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That whole episode in the suite,\u201d Manhattan prosecutor Joshua Steinglass<\/strong> reflected on Tuesday, \u201cthat was uncomfortable.\u201d<\/p>\n In his closing remarks in Donald Trump\u2019s<\/strong> hush money trial<\/a>, Steinglass was taking jurors back to the night in 2006, when, as the porn star Stormy Daniels<\/strong> testified<\/a> this month, she slept with the former president in his hotel room. Steinglass has a crisp and colloquial manner\u2014 sometimes referring to people in Trump\u2019s orbit as \u201cthese guys\u201d\u2013and as he wrapped up the prosecution\u2019s case against Trump, he put the parameters in plain terms.<\/p>\n Daniel\u2019s \u201cstory is messy,\u201d Steinglass continued. \u201cIt makes people uncomfortable to hear. It probably makes some of you uncomfortable to hear. But that\u2019s kind of the point.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the past five weeks, Trump\u2019s trial has often revolved around a slew of documents and phone records. The former president has pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records to disguise a payment to Daniels for her silence, and denied any affair with her. As his attorney Todd Blanche<\/strong> put it earlier in the day in his own closing statement<\/a>, \u201cIt\u2019s a paper case.\u201d But in Steinglass\u2019s telling, there was a narrative throughline.<\/p>\n \u201cStormy Daniels was the motive,\u201d he told the jury.<\/p>\n In the lead-up the 2016 election, the revelation of the Access Hollywood<\/em> tape\u2013in which, as Steinglass recalled, Trump discussed \u201cgrabbing women by the genitals\u201d\u2013threw the Republican nominee\u2019s campaign into disarray. The payment to Daniels followed shortly afterwards, and it amounted, the prosecutor said, to an effort to manipulate the electorate. It could be asked, he acknowledged, how much people would care if Trump had slept with a porn star ten years prior. Voters, Steinglass said, had a right to decide if they did.<\/p>\n Blanche had devoted the thrust of his summation to discrediting Michael Cohen,<\/strong> Trump\u2019s former fixer who arranged the payment to Daniels. Steinglass didn\u2019t quite defend the integrity of the admitted perjurer, but he did offer an emotive account of Cohen\u2019s conduct. It was true, he said, that Cohen was nurturing ill feelings towards his old boss after serving prison time related to the Daniels payment. But Cohen had been \u201cthe defendant\u2019s right hand man, his consigliere,\u201d Steinglass said. \u201cWhen it went bad, the defendant let him loose, dropped him like a hot potato, and tweeted out to the world that Mr. Cohen was a scumbag.\u201d<\/p>\n Steinglass seemed incredulous at the circumstances of \u201cthe Trump phenomenon\u201d he was describing, perhaps even slightly amused to be recounting them on this solemn stage. Cohen, he said, is \u201cunderstandably angry that to date, he\u2019s the only one who\u2019s paid the price for his role in this conspiracy.\u201d<\/p>\n In any case, Steinglass said, while Cohen had lied in the past, he had done so for Trump\u2013and Trump was the one who had employed him \u201cbecause he was willing to lie and cheat on Mr. Trump\u2019s behalf.\u201d And if Cohen had been lying during his testimony<\/a>, Steinglass proposed, why wouldn\u2019t he go further and say, for instance, that Trump had privately admitted to sleeping with Daniels?<\/p>\n Blanche looked intently at Steinglass while Trump stared straight ahead. The members of Trump\u2019s family in attendance\u2013Don Jr., Eric,<\/strong> and Tiffany<\/strong>\u2013glanced at their phones. Steinglass\u2019s remarks were set to stretch into the evening, and as Tiffany exited the courtroom during a 5 p.m. break, she mouthed \u201chey\u201d to Rudy Giuliani\u2019s<\/strong> son Andrew,<\/strong> who has been a fixture at the trial.<\/p>\n By this stage of the broader Trump-Daniels-Cohen story, enacted in 2016 and surfaced in 2018, the details surrounding this colorful cast have spilled out over and over. Steinglass seemed to be attempting, in the six hours his remarks spanned, to recenter the case. News outlets sometimes employ slight euphemisms to describe Daniels\u2019s work\u2013\u201cadult film star\u201d or \u201cadult entertainer\u201d\u2013but he preferred the punchy, evocative pairing of \u201cporn star\u201d with \u201cpresident.\u201d It was a way to remind the jurors, who will begin to deliberate as soon as Wednesday, that the reason that they had been reviewing documents in this courtroom for over a month could ultimately be traced back to a single night in Lake Tahoe 18 years ago.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n