The Real Perversion in Trump’s Porn-Star-Hush-Money Caper

By David Corn  March 25, 2023

Adult film actress Stormy Daniels speaks outside federal court in New York City on April 16, 2018. Mary Altaffer/AP

The possible indictment of Donald Trump—which may or may not have happened by the time you read this—is a useful reminder of how the whole porn-star-hush-money escapade illuminates so many key elements of Trumpishness. Sleazy personal behavior. Check! Relentless misogyny. Check! Tawdry tabloid skullduggery. Check! Furtive, behind-closed-doors deals. Check! Refusal to take responsibility for his actions. Check! Lying. Check! When the Wall Street Journal revealed in early 2018 that Michael Cohen, the onetime Trump lawyer and fixer, had made a keep-mum $130,000 payment to adult film star and director Stormy Daniels in the final days of the 2016 campaign, Trump publicly insisted he did not know of the payoff. That was false. But this episode also provides a superb example of a malady that Republicans moan about daily: the weaponization of government. In particular, the weaponization—that is, abuse—of the Justice Department. StormyGate proves that the pursuit of justice was perverted during the Trump years to—wait for it—protect Trump.

There’s a lot of heated chatter these days about whether the payment to Daniels violated campaign finance laws—but in one way, that has already been determined. In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to a variety of federal charges, including tax evasion, making a false statement to a bank, lying to Congress (about Trump’s business dealings in Russia), and violating campaign finance law. In the legal filing prepared for his plea by the office of the US attorney of the Southern District of New York—the document is called an “information”—federal prosecutors cited two instances of Cohen breaking campaign laws. (For a refresher on the sordid hush-money deal, see this recent piece I wrote.)

The first was Cohen’s participation in a scheme mounted in 2016 by David Pecker, the chair of American Media, Inc. (which owned the National Enquirer) and an intimate of Trump. This one involved AMI buying and smothering the story of Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who alleged she had an affair with Trump in 2006 and 2007. In a classic tabloid “catch-and-kill” gambit, AMI, at Cohen’s urging, paid her $150,000 to acquire the story of her relationship with “any then-married man,” and then did not publish a word about her time with Trump. (Trump was supposed to reimburse AMI; he did not.) The feds considered this payment an illegal contribution to Trump’s campaign.

The second was the Stormy Daniels caper. In that instance, Cohen himself took money from his home equity line of credit and paid Daniels the shut-up money. After the election, he was reimbursed by Trump through a phony legal retainer. The US attorney’s information—which Cohen accepted with his guilty plea—noted that Cohen “caused and made” the McDougal and Daniels payments “to influence the 2016 presidential election.” The feds contended these were illegal donations to the Trump campaign and a crime. Since Cohen pleaded guilty, there was no trial and this conclusion was never challenged.

Here's where things get dicey for Trump and the Republicans with their so-called concern for the politicization of the Justice Department. Both Cohen and the prosecutors who nabbed him said he was acting at the instruction of and in coordination with Trump when he broke the law. Yet the feds never prosecuted Trump. They let the kingpin skate. Moreover, the Trump Justice Department even took steps to keep Trump out of the case.

In his 2022 book, Holding the Line, Geoffrey Berman, the former US attorney for the Southern District, revealed that when his office was drafting the information in the Cohen case in 2018, Main Justice—that means the DC headquarters of the Department of Justice then headed by Jeff Sessions—asked for the information to be greatly pared down to include nothing specific about the crimes Cohen committed and with whom he had committed them. It also requested that all references to “Individual-1” be removed from the document. This was a reference to Trump. (In such filings, people not being charged with a crime are generally not mentioned by name.) There was a fierce argument over this, with the prosecutors in New York opposing the effort to write Individual-1 out of the plot. SDNY ended up with the more expansive version of the information. But it did remove the statement that Cohen acted “in concert with” and “coordinated with” Trump on the illegal campaign contributions. Instead, it declared that Cohen acted in concert and coordinated with “one or more members of the campaign.” In a blatant and brazen act of politicization, at the urging of the president’s Justice Department, SDNY had photoshopped Trump out of the picture.

