Hush money to a porn star: of course this was how Trump was indicted
Stormy Daniels didn’t seem to know what she had. In 2011, when The Apprentice was still getting decent ratings and Donald Trump had drawn attention to himself for racist claims about the birthplace of Barack Obama, Daniels – also known as Stephanie Clifford – started asking around to see who she could sell her story to. Daniels, for years a successful porn performer, had met Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in 2006. According to her, he invited her to his hotel room, offered her work on his TV show and then had sex with her. The two remained friendly afterwards; Trump invited Daniels
to the launch of his Trump Vodka brand the following year. It’s the kind of thing you suspect that these two people would have written off as a funny story. Instead, it’s the impetus for one of the most politically volatile prosecutions in the nation’s history: the first criminal indictment of a former president, which was issued on Thursday by a federal grand jury in New York.
Stormy Daniels and the illegal, fraudulent machinations that the Trump campaign allegedly undertook to pay her off during the height of the presidential campaign in 2016 have always struck me as the most quintessential of Trump’s many scandals. Trump denies Daniels’ allegations, but in retrospect, with the hindsight of what we’ve come to learn of him, the scene she recounts is almost unbearably true to his character: the gathering of low-rent celebrities, the paltry quid pro quo, the golf, and the sad, adolescent fantasy of sex with a porn star. The whole story drips with Trump’s defining attribute: the desperate and insatiable need to have his ego gratified. Which is why to me, at least, it seems obvious that Daniels is telling the truth.
Back then, she offered the interview about it to Life & Style magazine. The piece never ran, but they paid her $15,000. It’s not a lot of money, when you put it in the context of what has happened since, but Daniels seems to have made the same assumption that the rest of us did: that Trump would remain on the C-list, making needful and desperate bids for the attention of the tabloids. Back then, you’d have to have been crazy to think that he could have been president.
When it became clear that he might be, Daniels did what any savvy businesswoman would have done: she upped her price. After the Access Hollywood tape broke in October of 2016, Trump’s treatment of women – his leering use of them as props for his ego, his boorish demonstrations of virility for the benefit of other men and, suddenly, a flow of uncannily similar allegations of harassment and assault – gave Daniels another opening.
She approached the National Enquirer, which tipped off the Trump campaign. Michael Cohen, Trump’s sweaty and exhausted lawyer and fixer, offered to pay her $130,000 to shut up and go away, which Daniels was happy to accept. Cohen fronted the money himself; initially, he seems to have taken out a line of credit on his own house. Why go through this labyrinthine route? Why have the lawyer pay personally – an unusual and inappropriate arrangement – especially in an amount that was large for Michael Cohen but should have been small for his alleged billionaire of a boss?
The theory of the case, and the one that has always been most plausible, is that Cohen, and not Trump, initially paid Daniels off because if Trump had paid her, that payment would have been subject to scrutiny – from campaign finance regulators and from the