Stormy Returns The Favor

"This is the only way you're getting out of the trailer park" and other seductions.

Caution: this piece contains the word “fuck” and its variations several times. It’s called for.

In 2006, Donald Trump fucked Stormy Daniels in a brief (very, apparently) and seedy encounter.

Today, she testified in Donald Trump’s ongoing election interference/fraud/hush money trial, and unlike Trump’s performance in the bedroom, she took her time and delivered for the jury.

The case at hand — that Trump slept with her, despite his denials — and that he paid for her silence to help save his 2016 campaign is no longer in dispute.

But I’ve been thinking about how Stormy is a perfect exemplar of how Trump treats all women. Was she a former porn star? Undisputedly. Was she from a lower-middle-class background? By every account. Did Trump still use his perceived power and wealth to use her? You bet he did.

She wasn’t the first or last of his affairs. She wasn’t the highest or the lowest of the women he screwed over the decades and marriages.

I’ve known people like this before (men and a few women, to be honest) for whom sex isn’t about sex. It’s about a cluster of pathologies, insecurities, and, sometimes, evil.

Trump didn’t sexually assault E. Jean Carroll for pleasure; it was about his entitlement and hatred of women. He didn’t fuck Stormy for fun; it was a way of feeling above someone, better than someone. Her life and reputation led him to think of her as he seems to think of most women; as a whore, a hole, a tool for his lusts; Stormy was the kind of woman he viewed as essentially subhuman, interchangeable, and disposable.

Trump, an impulsive child raised by a domineering mother and a distant, cruel father, wasn’t trying to fuck Stormy for pleasure or release or even validation. He fucked her because she was one of the few women he felt superior to.

As he tried to seduce her, his desire crude and obvious, he said she reminded him of his daughter. “You remind me of my daughter because she’s smart, blonde, and beautiful, and people underestimate her.” This is not a line one might expect in the great history of seduction, but for Trump, it was practically Ars Amatoria. For all the MAGA folks who constantly bleat about how the elites hate them, Trump’s other line trying to get Daniels into bed is genuinely ironic: “This is the only way you're getting out of the trailer park."

Strangely, many of Trump’s fans and worshippers look at this story as a validation of Trump’s masculine power and superiority, when in a world of honorable men, his endless behavior on a spectrum of ditchwater womanizing to sexual assault is a profound weakness and a disqualifying character flaw.

The same set of men you’ve seen online defending Trump a billion times — goatee, Dollar Store knockoff Oakley sunglasses, Ford F-150, Punisher decal in the window — who bemoan the death of masculinity are gushing that a Trump is so alpha.

That’s your role model, guys? A shambling, indiscriminate poon hound who leaves his wife home with their infant child to bang a porn star? (Honestly, “bang” seems to be doing too much work there.)

Rather than alpha, it’s one more example of his utter lack of discipline in every domain of his life. His sex with Daniels was the kind of sordid, shabby act that has defined his personal life for decades. She wasn’t even close to the first who bought the “I’ll put you on The Apprentice and make you famous, baby.”

All men are flawed and driven by their desires. Some men work to be better. Pray, don’t ever imagine Donald Trump is one of them.

I’m sure Daniels regrets her momentary entanglement with Trump. It’s become a defining feature in her life, not in a good way. But seeing her nail down the details of Trump’s low character was a pleasure.

She’s the one witness Trump’s id fears the most, if only from what she could tell us about his inadequacies as a sexual partner. (To wit, mushroom-like, two-pump-chump.) Stormy was paid roughly $65,000 a minute for her time in bed with Trump, which seems inadequate.

His desire to keep the “I screwed a porn star and paid her off” story out of the political coverage of his 2016 campaign was explicable, if reprehensible. And now we have the act itself from the mouth of the witness to his nude horror.

Arguing that the coverup was trying to preserve the sanctity of his marriage to his beloved and adored Melania is the latest in a long series of explanations for this story, and more than risible.

It’s an absurdity of the highest order. Melania’s transactional and cold-eyed relationship with Trump was never more than an arrangement. I would argue that Melania, of the endlessly revised prenup, has a relationship with Trump closer to prostitution than his with Stormy, but that would be cruel.

Yesterday’s testimony was the kind of slow, devastating build that made it hard for a jury to ignore the paper trail that matches the testimony of witnesses from David Pecker to Hope Hicks.

While accountants' testimony is never thrilling, the evidence laid out makes the testimony of the two witnesses Trump hates most—Daniels and Michael Cohen—even more credible. The prosecution is doing a stellar job of outlining a case with eyewitnesses and receipts.

You can tell Trump is taking today well:

And by well, I mean he’s howling like a scalded dog.

There’s an Eagles song from 1980 that sprang to mind today. It’s called The King of Hollywood, and when it percolated in my memory, it seemed perfectly appropriate to Trump. It’s the story of an aging Hollywood agent playing the casting couch game in the pre-Viagra world:

Well, he sits up there on his leatherette
Looks through pictures of the ones that he hasn't had yet
When he thinks he wants a closer look,
he gets out his little black telephone book
(He's calling, calling, calling
He's calling, calling, calling
He's calling, calling, calling
He's calling)

"Come sit down here beside me, honey.
Let's have a little heart to heart.
Now look at me and tell me, darlin',
how badly do you want this part?
Are you willing to sacrifice?
And are you willing to be real nice?
All your talent and my good taste,
I'd hate to see it go to waste."

"We gon' get you an apartment, honey.
We gon' get you a car.
(spoken) Yeah, we're gonna take care of you, darlin'.
We gon' make you a movie star.
For years I've seen 'em come and go."
He says, "I've had 'em all, 'ya know.
I handled everything in my own way.
I made 'em what they are today."

After 'while nothin' was pretty.
After 'while everything got lost.
Still, his Jacuzzi runneth over.
Still he just couldn't get off.
He's just another power junky.
Just another silk scarf monkey.
You'd know it if you saw his stuff.
The man just isn't big enough.