The spectacle of Stormy Daniels on the witness stand in a Manhattan courtroom this week sent one back to the image of Trump’s last female antagonist, E Jean Carroll, the advice columnist who famously sued Trump for sexually assaulting her, standing victorious outside another courtroom in January. Daniels, unlike Carroll, is not the plaintiff in this case. Nonetheless, Trump’s fortunes rest, to a large degree, on her credibility, a 45-year-old former porn star who the New York Times described this week as “a complicated and imperfect witness”. If Carroll – elegant, measured, articulate – was the perfect victim, Daniels is practically the archetype of the woman court systems tend to revile. And yet, on the strength of her opening testimony, she strikes me as Trump’s very worst nightmare.

This impression is extrajudicial. Daniels, who has already been rebuked by the judge for straying off topic, may prove too wayward a witness to achieve what Carroll did: the civil case equivalent of a guilty verdict against a man almost supernaturally able to avoid them. If we are looking beyond verdicts to the public image, however,........

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