The SDNY prosecutors still tried to stick it to Trump. When they later submitted a sentencing memo in the Cohen case in December 2018, they noted that “in respect” to the McDougal and Daniels payments, Cohen “acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1.” Cohen also testified to this in court. So here were the feds acknowledging that Cohen had committed a crime with Trump at Trump’s instruction. Yet no federal action was taken against the guy responsible for this felony. Cohen was sentenced to three years in a federal prison.

After Cohen’s guilty plea, SDNY continued to investigate, perhaps looking to make a case against Trump. But when Bill Barr became attorney general in early 2019, he ordered SDNY to stop all investigative work on this front, while Main Justice evaluated whether there had been a legitimate legal basis for the charges to which Cohen had pleaded guilty, and, as Berman put it, “until Barr determined there was a sufficient federal interest in pursuing charges against others.” Berman and the others suspected that Barr was considering ordering SDNY to dismiss the Cohen’s guilty plea related to the campaign finance violations—which would mean letting Trump off the hook. “It certainly seemed clear that Barr did not want the Cohen case spiraling in new directions,” Berman writes. Barr even attempted to put the Cohen case under the auspices of another US attorney regarded as a Barr loyalist. Berman opposed this move, and Barr backed down.

It's not publicly known how far SDNY went in examining Trump’s role in these crimes. But Berman notes: “Barr shut us down on Cohen.”

Which brings us to the House Republicans. Ever since taking over the lower body of Congress, they have been on a tear investigating often-bogus charges of governmental abuse. (The Deep State conspired with Twitter to elect Joe Biden!) Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan is a prominent Big Lie champion who plotted with Trump to overturn the election. He now chairs a subcommittee on the “weaponization of the federal government”—which is not much more than a propaganda operation concocted to legitimize various fever dreams and conspiracy theories of the right. Yet the politicization of the Justice Department during the Trump years is not on the subcommittee’s to-do list. Such weaponization is too real to investigate.

In the end, the NSFW tale of Donald and Stormy not only reveals the multiple sides of Trump’s personal corruption; it illuminates the institutional corruption of the Trump administration. This is perversion on a deeper and far more troubling level—an abuse of power the GOP won’t touch.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.

Dumbass Comment of the Week (Possible Trump Indictment Edition)

The possible—or pending—indictment of Donald Trump sparked a tsunami of idiocy. Of course, Trump led the way last weekend by declaring he expected to be arrested on Tuesday and calling on his followers to rise up. He had no reason to assume that March 21 would be Indictment Day, and few Trump supporters heeded the call. But his bogus prediction nonetheless dominated the news cycle for days and prompted a week of stupid statements from the Trumpist right. Our judges for DCotW could not keep up with everything. (They even looked up worker’s comp regulations.) But they kept track of some of the most notable comments.

Unsurprisingly, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) was at the head of this pact with his tweet, “If I were Governor of Florida, I would not allow any Floridian to be hauled before a Soros-backed prosecutor in a blue city over politics. I wouldn’t make an exception to not protect the President of the United States. Ron DeSantis should be standing in the breach to stop any sort of extradition of President Trump from the state of Florida.”

Twitter users attached an addendum to the tweet: “Article IV, Sec. 2, Clause 2.1 of the United States Constitution states that an individual charged in a State for a felony and is found to be in another State shall be returned the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime.” Our judges wondered, why does Gaetz hate the Constitution?

Rudy Giuliani joined the George Soros–bashing choir, claiming that the progressive billionaire and former president Barack Obama had somehow orchestrated New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s investigation of Trump. And Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) brayed that Bragg and Soros “are trying to turn America into a third-world country.” With many Republicans—including DeSantis and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.)—portraying Bragg as the tool of evil puppet master Soros, this barrage marked the latest deployment of the right’s all-too-familiar antisemitic trope.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) proclaimed, “Americans want affordable groceries. Not a Donald Trump prosecution.”

This from the guy who spends most of his time pushing nutty, weaponization-of-government conspiracy theories, not economic policies to help American families.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) added this beaut to the national discourse: “A Trump indictment would be a disgusting abuse of power. The DA should be put in jail.”

A US senator calling for imprisoning a local district attorney not charged with any crime? Talk about an abuse of power. Meanwhile, with a straight face, former Vice President Mike Pence said he knew nothing of the details of the hush-money case but assailed Bragg for “the criminalization of politics.”

