pointed out to the court, “there was not a lot of detail elicited” about “the actual sexual encounter,” which was the subject of only a handful of questions put to the witness. Not just that, but the judge also sustained objections or struck testimony on what position Daniels and the defendant were in, whether she touched his skin, and how Daniels, as they coupled, “was staring at the ceiling … trying to think about anything other than what was happening there.”

In the end, the only somewhat lurid detail about the sex that actually got into the record was that the former president (in contrast with performers at her prophylactic-mandatory then-employer, Wicked Pictures), didn’t wear a condom, which concerned her. And that small factoid got in solely because the defense counsel inexplicably failed to object. (The judge later observed, “For the life of me, I don’t know why [the defense counsel Susan] Necheles didn’t object. She had just made about 10 objections, most of which were sustained. Why on earth she wouldn’t object to the mention of a condom, I don’t understand.”)

So the testimony wasn’t all that sexy, in the literal sense. Still, because of the defendant’s denial of what happened that night at Harrah’s Lake Tahoe, the testimony ended up being deeply embarrassing to Trump. To bolster Daniels’s credibility, the prosecution’s questioning went into great detail about what led up to the fleeting fornication—essentially, her conversations with Trump beforehand. And that brought out some memorable, and highly believable, testimonial gems that perfectly capture the lowbrow, hyper-self-absorbed 45th president of the United States. There’s Trump telling Daniels, “You remind me of my daughter because she is smart and blond and beautiful.” And him admitting that he and his wife, Melania, “actually don’t even sleep in the same room.”

And there’s him repeatedly interrupting Daniels to talk about—whom else?—himself: “He would ask me questions and then not let me finish the answer. He kept cutting me off, and it was almost like he wanted to one-up me, which was just really hilarious when you think about it.” And there’s how, when the self-consumed future defendant asked, “Have you seen my new magazine?” and pulled out an issue with his face on it, Daniels called him “rude, arrogant, and pompous,” and said, “Someone should spank you with that. That’s the only interest I have in that magazine. Otherwise, I am leaving.” And there’s how, when finally faced with the prospect of Daniels walking out, Trump rolled the magazine up and gave it to her.

In that Nevada hotel room that night, Daniels said, she rose to the challenge:

“I took it from him and said, turn around. And I swatted him.”

Where?

“Right on the butt.”

The alleged spanking hardly could have rent Trump’s rump in 2006. But given his extreme vulnerability to narcissistic injury, the story surely had to have inflicted acute trauma upon his most delicate ego when Daniels told it 18 years later.

We need not speculate. The day before, Merchan had ruled on the district attorney’s third motion to hold Trump in contempt for violations of the court’s gag order, which restricts the defendant’s ability to make public statements attacking witnesses. And for the tenth time, Merchan held Trump in contempt. But more important, Merchan gave the defendant a warning. The legal maximum of a $1,000 fine for each count of contempt, the judge observed, had failed to deter Trump from violating the gag order; “therefore, going forward, this Court will have to consider a jail sanction if recommended.” He addressed the defendant directly, in open court: “The last thing I want to do is to put you in jail … But, at the end of the day, I have a job to do, and part of that job is to protect the dignity of the judicial system and compel respect … So, as much as I do not want to impose a jail sanction … I want you to understand that I will, if necessary and appropriate.”

That was where matters stood the next morning, when Daniels testified about the spanking: Trump was so very close to—perhaps just one more contumacious act away from— incarceration. And yet when he heard Daniels say she had spanked him, he almost landed himself in lockup. Not long after that testimony, the court took its regular midmorning break. The jury was excused, and Merchan immediately called the lawyers to the bench. He told the defense counsel that their obviously “upset” client had been “cursing audibly” and “shaking his head.”

Trump had done that, in particular, the judge said, “when Ms. Daniels was testifying about rolling up the magazine, and … smacking your client.” Quelle surprise.

