But, of course

Posted on: May 3, 2024 at 21:47:53 CT

Hicks testified that when the payoff to Stormy Daniels became public in 2018, she and President Trump discussed the matter in the White House and Trump told her that Michael Cohen had paid the porn star “out of the kindness of his heart and never told anyone about it.”

“I’d say that would be out of character for Michael Cohen,” Hicks told the jury. “I didn’t know him to be an especially charitable person or selfless person.” Cohen was, instead, “The kind of person who seeks credit.” Later, under gentle cross-examination from the defense, she said his moniker as “Trump’s fixer” came from him. He was a fixer “only because he broke it so that he could fix it.”

So Hicks wasn’t buying the story the president was selling her about the payment being Cohen’s idea. After briefly pleasing the defense by talking about how Trump had asked her to hide the newspapers from his wife so as not to upset her, Hicks said this:

“Mr. Trump’s opinion was that it was better to be dealing with it now and it would have been bad to have that story come out before the election.” In other words, he was more concerned with the effect on the election — the basis for the prosecution — than his wife’s reaction.

A couple of minutes later, it sunk in that she was hurting a man who had treated her well, and she began crying. I think she’s smart enough to know that this was devastating testimony about the criminal intent at the center of this case. Much of the prosecution’s painstakingly assembled evidence has been building to this establishment of motive — from the feverish reaction to the “Access Hollywood” tape (bolstered Friday by Hicks’s testimony), to the urgency of Cohen’s contacts with Stormy Daniels’s lawyer, to the Trump tweets showing him concerned about losing the women’s vote in the election just a few days away.