And then there are PP and DD, the names used in the contract that is at the center of the alleged crime, in which Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen (and now the central witness in the Manhattan district attorney’s case against Trump) agreed to pay Daniels $130,000 not to speak about her relations with his boss.
Grind in silence tv#
Trump, of course, appears in it as The Donald, the ludicrous fantasy mogul from The Apprentice, the reality TV show where she hoped-in return, she says, for “two to three minutes” of bump-and-grind action in his penthouse bedroom-he would make her a contestant.
We might add to the cast list Daniels’s surgically enhanced triple-D breasts, which she named Thunder and Lightning. Clifford herself long ago disappeared into her avatar, Stormy Daniels, the nom de guerre she adopted shortly after she began her career in porn films. This is an epic so entangled in fictions that it has its own cast of made-up characters. History is being made, but it is, like Trump himself, history unfolding the second, third, and fourth time as farce, so that its primary tragedy is buried under layers of absurdity. It keeps that fading extravaganza on the road. It is a lurid-and seductively entertaining-sideshow in the great circus of which he is the ringmaster. This episode comes from, and gives new life to, the world of performative politics in which he remains the leading player. It’s that all of this drags us back into Trump’s territory. It is not just that using Stormy Daniels as the way to hold him to account plays dizzying tricks with perspective, zeroing in on a molehill of sleaze when the mountain of Trump’s criminal sedition continues to loom so large against the horizon of American democracy. Trump is a criminal-but not because he screwed a porn star and paid her hush money. It has turned it into an invasive species that has spread uncontrollably from its natural habitat of juicy gossip and into places it does not belong: the law, politics, and even the Constitution. The irony of the whole episode is that the apparent success of this operation in silencing Daniels did not contain her story. Wrapped up in “catch and kill,” the practice of capturing a sleazy tale and confining it in the cage of a nondisclosure agreement, is the image of a story as a feral creature with a life of its own, roaming out there on the untamed frontiers of scandalmongering, needing to be lured in with the smell of money and trapped in a net of legalities. We are in a very Trumpian world where the relationship between real events and the narratives they generate has gone wild. How much was Clifford’s account worth at different times between the encounter in 2006 and January 12, 2018, when The Wall Street Journal ran its headline “ TRUMP LAWYER ARRANGED $130,000 PAYMENT FOR ADULT-FILM STAR’S SILENCE”? Who could make the most money from it? What would its political impact be? How could it be defined as crime? All of them concern, rather, the telling, silencing, commodification, and politicization of that tale. None of the main plot points-which are expected to lead to Trump becoming the first former or sitting US president ever to be charged with a crime-relate to what actually happened on the night of July 13, 2006, when a twenty-seven-year-old porn star, Stormy Daniels, aka Stephanie Clifford, had bad sex with sixty-year-old Trump in the penthouse of Harrah’s Lake Tahoe Hotel and Casino in Nevada. The problem with the likely indictment of Donald Trump is that his offense is a metafiction.
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