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When all is said and done, we might owe Daniels a debt of gratitude for getting Trump convicted and keeping him from the presidency.
As everyone predicted, the media went into overdrive about Stormy Daniels's time on the stand this week in Donald Trump’s hush money case. She did not disappoint. After watching and reading many accounts, I saw that most referred to her testimony as “salacious” and “cringey.” It seems the media, in order to generate viewers and clicks, is exploiting the preconceived notion of a porn star as being salacious.
However, the onus is not on Daniels being an adult film star. This trial is about Trump, and what Daniels did in her testimony was confirm for the jury that he is a lying, narcissistic, and misogynist lout. In this case, it’s not a porn star who is sleazy, but Trump. Daniels came off as a useful witness against a gigantic sleazeball.
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The defense tried to tear her apart during cross-examination, but Daniels is much smarter than people are giving her credit for, so she was able to skate right through the rough questioning.
When you put sex with a porn star into any equation, all bets are off, particularly in this case, because it involves an out-of-wedlock tryst, money to silence, and male power over a woman. Daniels referred to it as an “imbalance of power.”
But it’s Daniels who is having the last laugh. While Trump looked down on her, re: telling her he could help get her out of a trailer park, Daniels, from the witness stand, looked down on a disheveled Trump. She shifted that power balance.
Before I set out to explain how damaging Daniels’s attestation was, I have to ask, has anyone else noticed Trump’s uncoiffed, alien-like hair this week? Pool photographers are briefly allowed into the courtroom to take photos of what appeared to be whipped-up orange cotton candy sitting on top of his head.
Which really confirms that Stormy Daniels definitely got in Trump’s hair.
Trump has always been hair-challenged and a fanatic about what sits atop his head. In Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House it was described like this: "An absolutely clean pate — a contained island after scalp-reduction surgery — surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray."
Trump is either being lazy when it comes to his rigorous styling technique, or he was overwhelmingly distracted by what Daniels might say about him. Whatever is going on, something’s amiss — or a mess.
Why does this matter? Because any negative talk about his hair sends him into a rage. I’ve seen some hair hits percolating on social media. We all know he’s paying attention and is not happy seeing memes of his sloppy head.
That said, while I can’t talk about how Daniels is affecting the perception of Trump’s guilt, I can see a few ways her words will be used against him as the campaign heats up. She may have an outsized impact on social and broadcast ads targeted toward Christians, moderates, independents, and perhaps beyond.
If you watch the Peacock documentary on Daniels, you will learn that she is a shrewd woman; however, through no fault of her own, any reference to her immediately invokes the word “porn” to many people. Society, as a whole, tries to keep porn at arm's length.
There are those who want no part of porn because it’s “seedy” and “dirty” and others who don’t want to talk about porn because they are secretly visiting — and enjoying — porn sites. So porn is an off-limits topic to most people.
There’s no way to remove “porn” from this trial, and now from the campaign. Unfortunately, Daniels will be the unwitting star of campaign ads, primarily aimed at Christian moderates, equating porn (that dirty word and subject) with Trump. Daniels’s face and words from her testimony will be widely displayed on-screen. She will be used as a bludgeon to hammer home the fact that Trump is “dirty.”
We forget that Daniels could have taken the easy way out and never come forward, but she’s determined to do the right thing. In the end, Americans might owe Daniels a debt of gratitude for helping to sink Trump by dishing all the dirt about him.
Lucy and Ricky, Rob and Laura, Ozzie and Harriet all slept in separate beds, but at least they were in the same room. While we all know that Melania and Donald aren’t Ozzie and Harriet, Daniels testified that Trump told her not to worry about Melania because they sleep in separate rooms. While there are many couples who sleep in separate rooms, you don’t go around bragging about it.
This has less to do with Daniels and more to do with how the misogynist Trump dismisses his wife by putting a gulf between them so that he has a “license” to close the gap between women he wants to bed. Campaign ads won’t go directly after Melania, but they’re likely to underscore how Trump can’t be trusted, most especially around women.
The approach dovetails with the Biden campaign’s “Trump did this” message to women around how Trump has created the abortion access crisis for women around the country.
Daniels testified that Trump told her, "This is the only way you're getting out of the trailer park,” as a way to call out the utter arrogance of Trump.
First and foremost, in 2006, Daniels was doing quite well for herself. Trump assumes that Daniels is “trash” because she’s an adult film star — and a strong woman, no doubt. Trump hates strong women.
We all know that some — not all — but some of Trump’s most fervent supporters live in trailer parks. I don’t mean to stereotype; however, Democrats would be smart to exploit this insult to those who do live in trailer parks and those who come from trailer parks, in campaign ads in red states.
They are wise to do it in a way that contrasts Trump’s insult to Daniels with his gilded gold multimillion-dollar penthouse. It’s an affront to some members of his base and to anyone who works hard to pay the bills to keep their homes.
Tuesday was about as diametrically opposite as you can get with regard to the presumptive Democratic and Republican presidential nominees. While Trump sat hunched and sleeping listening to how he was spanked with a magazine in a doggie position, President Biden was speaking in the hallowed halls of the U.S. Capitol on Holocaust Remembrance Day and condemning the “ferocious” rise in anti-Semitism.
The split-screen contrast will make for a riveting campaign ad about the dichotomy of character between the two nominees.
There are creepy dads, and then there’s Daddy Donald. Daniels testified that Trump told her that she reminded him of his daughter Ivanka. If I were Daniels, I would think this would be one of the biggest insults Trump levied against her, but I digress.
I don’t dare go down this road about Trump wanting to have sex with a woman who reminds him of his daughter. This underscores Trump’s weird sexual infatuation with Ivanka.
Biden’s first daughter was 13 months old when she died in a car crash along with the president’s first wife. The contrast couldn’t be more glaring, a father grieving over his daughter’s death versus Daddy Trump comparing his daughter to a woman he’s had sex with. This has memes and social media gold written all over it.
Americans don’t have time to follow the money, i.e. all the checks, documents, and business records associated with Trump’s 34 felony counts. But what they do understand is human nature and scandal, i.e. sex, porn, lying, and belittling. If he’s convicted, we can thank Stormy Daniels for that too.
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