“That’s contemptuous,” said an angry Merchan. “It has the potential to intimidate the witness.” Even without a gag order, and 10 prior violations of it, swearing at a prosecution witness is the kind of conduct that, before some judges, could quickly land a defendant in jail. Merchan commanded: “You need to speak to him. I won’t tolerate that.” And so the lawyers remonstrated with their client during the break. It was all a bit reminiscent of a moment in the second E. Jean Carroll defamation trial, when, within earshot of the jury, Trump had muttered that the trial was a “witch hunt” and a “con job.” The presiding federal district judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, threatened to eject Trump from the courtroom. “I would love it. I would love it,” Trump responded. To which Judge Kaplan replied, “You just can’t control yourself in this circumstance, apparently.”

In Merchan’s courtroom last week, whether Trump could control himself had once again become the question; and once again a judge gave him a break. But the struggle continues, and it’s being waged behind the scenes—largely by Trump’s legal and political teams. Another person battling to maintain his freedom would probably remain focused on that battle, but Trump remains distracted by his petty obsessions and resentments, including of some of the faces he sees in the gallery. A couple of weeks ago, he glared at me. I had smiled at him. He didn’t like that. He also seems to have a particular distaste for the MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell.

Trump’s many grievances pose a problem for him. As Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times reported last week, “People close to Mr. Trump have worried about whether long days in the courtroom have had an effect on his mental state.” The care and feeding of a narcissistic sociopath (see my exposition on that subject five years ago here in The Atlantic) and keeping him on a relatively even emotional keel is difficult—and sometimes impossible—even on a good day, and so Trump’s team has resorted to extraordinary measures to soothe him during this trial.

A key player in the current effort is apparently a young aide named Natalie Harp. Her job—no joke, this was in the Times—is to schlep around a portable printer “so she can quickly provide Mr. Trump with hard copies of mood-boosting news articles and social media posts by people praising him.” Last Thursday, after Daniels’s testimony, team Trump apparently found another use for this device. During the lunch break, Trump posted on his Truth Social account pictures of … me … from Election Night 2016. Alas, in one of the shots, I was, confessedly, rather inebriated. I had tears of joy in my eyes, was wearing a “Make America great again” hat, and was hugging my then-wife, the campaign manager whose remarkable talents had astoundingly just elected a buffoon. “Mr. Kellyanne Conway celebrating my Victory in 2016!” Trump’s post read. (Yes, Donald, supporting you was indeed a low moment in my life. Damn, you sure know how to hurt a guy.)

Now, I mention this not (just) because it is insane, hilarious, and involves me, but because it also makes my point about Trump being his own worst enemy. His uncontrollable pique at his plight, a plight caused by his own poor choices, leads him to make even more poor choices—and here, to impose those choices upon not just his political aides but his lawyers to boot.

Which brings us back to Daniels on the stand.

When prosecutors completed their direct examination of her on Tuesday afternoon, the cross-examination by Trump’s most competent lawyer, Susan Necheles, began. A Yale Law School graduate, she’s the one member of Trump’s current legal team who appears to be universally respected, and with good reason. By all accounts, and from my own limited observation, she’s extremely smart, highly experienced—and an excellent cross-examiner. As a woman, moreover, she was the obvious choice to be the one who cross-examined Daniels before a jury. Necheles started doing a disciplined and seemingly effective job of that on Tuesday afternoon. But she didn’t finish the examination, because it was too late in the day. Court adjourned.

The next day was Wednesday, a day off from the trial—the day each week that Merchan handles his other cases. Normally, when even a small hiatus like that occurs during a witness’s cross-examination, that’s a very good thing for the cross-examining side, and a very bad thing for the witness. The cross-examiner gets the chance to go back through the transcript of the witness’s direct testimony, tighten her lines of cross, focus them on the most important points elicited by the other side, and otherwise sharpen her knives.

But that didn’t happen here. When Thursday’s proceedings began, but before the witness returned to the stand, you could see the dynamic: Trump, sitting at counsel table next to poor Necheles, was talking animatedly into her ear, at length. Watching this, I imagined that the defendant had spent the day off stewing about the spanking. It couldn’t have been much fun for his lawyers.

