President Trump’s hush-money trial heard opening arguments on Monday, followed by the first witness, Mr. Trump’s former friend, David Pecker, the ex-president, chairman, and CEO of the National Enquirer. Mr. Pecker will continue to testify on Tuesday.

The court day was originally scheduled to finish at 2:00 pm due to the Passover holiday starting at sundown. But the judge ended even earlier because one of the jurors was suffering from a toothache and had a dentist appointment. 

After the proceeding, Mr. Trump spoke to reporters in the hallway for over nine minutes, seemingly relieved that he could finally talk after sitting at the defense table and listening to the judge and the attorneys for several hours.

“This is a case that … goes back many, many years. 2015. Maybe before that, he told the press from behind a metal barricade. “And it’s a case as to bookkeeping, which is a very minor thing,” the former president explained. “This is a case where you pay a lawyer … they call it a legal expense… And in the book, it’s a little line. That’s a very small line… It’s not like you can tell a life story. They mark it down to a legal expense… That is what I got indicted on…” 

Evidently, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, who brought the case against Mr. Trump, disagrees. Speaking first on Monday was senior counsel to the district attorney, Matthew Colangelo. “This is a case about a criminal conspiracy,” Mr. Colangelo told the jury. “The defendant, Donald Trump, orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election.” 

Mr. Colangelo then began to unfold, step by step, how Mr. Trump and Mr. Pecker, using the Enquirer, conceived a scheme “to influence the presidential election by concealing negative information” about Mr. Trump with the help of his former personal lawyer and current nemesis, Michael Cohen. The prosecutor called him Mr. Trump’s “former fixer.”   

The three men met in August 2015 at Trump Tower and cooked up a three-point plan to help Mr. Trump win the 2016 election, the prosecution alleged. The Enquirer would run “headline after headline that extolled the defendant’s virtues,” Mr. Colangelo argued.

“Pecker had the ultimate say over publication decisions,” Mr. Colangelo said, but magazine covers were shown to Mr. Trump beforehand, so he could “review them.” Mr. Colangelo alleged that Mr. Trump offered suggestions, made edits, and even killed stories. 

Besides publishing “flattering stories” about Mr. Trump, the supermarket tabloid, as Mr. Colangelo described The Enquirer, also ran negative stories that attacked Mr. Trump’s opponents, such as Marco Rubio and Ben Carson, who ran against him in the 2016 Republican primaries.    

But the “core of the conspiracy” was burying allegations from people in Mr. Trump’s orbit seeking to sell stories about alleged sexual liaisons involving the future president. To suppress these stories, Mr. Trump, Cohen and Mr. Pecker employed the “catch-and-kill” method, a tried tactic in the tabloid world in which a source is paid for exclusive rights to a story that is never published. The first such source was Dino Sajudin, a former doorman at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, who made an unproven claim that Mr. Trump had a child out of wedlock with a housekeeper. Mr. Pecker paid him – via Cohen – $30,000 to buy, or ‘catch’, the exclusive rights to the story for the Enquirer and then ‘killed’ the story by not publishing it.

Then there was Karen McDougal, the Playboy of the Month for December, 1997 and Playmate of the Year for 1998. Ms.  McDougal was seeking to sell her story of a nine month-long affair in 2006 with Mr. Trump (who denies the trysts). Mr. Pecker – again using Cohen as the middleman – bought her story for $150,000 under the pretense that Ms. McDougal would write fitness columns for the Enquirer (none were ever published).     

Mr. Colangelo then quoted from the notorious, September 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape, reminding the jury of Mr. Trump’s comments about women allowing famous men to do anything to them: “You can do anything…Grab them by the p—-. You can do anything” (Mr. Trump would later, during a presidential debate, dismiss the remarks as “locker room talk). The judge, Juan Merchan, had barred the prosecution from playing the inflammatory tape for jurors, but they were allowed to read from the transcript.   

“Seeing and hearing a candidate in his own words, in his own voice, with his own body language,” Mr. Colangelo said, had an “immediate and explosive” impact. “The campaign went on immediate damage control mode to blunt the impact of the tape.”

It was in that delicate moment that Dylan Howard, then the editor-in-chief of the Enquirer, informed Cohen about another woman, the porn star Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, who was seeking to sell her story that she had a one-time sexual encounter with Mr. Trump during a celebrity golf tournament at Lake Tahoe in 2006. 

In this case, the Enquirer did not want to disburse any more money. So Cohen transferred $130,000 of his own money to Keith Davidson, the lawyer brokering the hush money deals for both Ms. Clifford and Ms. McDougal, to stop Ms. Clifford from going public with her story. “Cohen made that payment at Donald Trump’s direction and for his benefit and he did it with the special goal of influencing the election,” the prosecution explained. “This was not a spin or communications strategy. This was a planned, coordinated, long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election … to silence people who had something bad about his behavior. It was election fraud, pure and simple.”   

