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.
