The Trump Defense Made Hope Hicks Cry. The Prosecution Got What it Wanted.

Read our ongoing coverage of Donald Trump’s first criminal trial here.

After a drab week of testimony in People of New York v. Donald J. Trump, a bit of excitement finally entered the courtroom Friday when former White House communications director Hope Hicks showed up to testify against her former boss.

There was no dramatic confrontation between Trump and the 35-year-old image of youth within the Trump administration—Hicks did not appear to look at her boss directly when entering or exiting the courtroom, or much at all during the testimony itself. For his part, Trump initially glanced at Hicks, before closing his (beautiful blue) eyes—as he has done throughout the proceedings—during the most sordid parts of questioning.

The most dramatic moment came at the start of cross-examination, when Trump attorney Emil Bove began to ask Hicks about her time at the Trump Organization, and Hicks began to cry—seeming to wipe away a tear with a tissue—before taking a 10-minute break to recompose herself. What made Hicks cry? It’s honestly hard to say. All Bove said was “I want to talk to you about your time at the Trump Organization,” and that was enough to set Hicks off. Maybe the right question is: What else happened at the Trump Organization?

Regardless of the answer, it is hard to envision how the jury will react to the near-breakdown of Hicks, who had revealed only one or two damaging bits of information about her former boss during the prosecutors’ questioning. Hicks, one of the most practiced public relations professionals in the country, appeared incredibly polished during that questioning. It was only when cross started that she seems to have felt the emotional weight of testifying against her former boss.

That emotional crinkle aside, it was when Hicks testified about the Trump team’s response to various scandals that one of the most damning moments of the entire trial occurred. Hicks testified to how Trump reacted when Cohen confessed in a statement to the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman to making the Stormy Daniels payment. According to the testimony, Hicks had a conversation with Trump the next day in which he seemed to indicate knowledge of Cohen’s payment.

“Mr. Trump was saying that he had spoken to Michael,” Hicks said, before correcting herself to call him “President Trump” (presumably because he had already been elected at that point). “President Trump was saying that he had spoken to Michael and that Michael had paid this woman to protect him from a false allegation and that Michael felt like it was his job to protect him and that’s what he was doing.” She added: “And he did it out of the kindness of his own heart—he never told anybody about it.”

At this point, the prosecutor asked whether this was “in character” for Cohen—to pay $130,000 out of the kindness of his heart—and Hicks responded, like many of the other witnesses have, by taking potshots at Cohen. “I would say that would be out of character for Michael,” she acknowledged. “I didn’t know Michael to be an especially charitable person, or selfless person. [He’s] the kind of person who seeks credit.”

The point was that Cohen would not have done this for Trump just out of the goodness of his heart without the knowledge of “the boss.” That the president tried to sell this as the story to Hicks is ridiculous, something Hicks seemed to acknowledge while still detailing only what had been said. This ability to dance around the true subject has proved to be the modus operandi of former Trump Organization staffers throughout the trial. “He thought that it was a generous thing to do and he was appreciative of the loyalty—that’s all I remember,” Hicks concluded.

How the jury will interpret the idea that Cohen was acting generously and alone remains to be seen. The most damaging portion of Hicks’ testimony, though, came in the follow-up to this episode. According to Hicks, Trump “wanted to know how it was playing” in regard to the Daniels story, which broke two years after Trump was elected. Specifically, Hicks said, he wanted to know “my thoughts, opinion about this story vs. having a story—a different kind of story—before the campaign had Michael not made that payment.” She continued: “I think Mr. Trump’s opinion was that it was better to be dealing with it now [in 2018], and it would have been bad to have that story coming out before the election.”

This is the key charge that prosecutors are trying to make: that the thing Trump truly cared about—and the reason the payment had been made—was winning the election. That would make it an illegal unreported in-kind contribution to his campaign, which is the central charge that elevates the falsifying business records case from a misdemeanor to a felony. Expect to hear this portion of Hicks’ testimony repeated forcefully during closing arguments. It’s much more important than the waterworks.

These two moments weren’t the only dramatic parts of her testimony either. Hicks was also on the stand to comment on how she, as press secretary, and the Trump campaign itself reacted to the bombshell release of the Access Hollywood tape on Oct. 7, 2016.

It’s fair to say that Hicks—who, during her time in the administration, often came off almost as a surrogate daughter to Trump due to her closeness to Ivanka Trump and to the president himself—being asked to read Trump’s “Grab ’em by the pussy” comments aloud to situate everyone to the story had the entire room spellbound.

When questioned about receiving an email from David Fahrenthold asking the campaign to comment prior to the release of the tape, she described it dryly as “a video where Mr. Trump and Billy Bush are having an inappropriate conversation about a woman.”

Then, when asked to read the transcript of the tape Fahrenthold sent her, she sped through it, taking just a moment to read part of the lengthy transcript before declaring herself “finished.” When prodded to specifically read the longer “Grab ’em by the pussy” section, she spent a little longer on that before, again, cutting it short, saying, “I’m good.”

She described her immediate reaction as being “very concerned,” particularly about the lack of time to respond, with the Washington Post planning to publish within a couple of hours of sending the comment request. Her initial response, in an email forwarded to other members of the campaign team, was “deny, deny, deny.” She also wrote that there was a “need to hear the tape to be sure.”

Hicks laughed uncomfortably at the obvious misstep of this response—the tape would soon become live and impossible to deny—and said she sent it because “it’s a reflex.”

The fallout from the tape was a full-on “crisis” for the campaign. This is when prosecutors allege that efforts to seal a hush money deal with Daniels went into overdrive. “This was pulling us backwards in a way that was going to be hard to overcome,” Hicks acknowledged through a fog of public relations jargon, seeming to downplay the significance of Republican officials’ initial response to the tape.

In the end, though, Hicks delivered a perfect description of how big a story it was: “We were anticipating a Category 4 hurricane making landfall somewhere on the East Coast [that weekend], and I don’t think anybody remembers where or when that hurricane made landfall,” she testified. “It was all Trump, all the time, for 36 hours.”

The next big witness seems likely to be Cohen, who will have to make the case that Trump’s reaction to that crisis was to buy Daniels’ silence. We’ll see if he takes the stand next week.