And the result wasn’t good for the defense. Necheles’s resumed cross-examination was bad, not because Necheles was a bad examiner, but because the examination, for a reason we can all take an educated guess about, became overlong, and overdone. It became too argumentative, too focused on badgering the witness and on attacking trivial aspects of her account. At one point, Necheles absurdly engaged in cross-examining Daniels on the geography of the Stateline, Nevada–South Lake Tahoe, California conurbation, the idea apparently being to challenge Daniels on whether she had actually taken a cab around town instead of walking in her high heels.

The cross also forayed into archaic, even nonsensical, slut-shaming. Sure, the witness made a living engaging in sex on camera for money. But does that really mean she shouldn’t have been horrified to see Donald Trump suddenly take off his clothes? And was there any logic at all in seemingly trying to show that the sex the defense said didn’t occur was consensual because Daniels wanted it? The defense’s cross-examination made Daniels appear more sympathetic than any prosecutor’s direct questioning ever could.

Worse yet, it emboldened Daniels. She’s a smart woman—and she’s clearly strong-willed, with a sharp, quick-witted tongue. Normally it’s not a good idea for witnesses, even smart and tough ones—perhaps especially smart and tough ones—to fence with lawyers too much on cross-examination; witnesses tend to lose credibility when they do. But the belabored and argumentative nature of this cross-examination gave Daniels some running room. And she took every inch of it.

At one point, for example, Necheles asked a question about Daniels’s history of writing porn scripts containing “phony stories about sex [that] appear to be real”—obviously implying that Daniels’s story about Trump in the hotel room was fake, like the scripts. Daniels’s devastating retort: “The sex in the films, it’s very much real. Just like what happened in that room.”

At another point, Necheles attacked Daniels for selling merchandise about Trump’s indictment.

Necheles: Again, you’re celebrating the indictment by selling things from your store, right?

Daniels: Not unlike Mr. Trump.

And then, this jewel of an exchange, in which Necheles got zinged once again, and, by unsuccessfully moving to strike the zinger, drew more attention to it:

Necheles: Okay. Even though you tweeted and celebrated about him being indicted, you have no knowledge of what he was indicted for?

Daniels: There was a lot of indictments.

Necheles: Your Honor, I move to strike that.

Prosecutor Susan Hoffinger: It is responsive, Your Honor.

The court: It’s responsive. Overruled.

I’m pretty sure I saw some of the jurors struggling at times to suppress laughter, as I was. Simply put, Daniels wiped the floor with Necheles. But I don’t blame Necheles. If I had to guess—and I admit I’m speculating here—I’d say that a lot of what Necheles did on Thursday was against her better judgment. To my mind, the cross-examination would have been orders of magnitude better had it been confined mostly to two of the questions Necheles asked toward the end of it: “You know nothing about the business records, right?” “You know nothing about what [the defendant] does or does not know about the business records, right?” At the end of the day, those were the questions that most mattered, to which Daniels’s answers had to be, and were, no, and no. But that testimony got lost in the mix with everything else—thanks to Trump’s easily bruised ego.

One evening in March 2018, I joined some friends at a bar in Washington, D.C., to watch a live broadcast of Anderson Cooper’s interview with the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels on 60 Minutes. For months, we’d all been reading news stories about Daniels’s reported sexual encounter with then-President Donald Trump, along with Trump’s efforts to pay her off in order to cover it up before the 2016 election—and now, finally, we were going to hear from the woman herself. The story itself seemed funny, an absurd dispatch from a faraway, brightly colored world of celebrity gossip.

But once the broadcast started, the story that Daniels told was not funny at all. It sounded, in fact, a great deal like the accounts of many of the women who had been recently sharing their experiences of sexual coercion as part of the #MeToo movement, which had exploded just a few months before, following The New York Times’ reporting on the abuses of the film producer Harvey Weinstein. Daniels hadn’t wanted to sleep with Trump, she told Cooper, but felt that “I had it coming for making a bad decision, for going to someone’s room alone.” Still, she insisted that she was “not a victim.” The atmosphere in the bar remained cheerful, but my “Dark and Stormy Daniels” cocktail no longer seemed quite so amusing an order. I left feeling unsettled.

