Jurors at Donald Trump’s Manhattan hush money trial got an inside look at his unique grammatical preferences for social media posts — such as capitalizing the word “country” and employing the Oxford comma.
Madeleine Westerhout, Trump’s former director of Oval Office operations and one-time personal assistant in the White House, told jurors that he had an elaborate, multi-step routine with his aides to craft his social media posts.
“Once in a while … the president would call me and dictate a tweet to me,” Westerhout, 33, testified in Manhattan Supreme Court on Thursday.
She would “scribble” the then-president’s words down, type them up on the computer and then print them out to “give it to him so he could look over it,” she told jurors.
Trump, 77, would edit the printout and sometimes ask her to make other changes, she said.
“My recollection is that there were certain words that he liked to capitalize,” Westerhout said. “Words like ‘country.’ And he liked to use exclamation points.”
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee “liked to use the Oxford comma,” Westerhout said, referring to the grammatical option of putting a comma after the second-to-last item in a list.
Westerhout — whose desk was directly outside the Oval Office — described Trump as a person who paid attention to details and had specific preferences including opting to “sign things himself” by hand with a “Sharpie or a felt-tip pen.”
Trump in general didn’t use a computer or email, preferring to work off hard copies of documents, Westerhout testified.
She also recalled how the former commander-in-chief kept the Resolute Desk, inside the Oval Office, “pristine” for meetings and instead chose to work most of the time in the dining room.
Westerhout gushed about her time in Trump’s employ — calling him “a really good boss” — and even teared up on the stand when she described resigning.
“He never once made me feel that I didn’t deserve that job and that I didn’t belong there,” she testified.
“Especially in an office filled with older men, he never made me feel like I didn’t belong there. He was a really good boss.”
Westerhout, through tears, said she stepped down from her post after she shared information about the Trump family to the press.
She said she was “very regretful of my youthful indiscretion” and claimed to have “grown a lot” since her departure in 2019.
Westerhout began testifying Thursday afternoon and finished Friday morning after a bombshell week at trial that saw porn star Stormy Daniels take the stand over two days, describing her alleged one-night stand with a married Trump.
After Westerhout wrapped, two staffers in the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg — who is prosecuting the case — took the stand to speak about electronic evidence in the trial, such as social media posts and cellphone records.
Trial is scheduled to resume Monday morning with former Trump lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen expected to take the stand.
Cohen is slated to be the prosecution’s star witness and has already testified against his longtime boss at a civil fraud trial last year.
Trump is accused of covering up a $130,000 payment he directed Cohen to make to Daniels in the run-up to the 2016 election to keep her quiet about her claims she had a tryst with the married mogul.
On Tuesday, Daniels testified that her sexual encounter with Trump in 2006, a year after he married wife Melania, was “brief” and in the “missionary position.”
Trump’s lawyers Thursday afternoon lost a bid for a mistrial after they claimed Daniels’ salacious testimony could prejudice jurors against their client.
But Judge Juan Merchan said Daniels had the right to prove her credibility and corroborate her story after Trump’s team opened the door for her testimony by blasting her as a liar who made up the whole story.
Merchan also ripped Trump lawyer Susan Necheles for failing to object during Daniels’ mention of the word condom. Daniels told jurors Trump wasn’t wearing one during their alleged sexual encounter.
Trump has denied the charges and claimed this case, along with three other criminal cases he faces, are part of a political witch hunt to keep him from getting re-elected.
