Stormy Daniels didn’t seem to know what she had. In 2011, when The Apprentice was still getting decent ratings and Donald Trump had drawn attention to himself for racist claims about the birthplace of Barack Obama, Daniels – also known as Stephanie Clifford – started asking around to see who she could sell her story to. Daniels, for years a successful porn performer, had met Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in 2006. According to her, he invited her to his hotel room, offered her work on his TV show and then had sex with her. The two remained friendly afterwards; Trump invited Daniels to the launch of his Trump Vodka brand the following year. It’s the kind of thing you suspect that these two people would have written off as a funny story. Instead, it’s the impetus for one of the most politically volatile prosecutions in the nation’s history: the first criminal indictment of a former president, which was issued on Thursday by a federal grand jury in New York.
Stormy Daniels and the illegal, fraudulent machinations that the Trump campaign allegedly undertook to pay her off during the height of the presidential campaign in 2016 have always struck me as the most quintessential of Trump’s many scandals. Trump denies Daniels’ allegations, but in retrospect, with the hindsight of what we’ve come to learn of him, the scene she recounts is almost unbearably true to his character: the gathering of low-rent celebrities, the paltry quid pro quo, the golf, and the sad, adolescent fantasy of sex with a porn star. The whole story drips with Trump’s defining attribute: the desperate and insatiable need to have his ego gratified. Which is why to me, at least, it seems obvious that Daniels is telling the truth.
Back then, she offered the interview about it to Life & Style magazine. The piece never ran, but they paid her $15,000. It’s not a lot of money, when you put it in the context of what has happened since, but Daniels seems to have made the same assumption that the rest of us did: that Trump would remain on the C-list, making needful and desperate bids for the attention of the tabloids. Back then, you’d have to have been crazy to think that he could have been president.
When it became clear that he might be, Daniels did what any savvy businesswoman would have done: she upped her price. After the Access Hollywood tape broke in October of 2016, Trump’s treatment of women – his leering use of them as props for his ego, his boorish demonstrations of virility for the benefit of other men and, suddenly, a flow of uncannily similar allegations of harassment and assault – gave Daniels another opening.
She approached the National Enquirer, which tipped off the Trump campaign. Michael Cohen, Trump’s sweaty and exhausted lawyer and fixer, offered to pay her $130,000 to shut up and go away, which Daniels was happy to accept. Cohen fronted the money himself; initially, he seems to have taken out a line of credit on his own house. Why go through this labyrinthine route? Why have the lawyer pay personally – an unusual and inappropriate arrangement – especially in an amount that was large for Michael Cohen but should have been small for his alleged billionaire of a boss?
The theory of the case, and the one that has always been most plausible, is that Cohen, and not Trump, initially paid Daniels off because if Trump had paid her, that payment would have been subject to scrutiny – from campaign finance regulators and from the public. And in the waning days of what was a chaotic and flailing election, this was scrutiny that the Trump campaign could not afford.
The Stormy Daniels affair is not the most serious of Trump’s alleged crimes, and so it can seem anticlimactic, and even a little ridiculous, that this is the only bit of his wrongdoing that he has been indicted for. A grand jury in Georgia is investigating a phone call he made to the secretary of state there in the wake of the 2020 election, seemingly imploring the official, Brad Raffensperger, to facilitate election fraud in his favor; at the justice department, a series of investigations into the January 6 riot, which disrupted the transfer of power and left five people dead, are proceeding at a glacial pace. He was impeached for it; he was also impeached for holding military aid to Ukraine hostage so he could try to dig up dirt on Joe Biden’s son.
Trump also seems to have taken dozens or hundreds of classified documents with him to his tacky resort at Mar-a-Lago, throwing them into boxes like someone stuffing their pockets with tiny shampoo bottles before they leave a fancy hotel. But none of that is what he’s being held accountable for: he’s being held to account for trying to launder his hush money to a porn star.
Trump will no doubt claim that the indictment against him on these comparatively trivial grounds is politically motivated, and he’s already got some support from Democrats in making that claim. David Axelrod, the former Obama strategist, characterized the Daniels charges, not unreasonably, as the “least meaningful” of Trump’s offenses. “If he’s going to be indicted in any of these probes, this [is] the one he probably would want first to try and color all of them as politically motivated.”
But if anything, what seems politically motivated is the fact that Trump has not been indicted on criminal charges already: his criminality and corruption are so profligate and unconcealed that the failure to charge him – a failure which until Thursday was unanimous among prosecutors across the country – seemed manifestly a result of fear. “No one is above the law” is something prosecutors like to say a lot; but the large-scale impunity for the rich and powerful indicates that they don’t quite believe it.
Now that’s changed, at least in a small way. It’s yet to be seen whether any other prosecutors will discover the courage to charge Trump. For now, he’s only been charged on the stupidest and lowest matter possible. Maybe that’s appropriate: Trump the man always seemed a little too small and stupid, his effect on history dramatically outsized to the banality of his character. This isn’t the Trump indictment we wanted, but it might be the one we deserve.
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Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
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