Tucker Carlson, naturally, had a banner week. He insisted it was “childish” to refer to Vladimir Putin as a “war criminal.” (Last week, the International Criminal Court announced it had issued an arrest warrant for Putin for war crimes.) He pushed an idiotic conspiracy theory about climate change, as the United Nations released a report predicting the Earth could reach catastrophic warming in the next decade, and proclaimed, "There are still people in this country...who seem to believe that the so-called climate agenda is about the climate, about the environment or the earth or something and not a coordinated effort by the government of China to hobble the US and the West and take its place as the leader of the world.” And Carlson did not disappoint the judges when it came to a possible Trump arrest. He bleated, “In a sane society…you don’t fantasize about your political opponents going to jail.”

The judges wonder how many times right-wingers must be reminded of the orgiastic chants of “Lock her up” that have resounded at GOP and Trump events for the past seven years. It’s getting old.

Of course, Trump surpassed all the other horrific remarks. Pushing racist and antisemitic buttons simultaneously, he assailed Bragg, a Black man, as a “SOROS BACKED ANIMAL” and compared him to the Gestapo. He asserted Bragg was an agent of the devil. He called the DA a “degenerate psychopath that truly hates the USA” and suggested “death & destruction” would occur were he to be indicted. Trump posted an image of himself holding a baseball bat in a threatening manner and staring at Bragg—a stark example of stochastic terrorism. (Dictionary.com defines it as “the public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of a violent act, which is statistically probable but whose specifics cannot be predicted.”) And not a single leading Republican denounced Trump’s racist, antisemitic, violence-inciting rage-posting.

There is no single victor this week: Trump and the Trumpers all win as they churned out hate, hypocrisy, and stupidity before there is even an indictment. The judges shudder to think what will come if Trump does get arrested.

The Mailbag

As we all waited to see whether Trump would be indicted, reader James Vespe recalled a historical analogy:

Even more than January 6, 2021, Donald Trump is probably looking back wistfully to a day in June 1992, and hoping for a repeat in Manhattan. That's the day busloads of supporters of another resident of Queens County, John Gotti, descended on the federal courthouse in Brooklyn to protest the sentencing that would imprison Gotti for the remainder of his life. Cars were overturned. Police officers were injured and hospitalized. People were trapped in the courthouse before order could be restored. And shouts of “Free John!” echoed through the early summer air. In fact, there is probably only one person who hopes more than Donald Trump that a similar riot occurs in Manhattan. Ron DeSantis.

The mailroom was overwhelmed with reactions to my reminiscence of being one of the few reporters in Washington during the runup to the invasion of Iraq who questioned the Bush-Cheney administration’s case for war.

There were many emails like this one from Bette Piacente:

How well I remember the hysteria that ran us into that war. Living in California, I wrote to Dianne Feinstein, vehemently urging her to refuse the daily diet of lies coming out of the White House about the evil in Iraq. She sent me a withering reply telling me I knew nothing of the facts and that she did. Despite her constituent's wishes, she was going to support the march to war. Watching the ramping up in the media and Washington, I was reminded of Barbara Tuchman’s The March to Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. That book shook me to the core when I originally read it in 1984. And, then in the buildup to the folly of Iraq, I watched our own government again move lockstep into a war against all common sense and truths.

It was a watershed moment for me. I don’t think I have ever recovered trust in my elected officials again. I still vote and support democracy in all its imperfections. But every time I think about the lives lost, the waste of talent and money, and the hubris of the Bush II White House, I see how it foretold the country’s willingness to believe anything except the truth.

Carol Weitz shared this:

Your narrative is one that resonates with me very deeply. I’m a retired, 74-year-old female oncologist who has always been interested in politics and world affairs. I was against the war at the time but remember the atmosphere in the country so well, in that it almost felt unpatriotic to talk to friends about being against the war. In my opinion, your letter really did a good job of reminding me of that time.

Dave Walker emailed:

Amen, brother. I, too, was vehemently against launching the Iraq war, and was a lonely dissenter in my rather large, rather conservative federal government research lab in 2003. It was a really awful time, for sure. I'm so taken by your story of dissent and advocacy that I just subscribed to your newsletter. Keep up the good work and keep up the good fight.

Of course, Dave.