I remembered that evening this week while following Daniels’s testimony at Trump’s New York trial, where he faces charges over his alleged effort to cover up the hush-money payment made to Daniels in 2016. News coverage of the trial has featured plenty of jokes about the seedy schemes by Trump’s team to quash unflattering stories. And Daniels has seemed happy at times to play her part in the circus, leaning into the character of a brassy Trump-hater. What she described on the stand, though, wasn’t exactly “tawdry” or “salacious,” as some news coverage has suggested. It was something sadder, uglier, and—for many people who have lived in some way in the shadow of sexual violence—more familiar.

Initially, whether the district attorney’s office would call Daniels to testify was unclear. Although she is at the center of the case, she’s also removed from it. Her story is what prosecutors say Trump wanted to silence before the election, but the charges themselves focus on documents allegedly fudged by the Trump Organization after the fact.

This week, though, prosecutors made the call to put Daniels on the stand. She described her experience with Trump in greater detail than she had on 60 Minutes, saying she’d reluctantly agreed to a dinner with Trump and, when she arrived at the hotel, was told to come up to his room—an echo of Weinstein’s tactics. After a long conversation about business—he was interested in the economics of the porn industry, she said, and suggested that she might appear on The Apprentice—she went to the restroom, and emerged to find him stripped down to a T-shirt and boxers. She was shocked: “I felt the room spin in slow motion,” she testified, and remembered thinking, “Oh my God, what did I misread to get here?” She went to leave, and he stood between her and the door. When she went to put on her clothes afterward, she said, her hands were shaking too hard to buckle up her shoes.

[David A. Graham: The Stormy Daniels testimony spotlights Trump’s misogyny]

As she had on 60 Minutes, Daniels emphasized in the courtroom that she viewed the sex as consensual. She also said that she was conscious of the difference in power between herself and Trump: Though she insisted that she hadn’t felt threatened, he was larger than her and standing between her and the bedroom door; his bodyguard was outside; he had dangled the possibility of a role on The Apprentice. Daniels’s insistence that she is not a victim locates the interaction in a queasy, blurred space of complicated sexual interaction that has become more culturally familiar in the years since #MeToo.

What was striking about Daniels’s story was how normal it seemed. Setting aside the identities of the people involved and the hubbub about hush money, elements were reminiscent of an uncertain disclosure that you might hear from a friend over brunch: Something weird happened last night … In a conversation with my colleagues at Lawfare, Claire Meynial, who has been covering the trial for the French magazine Le Point, described watching the focused, serious faces of the women in the press room as Daniels testified.

Particularly brutal was Daniels’s own frustration with herself for having ended up in a situation where Trump expected sex from her. On the stand, she seemed bitter over her own misapprehension that Trump had been interested in having a real conversation about her career aspirations. She had wanted “to be taken seriously as a writer and director” and hoped that appearing on The Apprentice might help get her there. Again, this carries an echo of Harvey Weinstein, and the many women who described their disappointment when they realized that the producer had no real interest in their work but saw them only as an object for abuse.

For all the attention that Daniels’s testimony has received, how much of a difference it will really make to an eventual verdict is not obvious. Though prosecutors seem to have calculated that her story will help build their case, the key questions they must prove to the jury don’t depend on what Daniels says happened to her that evening or whether she’s telling the truth. And there’s a risk that the sometimes-graphic details shared by Daniels might provide Trump with legal arguments with which to appeal any conviction, on the grounds that they could bias the jury against the defendant in a case that doesn’t turn legally on matters of sex. Twice, following Daniels’s testimony, Trump’s legal team moved for a mistrial on these same grounds—motions that the trial judge denied.

On cross-examination, the former president’s lawyer seemed committed to attacking Daniels’s credibility regarding her interactions with Trump. The questions took a shape familiar to anyone who has ever been questioned about their own experience of assault: Shouldn’t you have known that this was what he wanted? You didn’t say no? Aren’t you just making this all up? Daniels fought back, insisting on the truth of what had happened to her. Throughout it all, Trump sat there silently. When Daniels left the courtroom, he looked straight ahead, not turning to watch her go.

