Stormy Daniels’s testimony paints a dark picture of Trump’s view of sex and power | Moira Donegan

Trump's hush-money trial is, at heart, about the ways powerful men work to prevent women from telling ugly truths

He seems to have understood it as a business deal. That's what Stormy Daniels - the former porn star whose account of a sexual encounter with Donald Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in 2006 is at the center of his criminal hush-money trial - told Anderson Cooper in 2018. When Trump summoned Daniels to his hotel room in Lake Tahoe, he suggested that she might come on his television show, Celebrity Apprentice. Then he demanded sex.

In the law this is called quid pro quo - this for that - an arrangement in which work is offered in exchange for sex. It's illegal: sex cannot be a condition of employment, or a prerequisite for being considered for a job, under laws that are designed to punish sexual harassment and make workplaces accessible and tolerable for women. But Trump has long had a casual relationship to the law.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist