Dem
51
GOP
49
The second week of Donald Trump's criminal fraud trial has come to an end. Who knows how many weeks remain?
There was one big storyline and one small storyline yesterday. The big one was that former Trump ultra-insider Hope Hicks testified. And the main things that she testified to were that the Access Hollywood tape was a major crisis for the Trump campaign, and that she was broadly aware of efforts to pay off Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, though she could not speak to specifics.
There were two notable features of Hicks' testimony, one favorable to Trump, one unfavorable. The former was that she said Trump was concerned about Melania Trump's response if the Daniels/McDougal stories were to come out. The crux of the case, at least the felony criminal elements, is that he made the payment to Daniels to protect his political prospects. If the former president's lawyers can convince at least one juror it was really done to spare Melania, then no felony conviction.
The unfavorable feature is that Hicks very clearly did not want to be there and, during the time she was giving her most-unfavorable-to-Trump testimony, she was overcome by emotion and burst into tears. It would be hard to do more to convince a jury that you are speaking truth, truth you would rather not speak. And so, nearly every lawyer-pundit declared that her testimony was ultimately much more damaging to Trump than it was helpful.
The small storyline, meanwhile, involves the gag order. Trump has paid the first $9,000 he owes, in the form of two cashier's checks, one for $7,000 and one for $2,000. We can find nobody who knows why he split it up like that. And while Judge Juan Merchan has yet to rule on the second group of gag order violations, he did take time in court yesterday to tell Trump that the gag order does not prohibit him from testifying in the case, and that he better stop claiming otherwise.
On the whole, a relatively uneventful day. The party resumes on Monday at 9:00 a.m. (Z)