The Stormy Daniels Hush Money Case—Which Goes to Trial Next Month—Is a Bigger Deal Than You Think
Trump allegedly broke the law to hide dirt on himself from voters, and it might have changed the fate of the nation.
A SHOCKING THING HAPPENED TO ME the other day. I felt sorry for Donald Trump.
The trigger was the sheer magnitude of the monetary, moral, and legal judgments against him and those yet to come, like an avalanche gathering speed and strength as it hurtles down a steep slope.
Not to worry, my sympathy came and went in less than a minute.
The truth is, a pileup is not the same as piling on. It’s simply that justice delayed is no longer being denied. And it’s happening because Trump, unstable non-genius that he is, never understood the profound risks of a person like him running for president.
Did he think it was like TV, that he was the star, the voters were his audience, and what he owed them was simply entertainment? If so, he was wrong, and this is why the skeptics are wrong to dismiss Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s 34-count criminal indictment of Trump over falsified business records and election law violations.
Trump poses terrifying risks to national security and democracy, as two federal indictments, the Georgia case and what we saw with our own eyes on January 6th, have made clear. The case now scheduled to go to trial first, on March 25—Bragg’s prosecution stemming from hush money payments to porn actress and aspiring Apprentice contestant Stormy Daniels—seems like it’s a lesser order of magnitude. Yet in its own way it is just as dangerous and fundamental. Trump paid big bucks to hide dirt on himself at a key moment in the 2016 campaign. And he succeeded.
Don’t run if you’re hiding secrets
IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO LOOK AT U.S. politics as anything but an exercise in involuntary self-exposure. In his 1992 campaign, then-Gov. Bill Clinton was confronted with accusations that he had dodged the Vietnam draft (based on his own long-ago letter thanking a colonel for “saving” him from it) and Gennifer Flowers’s claim that they’d had a twelve-year extramarital affair. Clinton tried admitting to marital wrongdoing and “causing pain in my marriage,” but as president he caused more pain, and was plagued by old troubles as well.
More than a century earlier, accused “common libertine” Grover Cleveland acknowledged he might have fathered an illegitimate child and during the 1884 race was beset by chants and cartoons asking “Ma, ma, where’s my pa?” His Republican opponent, James G. Blaine, was a former House speaker and senator who had been caught trading favors for cash.
Herman Cain was a leading contender for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination when several allegations of sexual harassment and one woman’s claim of a 13-year extramarital affair rocked his campaign. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin discovered there was no privacy for her family right after 2008 GOP nominee Sen. John McCain chose her as his running mate. On the first day of their convention, Palin blindsided delegates with the announcement that her unmarried daughter Bristol, a 17-year-old high school senior, was five months pregnant.
There were plenty of unknowns about Palin, but campaign adviser Steve Schmidt said at the time that McCain knew about the pregnancy before offering Palin the job and viewed it as “a private family matter.” Veep-vetting had taken a turn for the more intense after the 1972 “Eagleton Affair.” That year, in a harried vice presidential selection process, Democratic nominee George McGovern tapped fellow Sen. Thomas Eagleton, who only told McGovern after the convention that he had been treated for depression three times in the 1960s, twice with electroshock therapy. Within a week, amid questions about the judgment of both men, Eagleton had resigned from the ticket.
Trump is in a league of his own, both in volume and variety, when it comes to scandals, revelations, and buried history waiting to explode under the klieg lights of a national campaign. Pro tip: Don’t run if you’ve cheated on spouses and taxes. If you’ve declared business bankruptcy six times. If your “university” was a “massive scam.” If you illegally used money from your charity for your own gain. If your (third) wife was a nude model. If your personal life and business success depend on deflection and secret-keeping. If you are not who you insist you are.
Trump wasn’t always Teflon Don
GEORGE SANTOS WAS NOT REMOTELY who he said he was, and somehow he slid under the radar of opposition researchers and high-visibility media until way too late. With Trump, we knew plenty before the 2016 election, and everyone—especially Trump—should have known it was just the beginning.
The month before the election was particularly fraught for Trump. That’s when the Washington Post published the infamous 2005 Access Hollywood tape in which Trump, then hosting NBC’s The Apprentice, bragged about kissing and assaulting women. “I don’t even wait,” he says. “And when you’re a star they let you do it. . . . Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” Married, single, it didn’t matter. “I did try and f—k her,” he said of a married woman who resisted his advances and who later, he said, acquired “big phony tits.”
