Doughty Daniels is armed to the teeth, and Trump is trembling
How Donald Trump must have dreaded this. Last week, Stormy Daniels stepped into the witness stand at his criminal trial. She was there to attest to their alleged encounter in his hotel room in 2006.
It was, as you might expect from the woman who gave us such an accomplished pen portrait of Trump’s penis in her 2018 book, resplendent with vivid detail. So much so that Trump’s defence lawyer Susan
Necheles called for a mistrial due to the “unduly and inappropriately prejudicial” account. The request was denied. The judge conceded that Daniels had occasionally strayed from the central facts of the case, but not to any trial-endangering degree.
So her description of the sight of Trump in his boxers and T-shirt when she returned from the loo – “I was startled. Like a jump-scare” – his quizzing of her STD test history, the “brief ” condomless sex, her spanking Trump’s bottom with a magazine and assorted other deliciously embarrassing and emasculating details stand in all their glory.
The defence lawyer also read out a tweet in which one of his supporters called Daniels a “human toilet” and Daniels tweeted back “Exactly! Making me the best person to flush the orange turd down.” I don’t know quite how Necheles thought that was going to play, but it was not the killer blow sought. Now her client’s an orange poo with a mushroom penis. Oh well.
We normally hear Margaret Atwood’s quote “Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them” in sombre contexts, where the latter half of the axiom has proved justified. Rare to see the former. But this is what we have here and it is edifying in the extreme.
Because what does it take for a woman to be able to laugh at a man?
It takes confidence. It takes power. It needs to be done from a position of safety – not just physical safety but psychological safety too. It needs to be done in the firm knowledge that you cannot be hurt or undermined. And as these things can never be entirely guaranteed, it also takes courage.
Women have courage, but they tend either to use it to get through the day in a world not designed for them or to face down very real threats they encounter (from strangers, or from family, or from partners). The luckiest keep an untouched reserve stock of the stuff for when the non-negligible risk of attack is realised.
Other requirements? These are hard to come by, and harder to find in combination, as we do in Daniels. Women, by and large, lack confidence, power and the profound feeling of safety men generally take for granted.
Trump – it seems both at their initial encounter and in subsequent dealings with her and in online exchanges (before he was banned from Twitter) in which Daniels habitually, effortlessly and wittily bested him – has always underestimated her.
He and his allies assumed that the 45-year-old porn star will behave how they think she should; cowering, ashamed of her career, hiding her aged crone face, beholden to him for his generosity. Because this is the narrative society teaches both sexes.
What society doesn’t point out is that eventually age and experience win out. Stormy Daniels has all the power of the unshameable woman.
She can afford to laugh at men – even and especially Donald Trump – and it is a mighty weapon.