I’m only the slightest bit ashamed to admit I was giddy all last week during the build up to Stormy Daniels’ big interview with Anderson Cooper on “60 Minutes” Sunday night. Stormy’s pretty easy on the eyes and I was relishing the irony of seeing the misogynist-in-chief, President Donald Trump, tripped up by his one true weakness: women.
By his own admission, he just can’t keep his hands off of them.
Stormy’s real name is Stephanie Clifford. She’s the adult film star and producer who was paid $130,000 in a non-disclosure agreement by Trump attorney Michael Cohen just weeks before the 2016 election. What she wasn’t supposed to disclose was that she allegedly had sex with Trump back in 2006 in his Lake Tahoe hotel room after a golf tournament.
Well, the cat’s out of the bag now. Stormy’s big reveal? All it took to bed Trump, just weeks after Melania had given birth to their son Barron, was a swat on his rather abundant derrière with a rolled-up magazine, predictably a copy of his own company’s rag, with his name on the cover.
Freaky, in a 50 Shades of Orange kind of way.
Freakier still? Days before Stormy’s “60 Minutes” interview, Cooper interviewed former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal, who alleges she carried on a year-long love affair with Trump from 2006 to 2007, again right after Melania had just given birth. The alleged affair included trysts in hotel rooms in cities across the country, including Lake Tahoe during the same golf tournament Trump met Stormy. It seems McDougal left the tournament a day early, and Stormy blew in after the coast was clear.
OMG! The dude, then a reality TV star, apparently couldn’t keep it in his pants. Who knows what he’s doing with it these days?
But here’s the freakiest thing of all. We’ve crossed the threshold into a strange new land where all of this behavior has become normalized. Candidate Trump, through an intermediary, paid hush money just before the election to a porn star he allegedly had sex with a decade earlier. A Trump-friendly tabloid publication paid McDougal $150,000 for her story in 2011, then in a practice known as catch-and-kill, never ran the story. Nobody cares, especially Trump’s base.
“We didn’t elect him because we thought he was a saint, we elected him because he was a great businessman,” I heard one evangelical pastor say in Trump’s defense on a cable news show. Really? Who have you been doing business with, padre? Rough trade?
Before the 2016 election, revelations such as these—I think it’s safe to say they are no longer mere rumors or locker room talk—would have destroyed any candidate, even the Teflon Don. I’d wager they’ve done substantial harm to his chances of gaining a second term. He may currently enjoy the support of 80 percent of evangelical voters, but they’re not going to put up with this decidedly un-Christian behavior for much longer, especially the women.
But for now, the evangelicals appear to be willing to give Trump a mulligan. They wanted to make America great again. Who knew that as far as extra-marital affairs by high public officials are concerned, it would wind up looking a lot more like France?
What’s it all mean for the rest of us? It’s possible Cohen and Trump’s payment to Stormy Daniels may have violated campaign finance laws, for which they’d have to pay a relatively small fine. There doesn’t appear to be anything here that rises to the level of an impeachable offense, if that’s what you were hoping for.
We could be subjected to the sordid spectacle of a billionaire president publicly extracting $1 million from an aging-but-still-pretty-hot porn star every time she tells her story, but somehow I don’t think it will come to that. Trump the manic tweeter has yet to tweet a single word regarding Daniels or McDougal. What point is there in enforcing the NDA now?
Having listened to these two women describe their interactions with Trump, who they say always behaved like a gentleman (except for that cheating on his wife part), I’m convinced Trump actually likes women, in his own fashion, despite the misogynist rhetoric he’s spewed, policies he’s pursued and judges he’s appointed since he was elected.
In fact, he likes women too much, but only as objects for his base carnal desires. They are his one true weakness. Therein lies the real danger. How will Trump react now that his weakness has been exposed to the entire world, once and for all?
If past experience is any indicator, rather badly, I expect. As soon as arch-neocon warmonger and world renown Islamophobe John Bolton is officially installed as Trump’s new national security advisor, standby for some serious wagging of the dog, President Bill Clinton style, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and beyond, with repercussions that could very well take us to the brink of WW III.
Or, who knows? Maybe this whole Stormy thing will just … blow over.
A Solemn Plea To Our Readers
Dear reader, we live in precarious times. I wrote about the president, the porn star and the playmate because that was this week’s good news. I could have written about the president firing half his staff, or calling for the death penalty for drug dealers like some sort of banana republic dictator, or following through on his threat to ban transgender individuals from the military.
I could have written about Rep. Doug LaMalfa, who’s gone full MAGA on his Facebook page as the June primary election approaches. Or the anti-LaMalfa billboards that have been popping up in District 1, sponsored by Mad Dog Pac, which “solicits contributions from concerned citizens to fund billboards against Treasonweasel House GOP candidates across the country.”
Indeed, I would have written about all of these topics already, except for one thing: aNewsCafe.com publisher Doni Chamberlain won’t let me write for free. Bless her heart, she actually believes journalists ought to be paid fairly for their work, an increasingly rare quality in the business these days.
For the record, I’d do it for free, if she’d let me, because I love writing for aNewsCafe.com that much. For me, it’s all about the audience. I’m particularly addicted to the comments section.
Our comments moderator, Barbara Rice, has a better feel for what’s spirited argument and what’s mean-spirited trolling than any Facebook algorithm. Readers sometimes complain the moderation isn’t consistent—and sometimes the complainers simply buzz off—but overall, in my opinion, you’re far more likely to engage in a meaningful conversation on aNewsCafe.com than on just about any other local media outlet in Shasta County.
This ability to communicate with readers near instantaneously remains one of my favorite features of the internet. It’s flattering, of course, when a reader likes something I’ve written, or agrees with my point of view, but it’s the arguments I crave, because that’s where minds can be changed—sometimes even my own, as my longtime readers can attest.
For me, writing for aNewsCafe.com has given me a sense of community I otherwise might not have. Honestly, I’d be lost out here without it. So naturally, I was a little distressed when Doni assembled the Cafe’s inner crew together earlier this year and informed us that if the website didn’t start bringing in a little more revenue, she was thinking about packing it in.
That’s the bad thing about the internet. For all the wonderful tools it has provided journalists during the past two decades, it has at the same time completely disrupted the journalism industry’s advertising model, at virtually every level. Everybody’s hurting, still, after all these years. That’s why pay walls are going back up at some of the big legacy dailies. That’s why journalism jobs keep disappearing.
There’s something that’s not quite right about all of this. Doni has spent more than 10 years building aNewsCafe.com into a respectable local news and lifestyle website. She’s assembled a talented stable of freelance contributors who can bring in the clicks. If hard work had anything to do with it, Doni would be making money hand over fist, because she’s one of the hardest working journalists I’ve ever known.
But she’s not making enough money, and she won’t let me write for free, so I figured I better put in my little bit for the cause, before it’s too late.
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I’m not sure how far away we are from Doni’s monthly income goal, but when you start seeing my column once a week, every week, you’ll know we’re getting closer.
If my column disappears … well, that’s not going to happen, because you’re going to dig deep, right?