Paul Baicich wrote:

Well done...and the nod to the Knight-Ridder gang (Jonathan Landy, Warren Strobel, and their stalwart boss, John Walcott) was fully appropriate! Perhaps one day they will get the full credit they deserve... I just finished reading Walcott's devastating piece in Foreign Affairs: “Why the Press Failed on Iraq.” Alas, while the Knight-Ridder team reported the truth, the war-machine rolled on. So, and in the meantime, how much has our own fourth estate learned?

G.E. Hahne emailed:

One aspect to the Bush administration's activities just prior to launching the war has not, to my knowledge, been prominently discussed: Vice President Cheney's visits to the CIA. It seems plausible that Cheney used the occasions to guarantee that the CIA went along with the pro-war program and did not raise any public doubts that the evidence was deeply flawed.

I know of a book that mentions this on the third page.

(That would be Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War by Michael Isikoff and David Corn.)

No surprise, there were plenty of strong reactions to a recent issue that examined how the GOP is trying to gin up a war over wokeness.

Jim Robison emailed:

It’s sad that, nowadays, you need to buy a pickup truck in order to get a bumper to share your message with the world. Anyway, here are bumper stickers I would love to display, if only I had a truck: “Proud to be Woke”; “I’m Woke and I Vote”; “Jesus was Woke.”

That last one made me laugh. Jesus, as the story goes, did rise.

Connie De Rooy shared this:

I enjoyed your column about anti-wokeness. One feels like the Republican Party is surely going to implode or destroy itself in some way. However, they are like termites, eating away rapidly and successfully at the foundations of our democracy via local governments and school boards. When it comes to political cunning, they win. And I’m afraid that means they’ll win, period.

Charlotte Dunham reported from Lubbock, Texas:

I would like to add that Republicans are not just campaigning about wokeness but are legislating these crazy ideas. Republicans in my home state of Texas have introduced a series of bills to defund diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, even though these initiatives have been shown to have a positive effect on educational success. This step is accompanied by intimidation and outright threats to funding. The biology department at Texas Tech was excoriated in a Wall Street Journal article for using diversity statements in its hiring practices, which is widely done at many universities. The article relied on data collected and analyzed by a right wing think tank. As a result of this article, a legislator openly suggested that they take away funding if Tech continued to use the practice. 

A few readers wrote to chastise me. In a recent piece, I identified Rep. James Comer, the Republican chair of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, as a representative for Tennessee. That was wrong, he’s from Kentucky. Sorry, Tennessee. And sorry, Kentucky.

Bob Higham had a request:

David, will you let us know if Jelani Cobb comments on Jeff Gerth's article or your Gerth/Corn exchange?

Bob was referring to a recent piece in which I wrote about criticism of Gerth’s misguided, Trump-boosting essay in the Columbia Journalism Review that slammed the media coverage of the Trump-Russia scandal. As far as I’ve seen, Jelani Cobb, the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, which publishes CJR, has not commented on my exchange with Gerth or Gerth’s article. If I spot anything, I will let you know.

MoxieCam™

“Sometimes you have to stop and smell the flowers.”

“I know, Moxie. To savor the everyday beauty of life.”

“No. To smell the urine and see if a cat, deer, or rabbit has come through.”

“Yeah, that too.”

“Or a fox, raccoon, or possum.”

“I get it.”

Read Recent Issues of Our Land

March 21, 2023: The Iraq War: a personal remembrance of dissent; Los Angeles Times columnist Jean Guerrero’s stunning investigative memoir; and more.

March 18, 2023: Is anti-wokeness all the GOP has?; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Mike Pence); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

March 15, 2023: A debate (of sorts) over the Columbia Journalism Review’s huge Trump-Russia fail; Iris DeMent sings out about our current troubles; and more.

March 7, 2023: I visit paradise (the Tucson Festival of Books); do we need the blood and guts of All Quiet on the Western Front?; and more.

March 4, 2023: The (very selective) Covid wars; the never-ending story of George Santos; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Bezalel Smotrich); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

February 28, 2023: Ron DeSantis’ war on freedom; Racist of the Week update; Your Honor’s double jeopardy; Richard Thompson keeps getting better; and more.

February 25, 2023: The GOP plays the race card with a train wreck; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Scott Adams); an Our Land focus group—do you wanna zoom; the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

February 22, 2023: The corruption of Fox News—worse than you thought; the GOP’s very long war on Social Security; The Banshees of Inisherin is no laughing matter; and more.

Got suggestions, comments, complaints, tips related to any of the above, or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.