Out CNN host Anderson Cooper was so shocked by some of the vulgar testimony in Donald Trump’s hush money trial in New York on Thursday as he struggled to find an appropriate way to talk about it on television.
Reporters with CNN were discussing the cross-examination of adult actress Stormy Daniels, who says she had a sexual relationship with Trump from 2006 to 2012 while he was married to Melania Trump. Prosecutors believe that Trump’s “fixer,” Michael Cohen, paid Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about the affair during the 2016 presidential campaign and that business records were falsified to cover up the payments in order to interfere with the election.
During cross-examination yesterday, Trump’s lawyers tried several lines of questioning to impinge the credibility of Daniels, looking for contradictions in some of her past statements and reasons to believe that she is motivated by a hatred of Trump or an attempt to profit off publicity.
Trump’s lawyer Susan Necheles showed Daniels a post on X that she sent in March, where she said she is “the best person to flush the orange turd down.” Daniels said that she was responding to someone who called her a “human toilet.”
“It doesn’t say President Trump, it says ‘orange turd.’ If that’s how you’re going to interpret it, that’s on you,” Daniel said, later confirming that she was referring to Trump.
Cooper then had to summarize that on television.
“I didn’t think I’d ever say this sentence, but they’re actually arguing over who the orange turd is,” he said, looking stunned. “She says, ‘Oh, I absolutely meant Mr. Trump,’ so Stormy Daniels has now clarified that is, in fact, who she was talking about flushing an orange turd down the toilet.”
Some have questioned this tactic of questioning Daniels about so many topics – including her mean tweets – and there have been reports that Trump is pressuring his lawyers to be more aggressive in attacking the credibility of witnesses since he doesn’t want people to believe that he had a sexual relationship with Daniels.
Cooper discussed those criticisms.
“It’s gonna be interesting to hear… how ultimately, if jurors ever speak, how effective they think this kind of level of cross-examination of Stormy Daniels has been,” said Cooper. “There’s obviously a danger of spending a lot of time in the weeds on tweets.” He added that the line of questioning may have been “client maintenance… essentially what Donald Trump wants them to do, not necessarily what they may have wanted to do.”
On Tuesday, Daniels described how she met Trump at a golf event in 2006, how he complimented her and invited her to dinner, and how he cornered her in his hotel suite that night in order to have sex with her. She said that he didn’t threaten her directly but that she knew his bodyguard was outside the suite and that Donald Trump “was bigger and blocking the way” to get out. She said that Donald Trump told her that his wife wasn’t sharing the room with him and shared a picture of her.
After the sexual encounter, Daniels testified, “It was really hard to get my shoes because my hands were shaking so hard.”
“He said: ‘Oh, it was great. Let’s get together again, honeybunch,’” she continued. “I just wanted to leave.”
Daniels testified that Donald Trump’s “fixer,” attorney Michael Cohen, approached her during the 2016 campaign and worked out a deal to pay her $130,000 to keep quiet about her relationship with Donald Trump, which lasted until 2012. She talked about the emails she saved that showed them working out aspects of the alleged deal.
This was shortly after the Access Hollywood tape – where Donald Trump bragged about how he felt he was allowed to sexually assault women and “grab them by the pu**y” – dominated the news cycle, and his campaign didn’t want another story of Donald Trump’s sexual misdeeds to get media attention.
Trump faces 34 charges related to fraud in this case. He has pled not guilty to all of them.
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