Stormy Daniels' lawyer didn't give prosecutors fireworks. That will help them.

NEW YORK — In a trial laced with tawdry tales fit for the tabloids, a witness who testified against Donald Trump on Tuesday offered something that prosecutors might find useful: a bit of blandness.

The witness, lawyer Keith Davidson, represented both porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal in 2016, when the two women received hush money to keep quiet about their claims of extramarital sexual encounters with Trump.

Davidson offered crucial details about the secret negotiations that led to the “catch and kill” deals, and his testimony helped prosecutors link the payments to Trump himself and to that year’s presidential election.

But despite the colorful claims at the core of these deals, Davidson’s presentation was cautious and calculated — in other words, lawyerly. For prosecutors, his staid recollection may be a welcome contrast to another key witness who is all but certain to testify against Trump: his former fixer Michael Cohen, who arranged the deals. Cohen has a more boisterous style and is a more problematic witness due to his well documented credibility problems, so prosecutors are no doubt trying to corroborate his expected testimony with other witnesses whom jurors may find more trustworthy or likable.

Davidson appeared to help satisfy that need on Tuesday afternoon, capping off what was, from the beginning, a bad day in court for Trump. Before the start of testimony, Justice Juan Merchan ruled that the former president had violated the gag order in the case nine times by criticizing potential witnesses and jurors. Merchan fined him the maximum penalty of $1,000 per violation and threatened Trump with jail time if the former president continues to violate the gag order.

On the witness stand, Davidson methodically laid out the origins of the hush money deals to Daniels and McDougal. He testified that, even though Cohen put up the $130,000 in hush money for Daniels, Davidson believed that Trump or “some corporate affiliation” of Trump — not Cohen — was actually paying the money.

And when, in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign, Cohen dragged his feet on sending the money, Davidson thought he was offering excuses and “trying to kick the can down the road until after the election” — presumably because Trump and Cohen would no longer need to suppress Daniels’ story after the election. That inference may support prosecutors’ assertion that Trump orchestrated the deal, and tried to conceal it, as part of a scheme to unlawfully influence the election.

Davidson is not done testifying. After the trial takes its customary break on Wednesday, he will return to the stand on Thursday, when Trump’s lawyers may get a chance to cross-examine him.

On Tuesday, as Davidson was asked about salacious details of the deals he struck for his two clients, he at times appeared conservative, trying to discuss the backroom negotiations about tabloid fodder with professional restraint.

He repeatedly referred to McDougal’s alleged yearlong relationship with Trump as a “personal interaction,” without describing it further. Only under further questioning from prosecutors did he admit that McDougal’s allegation concerned a romantic and sexual affair.

Though prosecutors displayed text messages that used language such as “fucked up,” Davidson censored it in his testimony, reading it to the jury as “f’d up.”

He displayed no animus toward Trump. In fact, the only person involved in the events who appeared to anger him was Cohen.

He recounted a story involving a manager for Daniels describing a phone call from “some jerk” who was acting “very, very aggressive.”

“I hate to ask it this way, but who was that jerk?” prosecutor Joshua Steinglass inquired.

Davidson replied, “It was Michael Cohen.”

And he recalled another incident in which various people passed off the responsibility of calling Cohen, saying, “The moral of the story is no one wanted to talk to Cohen.”

That antipathy toward the person who is expected to be prosecutors’ star witness could also prove, in the long run, helpful to them. After all, prosecutors likely don’t need the jury to hold Cohen, with his felony convictions, in high regard. They just need jurors to believe what he — and Davidson — have to say.