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Donald Trump is in his third week on trial in New York, where he faces 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree. He’s accused of covering up a $130,000 hush-money payment made in 2016 to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels, who recently testified about her encounters with the former president. I spoke with Atlantic staff writer David A. Graham about where the case stands, Trump’s penchant for violating his gag order, and the bizarre nature of this trial.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The nudes internet Trump’s latest abortion position is more radical than it sounds. “Listen to what they’re chanting,” Judith Shulevitz writes.

Like an Ordinary Citizen

Stephanie Bai: To start off, let’s lay the groundwork for this trial. Can you briefly explain the case that the prosecutors are trying to make?

David A. Graham: People talk about this as “the hush-money case,” but paying hush money is not itself illegal. What prosecutors are arguing is that Trump paid Stormy Daniels in exchange for her not talking about their alleged sexual relationship, and then falsified the business records to cover up that payment. They say that this constituted election interference because the goal was to keep knowledge of the relationship from voters during the 2016 election.

The prosecution needs to establish that Trump was deeply involved in the creation and the payment of this hush-money agreement, because the defense is trying to say that Trump may not have been aware of the situation. When the prosecution questions people who worked in accounting at the Trump Organization, for example, they are trying to show that Trump was deeply involved in payments, deeply involved in the minutiae of the business—so he obviously would have been aware of a payout as big as $130,000.

Stephanie: What is Trump’s defense team’s counterargument?

David: They don’t deny that this money was paid, but they say that he didn’t falsify the records. They’re also trying to impugn the honesty of some of the witnesses. They mostly seem to be trying to pick apart aspects of the prosecution’s case rather than offering some sort of counternarrative.

Stephanie: If the prosecution isn’t able to successfully prove that Trump was aware of the hush-money agreement, what does that mean for their case?

David: If they can’t prove that Trump was involved, or if Trump’s lawyers can plausibly argue that he did this simply to protect his reputation or to protect his marriage rather than to interfere with the election, then the prosecutors will have a harder time getting the jury to convict.

Stephanie: In defending comments Trump made about the trial, his attorney Todd Blanche said that Trump had a right to complain about the “two systems of justice.” In some ways, it seems like the prosecution is arguing two cases: the hush-money case, and the case for this being a legitimate, fair trial—and not the “political witch hunt” that Trump has called it. Let’s say that Trump ends up getting convicted. Do you think his supporters will accept that outcome?

David: It depends on what that means. There was a poll yesterday saying that most people expect Trump to be convicted, and that includes a plurality of Republicans. So in that sense, they see what’s coming. But I think there’s a widespread sentiment that either he’s being prosecuted by Democrats who are out to get him or that what he did wasn’t wrong. If anything, the trial seems to be solidifying support within his base.

Stephanie: At the core of this case is the extramarital affair Trump allegedly had during his marriage to Melania. Have we heard anything from her during this trial?

David: We have not! Trump has brought a rotating posse with him to court, including not just his lawyers but also his aides, his campaign manager, and his son Eric. Melania has not been there. He complained that he had to be in court on her birthday, which is a little ironic given the alleged events that led to the case.

Stephanie: Headlines and pundits have called this a “historic” and “unprecedented” trial, because it’s the first time a former president has gone to trial for criminal charges. Has this case set any precedents for how a criminal trial of a former president would proceed?

David: This is not a legal precedent, but it’s been powerful to watch Trump have to show up in court when he clearly doesn’t want to be there, listen to testimony he doesn’t want to listen to, sit in this courtroom with a bad HVAC system, and endure it like an ordinary citizen. Even if he argues that he is above the rule of law, we are seeing him sit there like anyone else.

Stephanie: Does the gag order, which has been imposed on Trump and bars him from attacking people involved in the trial, set any sort of precedent for presidential trials going forward?

