As I tuned in to “60 Minutes” to watch the Stormy Daniels interview, I swear it wasn’t about the sex. Look, I know the ratings were sex-driven because that’s how you get ratings. I’ll agree that no one watched the show hoping to hear Daniels’ views on, say, the march against gun violence.
But I promise you, the last image I ever want stuck in my head is one of Donald Trump in the adulterous sack.
My guess is many tuned in because they don’t know what else to do about Trump. Maybe the most amazing thing about the Trump presidency is that his historically low approval ratings are as high as they are. We can be pretty sure that the 35-40 percent of Americans who back Trump — who, remember, had all heard the pussy-grabbing Access Hollywood tape before voting for him — will never abandon him.
Not the Trumpists. Not the evangelicals, who don’t seem bothered by porn stars so long as it’s Trump bedding them. Not the Vichy Republicans in Congress, who seem unbothered that Trumpworld was paying hush money (in American money, not in rubles) in the run-up to the 2016 election.
In a CNN poll released Monday, 63 percent said they believed Trump’s accusers and only 21 percent believe Trump. Even a slight majority of white evangelicals believe the women. I mean, why would you pay women hush money if they didn’t actually have a story to tell?
But here’s the kicker to the poll: Despite all the White House chaos of the last week, and all the other weeks, Trump scored a 42 percent approval rating, the highest since his first 100 days in office.
So if you’re a confirmed anti-Trumpist, you figure he’ll never be impeached, he’ll probably never be indicted and it’s all too possible he could even be re-elected. By watching, though, you at least get to see Trump thoroughly humiliated on national TV. It’s something.
It’s hard to resist the story of a porn star and a president, even if he was just a reality-TV star at the time. And who didn’t enjoy Daniels’ story about slapping some POTUS butt with a rolled-up Fortune magazine featuring his image on the cover? That story is so good, and so Trumpian, you desperately hope it’s true.
But the story that stuck, the one the White House and Trump lawyer Michael Cohen rushed to deny, was the parking lot story. When Daniels first tried to tell her story in 2011, for a $15,000 payoff, Daniels said she was approached by someone in a Las Vegas parking lot, warning her to drop it.
“A guy walked up on me and said to me, ‘Leave Trump alone. Forget the story.’” Daniels told Anderson Cooper. “ And then he leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, ‘That’s a beautiful little girl. It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.’ And then he was gone.”
Daniels said she didn’t know who the guy was. There’s no corroboration. There’s no way to know if it was true. But if you believe Daniels’ story about Trump — and apparently most people do — you have to wonder why she would lie about the intimidation. If she’s telling her story to boost her career, which is a reasonable guess, I don’t see how the thug story helps.
What we do know is that, if it is true, it changes the dynamic entirely. It’s not Bill Clinton with an intern. It’s Harvey Weinstein.
The Trump White House rushed to say the parking lot confrontation never happened, but, of course, it’s the one part of the story that the White House can’t credibly deny. They could conceivably know if it had happened. They couldn’t possibly be sure that it hadn’t.
Meanwhile Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who claims he paid Daniels her $130,000 hush money out of his own pocket, has sent Daniels a cease-and-desist letter saying she accused him of sending the thug to the parking lot. Except she didn’t accuse anyone of sending him. The implication is clear enough, though, that it had to be someone from Trumpworld. And we know enough about Cohen — who, in another form of intimidation, is seeking $20 million from Daniels for breaking the hush-money agreement — to at least wonder.
If you didn’t see the interview, don’t worry. The story is not going away. There are lawsuits and countersuits in the Daniels case. And there are other women. There’s Summer Zervos — remember that name — who is suing Trump for defamation. She’s one of the women who accused Trump of “unwanted sexual touching” and whom Trump had called a liar. A New York judge has ruled the lawsuit can proceed.
And Daniels? Here’s the big tell. Trump, who likes to call himself the ultimate counter-puncher, has basically had nothing to say about her. Daniels came after Trump with left and rights, and Trump came back with…nothing, not even an insulting nickname. He also hasn’t tweeted about the accusations of a longstanding affair from Playboy model Karen McDougal.
This is obviously the White House strategy — for Trump simply not to respond to any and all such accusations. You know how hard that has to be for him and his Twitter finger. How long can he hold out? Well, if you’re thinking of an office pool, I would have said the day Trump re-hires Rob Porter (but The New York Times, remarkably, is reporting Trump is considering just that). So I’ll go with either the moment Robert Mueller decides to interview Michael Cohen or the day Daniels’ attorney locates the missing alleged Las Vegas thug.
Mike Littwin writers for ColoradoIndependent.com