It’s easy to forget now, but that Access Hollywood tape really could have sunk Trump. A parade of prominent Republicans in Congress, among them McCain and Sen. John Thune, said they were withdrawing their support or endorsements. Then-House Speaker Paul Ryan disinvited Trump from an event in Wisconsin. Rob Engstrom, then national political director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, tweeted that “Trump should step down immediately tonight, yielding to Governor Pence as the GOP nominee.” Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman suggested the same.
It was long before politicians feared opposing Trump; long before Trump had learned to play the martyred victim and raise boatloads of money off failure and wrongdoing. He and his friends—lawyer-fixer Michael Cohen and National Enquirer publisher David Pecker—had reportedly already worked out a scheme for Pecker to pay for and never publish stories damaging to Trump.
They had allegedly already paid former Playboy model Karen McDougal $150,000 for her account of a nine-month affair with Trump, and buried the story. A lawyer for Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels, had also approached the National Enquirer. When the Access Hollywood disaster struck, Trump and Cohen offered her $130,000 to keep quiet about a July 2006 sexual encounter she said she had with Trump at Lake Tahoe—“the worst 90 seconds of my life,” she told Cohen in 2021.
Trump said in April 2018 that he didn’t know about the payments. His personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, then said Trump did know, and personally reimbursed Cohen after he became president. Trump called those monthly retainers. But a couple of months later, Cohen pleaded guilty to, among other things, violating campaign laws at Trump’s direction—and served time.
Bragg’s April 2023 “statement of facts” alleges that Trump not only led the suppression efforts but wanted to delay payments to Daniels until after the election and never pay them at all—because then it wouldn’t matter if she went public. (Good luck with the “I was trying to protect Melania” defense.)
“The core is not money for sex. We would say it’s about conspiring to corrupt a presidential election and then lying in New York business records to cover it up,” Bragg said last December on WNYC radio. His indictment unveiled nearly a year ago charges Trump with, as the accompanying press release put it, “falsifying New York business records in order to conceal damaging information and unlawful activity from American voters before and after the 2016 election.”
What if the women had spoken?
WAS THIS JUST A SLEAZY SIDELIGHT in a campaign about a well-known sleazy guy? Would American voters have cared? Let’s go to the timeline:
Trump marries Melania on January 22, 2005. By December, she’s pregnant and he’s joking with radio host Howard Stern about giving her a day or maybe a week to get back her modeling figure. Their son, Barron, is born on March 20, 2006. Daniels says she had her Tahoe encounter with Trump in July 2006, four months after Barron’s birth. McDougal, meanwhile, says her affair with Trump spanned 2006–2007.
In 2017, Vanity Fair reports that Trump pressured Melania to lose her baby weight immediately, as a condition of having a baby. In January 2018, a year after Trump’s inauguration, the Wall Street Journal runs a report on the Stormy Daniels hush money payments. In February 2018, the New Yorker runs the tale of “catch and kill”—Pecker’s scheme to buy and bury stories harmful to Trump.
What if all of this had come out in that month between the Access Hollywood tape and the 2016 election? What if Daniels and McDougal had not been silenced with money? How many voters would have identified with the new mother at home with her four-month-old son and felt disgusted by Trump? Enough to tip the election?
Consider that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 and lost each of three major swing states—Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan—by less than 1 percentage point. A shift of 80,000 votes in those states would have put her over the top in the Electoral College and sent her to the White House.
Also consider that in a 2020 analysis of whether the Access Hollywood tape had an impact, political scientists found “consistent evidence that the release of the tape modestly, though significantly, reduced support for Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign. Surprisingly, these effects were similar among men and women, but they were noticeably larger among Republicans compared to Democrats.”
We can’t know for sure what would have happened on Election Day if Trump and his friends had not paid off women who might have turned some Americans against him, persuaded some people to vote for Clinton, and made others think twice about voting third party. What we do know is that Trump and his friends apparently used illegal means to keep voters in the dark at a moment when a nation’s fate hung in the balance. If that’s not election interference, I can’t imagine what is.
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