“The Storm rolls back in,” ran some promotional material Stormy Daniels posted early on Friday, and – as is increasingly the case – it was not immediately clear whether it related to her adult film work or her gathering legal battle with the president of the United States.
Whichever it was, I enjoy Stormy’s relentless message discipline. In so many ways, her attorney, Michael Avenatti – who loves to go on television, and has yet to make a mistake on it – has a dream client. Stormy is smart and self-aware, and has an amusing line in dispatching her critics. By contrast, everyone in the enemy camp loves to go on television, and they only make mistakes on it.
They then make matters worse. As Rudy Giuliani later said of his surprise Fox News announcement that, contrary to previous statements, Donald Trump had paid back Stormy’s $130,000 hush money to his lawyer during the presidential election campaign: “I was going to get this over with.” Do expect Giuliani to go on TV shortly to explain why, having revealed the original potentially incriminating mistake, he then described this revelation itself as something to be got over with, presumably on account of its potentially incriminating nature. As that classic law of American political scandals runs: it’s not the crime; it’s the inability to stop going on television and revealing that you have committed a crime.
It’s notable, incidentally, how much of this particular story involves people “getting something over with”. Before Stormy Daniels (real name Stephanie Clifford) signed her confidentiality agreement in 2016, she gave an interview about her liaison with Trump. (He still denies it, by the way, despite having paid $130,000 – making you wonder what he’d do to bury something if he was genuinely compromised.)
Stormy’s “5,500 words of cray” were eventually published in January, and mark her emergence as a hilariously affectless picaresque heroine. When she emerges from the bathroom at their first hook-up, she finds Trump sitting on the bed. “Ugh, here we go,” she recalls thinking. The sex is categorised as “textbook generic”. Stormy doesn’t say which genre – and she’s worked across a few – but implies a vanilla quality. “I actually don’t even know why I did it,” she muses at one point, “but I do remember while we were having sex, I was like: ‘Please don’t try to pay me.’” That was the heat of the moment. Eventually, Stormy would come round to the idea of payment of another sort.
Despite maintaining “one position” during sex with Stormy, Trump has now adopted several conflicting ones on the payment. Arguably the most ridiculous is the tone of Victorian gentility written into a series of stiff tweets on Thursday.
“Prior to its violation by Ms Clifford and her attorney,” this refined communique sniffed, “this was a private agreement.” I’m not sure you can carry off this whole “Ms Clifford” tone when the entire world has online access to the claim that you interspersed bad sex with obsessive watching of the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, delivering post-coital lectures on how you wished all the sharks would die and you would “never donate to a charity that helps sharks”. Many will find Daniels’s kissing-and-telling distasteful. But perhaps you have to set a shark to catch a shark. (Apologies to Discovery if this is not precisely how shark hunting works.)
Quite how much or little of a toss American voters give about being told barefaced lies by the White House will become clear in November’s midterm elections. But if the results enable the Democrats to impeach Trump, there would be something appropriately vanilla about the Stormy storm being Trump’s downfall.
For all the Russian election meddling, and the accusations of baroque international financial corruption, there would be a certain poetic justice if Donald Trump’s nemesis proved to be a woman, of all things, with the medium of television as her accomplice. If you were writing this one, you’d certainly have all the international conspiracy stuff as a subplot. But death by sex and television is so much more perfect.
And, heaven knows, Trump has long reduced epic global events to mere comments on his sexual incontinence. He famously described the business of avoiding STDs as “my personal Vietnam”. The other Vietnam – the one set in actual Vietnam – he couldn’t make, because of heel spurs. But vaginas “are landmines”, he judged, and he felt “like a great and very brave soldier”. To survive the metaphorical conflict, and then come home and shoot yourself … well, it wouldn’t quite be tragic. How does that other saying go? History repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce, and finally as porn.
• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
