An important thing to note about the alleged hush payment is that Donald Trump supposedly only did it to keep his 2016 campaign train from derailing — and to protect his marriage to Melania. The kicker? Only one of these things is true, according to Michael Cohen’s testimony.
Cohen said in the trial that when he questioned Donald about how Melania would react to the Stormy Daniels scandal, Donald simply said, “Don’t worry, he goes, ‘How long do you think I’ll be on the market for? Not long,'” recalled Cohen. “He wasn’t thinking about Melania.” Meanwhile, Melania apparently made an effort to mitigate fallout from the resurfaced “Access Hollywood” tape where Donald boasted about sexual assault. “The spin he wanted put on it was that this is locker room talk, something that Melania had recommended or at least he told me that’s what Melania had thought it was,” Cohen explained.
Imagine helping your man, only to find out he might have been trying to buy silence about an affair. No wonder Melania is absent from the trial! However, Stephanie Grisham, Melania’s former chief of staff, told CNN that Melania is likely keeping tabs on everything to look for concrete evidence. “Melania is very much about proof,” she said. “If some other stuff comes out, I think that’ll be really interesting to watch because you can’t really dispute things that are in writing and that’s something she always paid quite a bit of attention to, was proof.”
