The New Yorker:

During Donald Trump’s criminal trial, the inscrutable former White House aide was equally inscrutable on the witness stand, despite breaking out into tears while testifying.

By Eric Lach

Imagine a trial scene at the end of a Mob movie, with a wood-panelled courtroom and a white-haired judge. The old don at the defense table, surrounded by slick lawyers. The striving prosecutors. The armed security. The sworn witnesses, one by one, pressed to stay loyal or turn rat. That has pretty much been the scene on the fifteenth floor of the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse these past few weeks, during former President Donald Trump’s hush-money trial.

On Friday, the former White House counsellor Hope Hicks took the stand. Hicks got involved with the Trump campaign in its early days; she was already on the team in 2015, when Trump came down the Trump Tower escalator to announce that he was running for President, and she was still with him in 2021, when his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol to try to keep him in office. But Hicks has since kept her distance. After his insurrection failed, Trump decamped for Florida. Hicks stayed in Washington, where she runs her own communications consultancy. Now she was testifying against Trump after being subpoenaed by the government. In press reports about the Trump Administration, she’d often been written about as a kind of surrogate daughter to the President—according to other 2016 campaign aides, Hicks used to press Trump’s jackets and pants as he wore them. When she walked into Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom, she could have passed for Ivanka Trump’s sister: hair extravagantly done, back straight, arms down by her sides, handbag held loosely with just the ends of her fingers. But, when she sat down in the witness stand, she didn’t look in her old boss’s direction. “I’m really nervous,” she said, immediately reaching for a glass of water placed in front of her by a court officer.

The government wanted Hicks to testify because she’d had conversations with both Trump and Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney, about Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels, women who say they had sex with Trump in the early years of his marriage to former First Lady Melania Trump. As a top communications aide, Hicks helped shape the official campaign and White House response to articles about McDougal and Daniels that ran in the Wall Street Journal both before and after Trump was elected. The Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, believes that Trump and his allies paid off McDougal and Daniels in 2016 as part of an illegal conspiracy to influence the Presidential election. Bragg’s office has charged Trump with falsifying business records when he allegedly paid Cohen back for paying off Daniels. Trump maintains his innocence, and, in fact, has portrayed himself in many ways as the victim in this trial. 

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