The Emasculation of Donald Trump

It may seem paradoxical that a porn star could arouse optimism amid an election campaign that has been so thoroughly sullied by Donald Trump’s rhetoric. But that’s how I felt after May 30 when the former president was convicted at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse for falsifying business records in order to hide his affair with Stormy Daniels.

I admit that there were other legally salient components that informed the decision made by the twelve jurors, but every criminal trial is like a show with a set of characters—the bad guys and the good guys, the liars and the saints. The story and its plot—in this case as told by the lawyers for both Trump and Daniels—must have had an impact on the verdict as huge as the testimonies of National Enquirer publisher David Pecker and Trump aide Hope Hicks. Another crucial element is the credibility of the witnesses, or the actors. In this case, when the curtain parted for the encore, Stormy Daniels seemed more credible than Trump, a former reality-TV star.

What can explain her unlikely victory against a billionaire who brags about having been educated at the best schools in America? What is most striking about Ms. Daniels’s testimony is the force of her words compared to the nonsense Trump spewed after the hearings.

https://harpers.org/2024/09/the-emasculation-of-donald-trump/