Seriously, what could be better than watching a so-called “porn star” take down the trashiest leader our country has ever known? Sure, Robert Mueller's the Marine on a mission, but a Stormy Daniels take-down feels like just deserts for a man who knows no low.
After so many women came virtuously forward with their stories of violation by Donald Trump only to be demeaned and threatened with lawsuits comes a killer cleanup batter who likely had totally consensual transactional sex with Trump. She's the honey badger America's been waiting for—she don't care. As Lili Loofbourow writes in The Week, Stormy's beating Trump with his ritual weapon of choice: the shame game.
Porn stars don't find shame especially useful, and Daniels is no exception. This poses a problem for the president: Daniels (aka Stephanie Gregory Clifford) is utterly unembarrassed about profiting off her connection to him. She's unembarrassed in general. As the president's most virulent defenders have come after her, she's parried their attacks with jokes that defang them. Cracks about her age earn GILF humor, cracks about her being a prostitute have her crowing with glee. She's so good at this that her attackers often end up deleting their tweets; it's just not worth it.
Neutralizing shame has leveled the playing field to a simple match of wits. And guess what? Stephanie Clifford doesn't just have the hair advantage in this head-to-head. She has aggressively backed Trump and his bumbling legal hatchet man into a litigious corner of no escape. The Nondisclosure Agreement (NDA) that she signed and he didn't before $130,000 was transferred into her account is a no-win situation for the fence-sitting Trumpty Dumpty. Any response he makes to Clifford's effort to get the NDA disqualified could lead to a ruinous fall.
If Trump cops to being David Dennison, the name on the NDA that's conspicuously missing a signature, then he's admitting to the affair as outlined in the agreement.
That would be a disaster. Trump's story up to this point is that he had no relationship with Daniels and that his attorney (using a Trump Organization email and through a shell company he set up two weeks before the election) merely "facilitated" a transfer of funds to her on his own initiative, and for unspecified reasons. If Trump claims the benefit of the NDA, that story blows up. And this becomes the story of a massive coverup.
Not only does that admission leave Trump with some massive egg on his face, it could carry the extra weight of rendering the payment an undisclosed campaign contribution.
Or, Trump could deny being David Dennison, thereby dissolving the NDA.
That would liberate Stormy Daniels to share whatever she has, and since the settlement mentions "artistic media, impressions, paintings, video images, still images, email messages, text messages, Instagram message [sic], facebook [sic] posting or any other type of creation by DD," the mind boggles at what that might include.
Stephanie Clifford, the blonde bombshell Trump likely thought he conquered, might just turn out to be the ace operator who calls the blowhard-in-chief's bluff. And more power to her—it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.