The way that Mr. Trump, once he was installed at the White House, eventually reimbursed Cohen for the payment to Ms. Clifford is at the heart of this case. According to the prosecution, he disguised the payment as expenses for legal services Cohen was providing him, over the course of one year, with eleven checks, eleven invoices, and twelve ledger entries.    

 “The defendant said in his business records that he was paying Cohen for legal services pursuant to a retainer agreement. But those were lies,” Mr. Colangelo told the jury. “The defendant was paying him back for an illegal payment to Stormy Daniels on the eve of the election.”

While Mr. Colangelo was speaking, Mr. Trump sat at the defense table, shaking his head and taking notes that he would pass to his attorneys. 

“Tune out the noise … Focus on the facts … Focus on the evidence … Listen to the testimony … Read the documents … The emails, text messages, bank statements, hand written notes,” Mr. Colangelo concluded. 

The defense agreed. “I am gonna say the same thing that people said,” 

defense attorney Todd Blanche told the jury, referring to the district attorney’s office. “Listen to the evidence … Listen to the folks that still work at Trump Tower … Use your common sense … We’re New Yorkers … We trust you to do that.”  

Mr. Blanche reminded the twelve jurors that the prosecution carried the burden of proof, and that his client was “cloaked in innocence.”    

“I have a spoiler alert,” Mr. Blanche said. “There is nothing wrong with trying to influence an election. It’s called democracy.”

The conspiracy, the prosecution alleged, was nothing but an ordinary business deal between a media outlet and a political candidate, and the hush-money payment a legal agreement to keep a “false claim” from being publicized.          

“There is nothing illegal about entering into a non-disclosure agreement. Period,” Mr. Blanche said. 

The defense then turned its attention to the credibility and character of Cohen, and of Ms. Clifford, the core of their argument. 

He called Cohen a “criminal” and an “admitted liar”, reminding the jury that Cohen’s house was raided by the FBI in 2018, that he was indicted, that he pled guilty to tax evasion and election fraud, and served time in prison. 

“Unbeknownst to President Trump, in all the years that Mr Cohen worked for him, Mr Cohen was also a criminal,” Mr. Blanche said, adding that Cohen was “obsessed” with Mr. Trump.    

“He has a goal, an obsession, with getting Trump. I submit to you he cannot be trusted,” Mr. Blanche insisted, quoting a Sunday social media post from Cohen, in which he stated he had a “mental excitement about this trial.” 

“His entire financial livelihood depends on President Trump’s destruction,” Mr. Blanche continued of Cohen, who recently published a book, “Disloyal”, about his relationship with Mr. Trump. “You cannot make a serious decision about President Trump by relying on the words of Michael Cohen.”

He mentioned the perjury Cohen committed during the recent civil fraud trial, and illustrated the moment by describing how Cohen took the witness stand, raised his right hand, swore an oath and lied.

The defense also attacked Ms. Clifford, calling her “sinister” and disputing her claim that she had sex with Mr. Trump, a tryst she described in graphic detail in “Full Disclosure”, her recent memoir. “It was an attempt to try to embarrass President Trump,” the defense attorney said. “It was damaging to him and damaging to his family. He fought back like he was entitled to do.” 

Mr. Blanche said Mr. Trump and Ms. Clifford had indeed communicated for a time, but only in regard to his hit TV show, “The Apprentice”, and a possible appearance of hers on the show. He reminded the jury that Ms. Clifford had lost her lawsuits against the former president and currently owes him $600,000 to reimburse his legal feels, accusing her of seeking to profit off of Mr. Trump, and saying she “made a life off these communications.”

“She saw her chance to make a lot of money, $130,000, and it worked. Her testimony, whilst salacious, does not matter,” Mr, Blanche argued. 

The prosecution objected six times as Mr. Blanche hinted that Ms. Clifford may have tried to extort Mr. Trump. Judge Merchan sustained two objections, then called all attorneys to the bench, and allowed one of the objections to stand. The prosecution also objected during Mr. Blanche’s disparaging portrayal of Cohen, taking their dispute to the judge’s bench. 

After the opening statements, Judge Merchan granted everyone a short bathroom break. The courtroom was so cold that several of the jurors returned wearing their jackets. Last week, Mr. Trump complained about the temperature, but the matter had not been resolved. 

Then the prosecution called its first witness, Mr. Pecker, 72, who wore a gray suit and yellow tie. He explained his former role at the Enquirer, for which he still works as a private consultant, and how he approved or disapproved of every editorial decision, especially when it came to “big stories” involving celebrities. He also told the jury that he used “checkbook journalism,” meaning he paid for stories. And he answered questions about having two email accounts, one private and one accessible to his assistant. 

It appears the prosecution will use some of these private emails to try to prove their conspiracy allegation. Judge Merchan ended the court session earlier than expected to honor the juror’s dental appointment.   

Mr. Pecker’s testimony will resume tomorrow after Judge Merchan holds a hearing on the gag order he issued against Mr. Trump. The defense has fiercely objected to the gag order, saying Mr. Trump has been gagged from criticizing Ms. Clifford and Cohen even as they are vocal in their denunciations of him.