It may seem paradoxical that a porn star could arouse optimism amid an election campaign that has been so thoroughly sullied by Donald Trump’s rhetoric. But that’s how I felt after May 30 when the former president was convicted at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse for falsifying business records in order to hide his affair with Stormy Daniels.
I admit that there were other legally salient components that informed the decision made by the twelve jurors, but every criminal trial is like a show with a set of characters—the bad guys and the good guys, the liars and the saints. The story and its plot—in this case as told by the lawyers for both Trump and Daniels—must have had an impact on the verdict as huge as the testimonies of National Enquirer publisher David Pecker and Trump aide Hope Hicks. Another crucial element is the credibility of the witnesses, or the actors. In this case, when the curtain parted for the encore, Stormy Daniels seemed more credible than Trump, a former reality-TV star.
What can explain her unlikely victory against a billionaire who brags about having been educated at the best schools in America? What is most striking about Ms. Daniels’s testimony is the force of her words compared to the nonsense Trump spewed after the hearings.
Stormy Daniels is anything but a rich kid like Trump. She grew up in a working-class family in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and, despite her single mother’s financial difficulties, she appears to have succeeded academically, demonstrating a talent for journalism, engineering, ballet, and horse riding in high school.
But American life is hard on disadvantaged young women—“my mother…would disappear for days,” Ms. Daniels testified. She turned down a scholarship to veterinary school in part because she’d already been pursuing a career as an exotic dancer since the age of seventeen. “I could make more in two nights than I did shoveling manure eight hours a day” in a stable.
Eager to increase her stripping income, she soon realized she needed glamour shots, either by posing nude for magazines or by entering beauty competitions or appearing in porn films. Acting in films paid well, but she earned even more as a writer and director for Wicked Films. It was in this capacity that in 2006, on a visit to Lake Tahoe, she met the great man who exclaimed, “You actually direct, too? You must be the smart one.” I’ll say!
Not one to think things through, Trump did not hold back. He had his bodyguard invite Ms. Daniels to dine with him and, encouraged by her publicist, she accepted, telling herself that the support of a wealthy man who hosted his own TV show might come in handy. Such was the context in which she was able to benefit from the sophisticated perspectives of a self-proclaimed business genius.
According to Stormy Daniels, as soon as she walked into Trump’s enormous hotel room, she made fun of his pajamas, which were silk or satin. “Ha, does Mr. Hefner know that you stole his outfit?” she asked him. She made him get back into his pants and shirt, after which he asked her a barrage of questions on “the business aspects” of porn films, which she said she thought was “cool.” On the other hand, she remembered, “he kept cutting me off. It was almost like he wanted to one-up me, which was just really hilarious when you think about it.” It’s bizarre to think of a future president trying to get the upper hand over a twenty-seven-year-old stripper.
After those interminable discussions, dinner had still not been served, and Ms. Daniels was hungry. “Are you always this rude? Are you always this arrogant and pompous?” she remembers asking him. I’ll spare you the “seduction” and subsequent sexual relations, except for a condescending comment from Donald Trump challenging Stormy Daniels to prove how serious she was to “get out of that trailer park.” All you need to know is that Daniels never ate dinner with him and that as she was leaving, Trump allegedly said, “We have to get together again soon. We were great together. I want to get you on the show.”
Little did he know that the “show” would take place eighteen years later, live from a criminal courtroom.
Trump did not testify in his defense, so there’s no real way of knowing what was going through his head as he watched his one-time fling systematically destroy him. One can only imagine he felt deeply humiliated. Post-verdict Trump lacked his usual momentum. Perhaps he was still thinking about Michael Cohen, his two-timing lawyer, who, quoting from his former boss, revealed to the court that Donald Trump thought that if his affair with Daniels were to come out, “women would hate him; the guys might think it was cool.” What is not so cool is the Reuters/Ipsos poll taken the day after the trial, in which 20 percent of potential voters said they were now much less likely to vote for Trump compared with 14 percent who said they were much more likely to vote for him.
“You acted and had sex in over 200 porn movies? You have a lot of experience making phony stories about sex appear real?” Trump’s lawyer asked Stormy Daniels on the second day of her marathon testimony. “The sex in the films is very much real, just like what happened to me in that room,” she shot back.
Was this the first time in Trump’s life when reality presented itself in such an authentic way? If so, forgive me, but I can’t help but see it as the beginning of the end of his act, despite Biden’s crack-up in the first debate.
