Testimony delivered by adult entertainment star Stormy Daniels on Tuesday could be “death blow” to Trump’s 2024 campaign, Chris Hayes argued on Tuesday’s episode of MSNBC’s “All In.”
“This story, told in the way she told it today is… it seems like much more of a possible death blow than the version that I think had been maybe two to three before or how I understand it, which was like more… the foolish hijinks and less predatory,” Hayes said.
Hayes had responded to Lisa Rubin’s comparison of Daniels’ testimony to that of Trump sexual assault victim E. Jean Carroll. Rubin had explained, “There’s an imbalance of power and she testified to looking up at the ceiling at one point and thinking to herself, ‘How did I misread this situation? How did I get to here?’”
“And I have to tell you, Chris, for me, where that called me back to is May of 2023 sitting in a federal courthouse, not that far away, thinking about an E. Jean Carroll, who was a victim of a sexual assault, thinking to herself after bantering with Trump, thinking she was going to have a cocktail party story in that Bergdorf Goodman lingerie floor and walking out after the assault, shaken, thinking ‘What did I—I screamed up, what did I do to let it go here?’” Rubin added.
Hayes agreed and said his “lightbulb moment” from the day was “the Access Hollywood tape is the biggest crisis” the Trump campaign had to contend with at the time and later accusations from other women who said they were victims of sexual assault at the hands of Trump could deliver Trump’s 2024 campaign a fatal blow.
“And the reason that seemed to matter to me is because of the motive here, which is that this is about the campaign,” he said.
“Right, and to put it even a finer point on it, when you’re talking about literally the campaign on a day by day basis, Stormy Daniel signs the first iteration of this non-disclosure agreement that is not paid for by the Trump people on the same day that the New York Times reports that these other women are coming out of a reward to say that they have been sexually assaulted by Trump,” Rubin added.
Elsewhere in the show, Jen Psaki shut down the idea that voters won’t be impacted by what Daniels said on the stand.
“When you hear that’s a woman blacked out while she was having sex with someone and it was so traumatizing for her her hands were shaking and you combine that with the fact that this same person does not think women should make choices about their own body—that may matter,” Pskai explained.
However, she cautioned, the “prediction game can be a little dangerous” six months before the election.
Earlier in the segment, the pair agreed that the 2016 release of the notorious Access Hollywood tape in which Trump told former host Billy Bush of women, “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab ’em by the p—y. You can do anything” should have been a watershed moment for his ultimately successful presidential run.
“And one of the things that’s been really striking to me about revisiting 2016 and that period was the real sense of like profound shock and like recoil mechanism of so many people,” in response to the tape, said Hayes.
“Republicans, everyone was so grossed out and disgusted by that, what he said on the tape and then women coming forward to be like, ‘He groped me on an airplane’—Trump denied that, he denied all charges—it brought me back to a place where the country as a whole and maybe I had this like quaint notion [that] there were there were things you could do that could sink your campaign.”
Psaki agreed. “I remember being in the White House in the time thinking, well God, this took a while, but this tape is so crazy it’s going to tank his campaign and we don’t have to worry about it,” she said.
“That’s not what happened,” Psaki continued. “We’re not going to have to worry about this guy much longer, but I also think that what happened then has contributed to a form of PTSD where everyone says none of this is going to matter, no one is going to care. People don’t care. It’s all baked in, people say it’s all baked in.”
Daniels’ testimony on Tuesday has been described as “tense.” Daniels answered “yes” when asked if she hates Trump and flatly denied allegations that she attempted to extort the former president. She also admitted that she planned to tell the story before it was sold against her, which she is why she made the hush money agreement in the first place.
Watch the clips from “All In with Chris Hayes” in the video above.