David: The gag order comes from Trump’s habit of attacking witnesses, the family of prosecutors and judges. I don’t know that you would get one of these as a standard practice with presidents. But each time you have a defendant who has that kind of history or who starts doing that, there’s a good chance of the gag order. Still, Trump has been able to exploit the weirdness of this case and get away with things that other defendants would not have.

Stephanie: Can you say a bit more about how he’s exploited the weirdness of the case?

David: Anytime he gets in trouble for saying something, he says, Look, I’m a politician running for office. I have to be able to make political speeches. It’s unfair for me to be muzzled. That’s something that the judge has had to figure out: How do you write a gag order that allows Trump to be a candidate but protects the witnesses and the sanctity of the case?

To me, it also looks like Trump is daring the judge to jail him—like he concluded that getting sent to jail for a night or a weekend would actually help him politically. So the judge has to decide how much he protects the sanctity of the system by enforcing the gag order versus giving Trump an opportunity to undermine the system in an even bigger way by claiming political persecution.

Stephanie: You wrote earlier this week that some of the best-sourced reporters in the courtroom are saying that Trump largely wants to avoid jail time. Is this a situation where Trump can spin either option in his favor?

David: I think it’s very “heads I win, tails you lose.” If the judge lets him get away with it, he can talk all kinds of trash about the proceeding, and that’s a win for him because he wants to undermine the trial for political reasons. If he gets thrown in jail, I’m sure he would hate it, but it also gives him another political talking point.

Stephanie: It seems like a very tight line for Judge Juan Merchan to walk.

David: It’s really challenging. Every judge Trump has recently come before has had to deal with this in some way or another. They’re trying to figure out: How do we keep him in line without that becoming the story? They want the focus to be on the facts of the case. And that’s really hard to achieve with Trump, because he doesn’t want the focus to be on the facts.

Related:

The Stormy Daniels testimony spotlights Trump’s misogyny. Judge Merchan is out of good options.

Today’s News

Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said that President Joe Biden’s decision to pause weapons shipments to Israel was related to Israel’s plans to move forward with a large-scale offensive operation in Rafah, a city in southern Gaza. An appeals court in Georgia agreed to review the ruling that allowed Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to stay on the election-interference case against Trump after it was revealed that she had a romantic relationship with a prosecutor on her team. The New York Times reported that in a 2012 deposition, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that a doctor told him that his memory loss and mental fogginess could be due to a worm in his brain that “ate a portion of it and then died.”

Dispatches

Work in Progress: No one knows what universities are for, Derek Thompson writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Vartika Sharma for The Atlantic

Ozempic or Bust

By Daniel Engber

In the early spring of 2020, Barb Herrera taped a signed note to a wall of her bedroom in Orlando, Florida, just above her pillow. Notice to EMS! it said. No vent! No intubation! She’d heard that hospitals were overflowing, and that doctors were being forced to choose which COVID patients they would try to save and which to abandon. She wanted to spare them the trouble.

Barb was nearly 60 years old, and weighed about 400 pounds. She has type 2 diabetes, chronic kidney disease, and a host of other health concerns. At the start of the pandemic, she figured she was doomed. When she sent her list of passwords to her kids, who all live far away, they couldn’t help but think the same. “I was in an incredibly dark place,” she told me. “I would have died.”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Taxpayers are about to subsidize a lot more sports stadiums. The absurdity of believing China’s great at protecting kids online

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Teenie Harris Archive / Carnegie Museum of Art; Getty.

Read. “When Nan Goldin Danced in Low-Life Go-Go Bars in Paterson, N.J.,” a poem by Rosa Alcalá:

“While men fed her tips and she tucked them into her bikini, / a fist hit an eye in a house in Paterson, like a flash going off / in a dark kitchen. And in the corner, a girl stood watching.”

Revisit an iconic photo. American Gothic: Gordon Parks and Ella Watson, a book about Gordon Parks’s widely celebrated 1942 portrait of the government worker Ella Watson.

Play our daily crossword.

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The court is now hearing from its next witness in the trial - former Trump Organization controller Jeff McConney