Clashing Visions of Trump

After a year of legal skirmishes and a week of jury selection, today marked the true beginning of the first prosecution of a former American president — a courtroom drama complete with lawyerly broadsides, a no-nonsense judge and 12 Manhattanites sitting in judgment.

The State of New York laid out a twisty tale of hush money, illicit sexual encounters and a battle for the White House. The defense says it’s all a nothing-burger: an overblown attempt to pursue felony charges for actions that, if anything, are minor record-keeping errors.

As the prosecution described it, the case that faces a man who made his Hollywood name with the artificial drama of “The Apprentice” needs no contrivance. In a 45-minute opening statement, the prosecutor Matthew Colangelo wove a complex tale of Donald Trump — reeling from the unsavory revelations of the “Access Hollywood” tape — desperately wanting to bat back another simmering scandal in the weeks before the 2016 presidential election.

That accusation was of a sexual encounter in 2006 with Stormy Daniels, a porn star. Colangelo said Trump, his campaign rattled by the “Access Hollywood” tape, on which the former president bragged about grabbing women’s genitals, agreed to pay Daniels $130,000 “to silence her and to make sure the public did not learn of the sexual encounter.”

Colangelo added that “this was not spin or communication strategy,” but part of a larger effort to dupe the American voters.

“This was a planned, coordinated, long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election to get Donald Trump elected through illegal expenditures,” he said, adding: “It was election fraud.”