Culture Society, Identity and Belonging
Donald Trump’s hush money trial in New York welcomed its star witness yesterday: not Stormy Daniels, who appeared last week, but Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen. Cohen used $130,000 of his own money ahead of the 2016 election to buy Daniels’ silence about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump. Cohen testified yesterday that Trump signed off on the payment (“Just do it”) and worried that the story would be a “disaster for the campaign”. Trump faces 34 counts of falsifying business records tied to his reimbursement of Cohen in the first trial of a former US president (and the only one likely to take place before November’s election). Before going into court, Trump pointed to the latest NYT polls that show him leading Biden in five key battleground states. His trial so far hasn’t moved the political dial.