Longtime Trump confidante Hope Hicks delivered devastating testimony against the former president on Friday, recounting how his 2016 campaign weathered a political firestorm after the release of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape and confirming the lengths to which Donald Trump and his inner circle went to keep hush money payments secret – even from her.
Hicks, a former White House communications director and key adviser, appeared conflicted over testifying. She announced at the outset that she was “very nervous” and then broke down in tears as Trump’s attorney began his questioning, causing the trial to recess briefly.
Her account was a boon for the prosecution as she described being stunned by the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump describes using his celebrity to get away with grabbing women by the genitals.
“I had a good sense to believe this was going to be a massive story and that it was going to dominate the news cycle for the next several days,” she said. “This was a damaging development.”
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The tape, which became public one month before the election – on Oct. 8, 2016 – “was just pulling us backwards in a way that was going to be hard to overcome,” she said.
Then, just four days before the election, she fielded a question from a Wall Street Journal reporter looking for a comment on an even bigger story – a story about American Media Inc., the parent company of The National Enquirer, buying the rights to former Playboy model Karen McDougal’s story that she had an affair with Trump years earlier. And later, the reporter also wanted to know about Stormy Daniels, the former porn star who claimed to have sexual encounters with Trump.
In each instance, Hicks was given an excuse: In the case of McDougal, David Pecker, the former publisher of The National Enquirer, told her that the $150,000 payment was a business contract for magazine covers and fitness columns. And Trump told her that the $130,000 payment to Daniels from Cohen was “made out of the kindness of his heart.”
“Mr. Trump was saying he had spoken to Michael and that Michael had paid this woman to protect him from a false allegation – and that Michael felt like it was his job to protect him and that that’s what he was doing. And he did it out of the kindness of his own heart and he never told anybody about it.”
When asked to describe whether that story seemed to bolster what Hicks knew about Cohen’s character, Hicks said that it was “out of character for Michael.”
“I didn’t know Michael to be an especially charitable person or selfless person,” she said.
Trump’s defense scored one good point on Friday, when Hicks repeated multiple times that, more than anything else, Trump remained most concerned about how the stories about McDougal and Daniels would affect his wife, Melania Trump. The detail plays into plans by the defense to present Trump as a family man concerned with the well-being of his wife – not a politician looking to cover up a scandal ahead of an election.