Donald Trump already has what he wanted, a story to regain the attention of public opinion and a stage to interpret it. The ex-president returns to the charge and nothing seems to prevent him from leading the campaign of the Republican party in a presidential election for the third time.
The story of the porn actress is stupid, but it doesn't matter. What's more, she helps her goal of taking back the White House because she is deceitful and salacious. It's fake and lusty, a perfect narrative to reconstruct her character. This is not about justice and democracy. This is about provocation and personality, power at all costs. This is how the elections for the presidency of the United States are won today.
It is a provocative story with two very powerful protagonists, a man and a woman who are unscrupulous, ambitious and brimming with narcissism. We have seen them hundreds of times in the political fiction, justice fiction and capitalism fiction series that are so successful with the public.
The story is very simple. Donald Trump, a New York real estate developer with a reality television show called The Apprentice, meets Stephanie Clifford, a porn actress who calls herself Stormy Daniels. He is 60 years old and she is 27. He invites her to dinner in a suite at the Harrah's Lake Tahoe hotel and casino in Nevada. She agrees because he has promised to put her on the show.
It's the night of July 13, 2006. Daniels' career is going well. He has had breast surgery and put on the biggest prostheses he could. He calls them Lightning and Thunder. They are very successful with their clients, who are mostly white, Republican men, between the ages of 45 and 65. Trump is one of them, as are the Americans who ten years later will form his electoral base.
Dinner went well. Trump insisted on her promise to make her debut in The Apprentice. She has written in her memoirs that she gave him a striptease that he consummated with a deplorable sexual act of less than three minutes. He proposed to see her again and she accepted, but there was no second meeting. Trump never invited her to participate in The Apprentice.
Nine years later, Trump announced his candidacy for the White House, and Daniels tried to sell the story of their Lake Tahoe encounter. He was unsuccessful, but a few weeks before the 2016 election, The Washington Post published the transcript of an audio recording in which the Republican candidate bragged that he could grab any woman by the genitals.
Donald Trump had trimmed much of Hillary Clinton's lead in the polls. His confrontational style and his exacerbated populism work much better than expected. Not even the Post story had hurt him. Daniels shouldn't be a concern. Throughout the campaign he had been shown that his voters adore him. They applauded his immorality. The fact that he had slept with a porn actress caused much more envy than rejection among them.
But still, Trump bought Daniels' silence. He forced his chief of staff to pay him $130,000 with a promise to repay it later. Because? Because he didn't want his wife Melania to find out from the press that, four months after giving birth to Brannon, her youngest son, he was with Daniels. He was afraid that she would ask for a divorce and this would have been a blow to his career. An economic blow for the millions that he would have had to pay Melania for the separation and perhaps also a political one because, for his followers, adultery is fine, as long as it does not cost you a divorce.
The Manhattan district attorney now accuses Trump of passing off the payment of those $130,000 as expenses for legal matters. It is a very minor crime compared to others for which he is being investigated, such as the assault on the Congress building on the afternoon of January 6, 2021 or the pressure on the person in charge of the elections in Georgia to "find" the necessary votes to give it winner
But then again, it doesn't matter. Only the story matters and Trump now has the necessary elements to recover his strongman image.
This has been well understood by his colleagues in the Republican Party. Almost all have closed ranks. Even Ron DeSantis, his greatest rival, has joined the chorus denouncing a witch hunt.
This support means that Trump will receive more donations than any other Republican presidential candidate. He is the winning horse and money is almost everything in a campaign, especially in the United States, where magnates have a free hand to invest as much as they want in a candidate. In the presidential and legislative elections of the year 2000, for example, more than 14,000 million dollars were invested, a record that is broken in each electoral cycle.
Trump's protectionist policies and his support for hydrocarbons, for example, will attract many of the big electoral investors. He is already doing it. Within 24 hours of the indictment, his campaign raised $4 million.
Their lawyers are going to drag out the electoral process as long as they can with all sorts of legal technicalities. The longer it is, the more it will strengthen you and the more money you will raise.
Therefore, the circus begins, the theater of the absurd, the extravagance, the hyperbole, put the adjective you want, a lucrative psychodrama for a few magnates and, again humiliating, for American democracy.
Gossip and pornographic detail have once again touched the backbone of the republic, the judicial and electoral systems. It is not the first time it happens.
This story reminds me of another one from 25 years ago, then starring President Bill Clinton and the scholarship recipient Monica Lewinsky. The argument had more or less the same ingredients.
Lewinsky had performed at least one fellatio on Clinton at the White House. She had preserved a blue dress with his sperm. Clinton denied it, and when the truth came out, she was unrepentant. She said that oral sex was not sex.
Republicans ordered an investigation and independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr released a report detailing the relationship and the White House's attempts to hide it.
I remember that summer of 1998, hot and humid like everyone else in Washington, with the Starr report in every bookstore. There was no talk of anything other than the president's penis and that he only had three testicles. He reminded himself that he had fled to Oxford to avoid serving in Vietnam and that he had smoked joints. Anything was worth to denigrate him. Phillip Roth later recalled it in the novel The Human Stain: "Life, with all its shameless impurity, once again confounded America."
To the Americans, however, that scandal did not make them lose confidence in Clinton, who ended his term with a popularity rating of more than 60%. They didn't care about his private life because during his two terms, in that happy decade of the 1990s, family income had risen 35%, well above inflation. The United States had prevailed against the Soviet Union, and Bill Clinton had presided over a period of peace and prosperity.
The situation is very different today. The middle classes have been losing purchasing power for years. Inequality has skyrocketed. Nobody wants to pay more taxes so that who knows who benefits. Uncertainties about the future generate a lot of concern and pave the way for populism. America is looking more and more like the Weimar Republic with a Trump threatening democracy.
The threat from authoritarianism, but, above all, from the empathy that it arouses in millions of Americans who believe in him even if they don't believe what he says, and this distinction is very important.
Trump voters are not stupid. They may envy his lifestyle and his relationship with women, but they don't vote for him, they vote for him because he shows that he has the guts to stand up to anyone and doesn't marry anyone.
As much as he fills his mouth with the idea of making America great again, he has no values or principles. He is simply a pragmatic man who understands transactions.
It takes on China because it is an unfair competitor and abandons Ukraine because it has never done and will never do anything for the United States. This pragmatism is what his electorate buys.
He asks for their support in exchange for them later being able to do whatever they want with their weapons, their religions, their employees, their SUVs, and their patriotic holidays.
Trump can spend as much money as he wants on hairsprays and hairspray to lengthen his imposing bangs, he can put on suntan lotions, sleep with whoever he wants, and say whatever he wants. The congressmen of the Republican Party embrace him because they believe that they will live better next to him and this is the clearest symptom of the decline and humiliation of American democracy.
In this story, as in all silly stories, the bad guy is very bad and the good guy is very good. There are no nuances and I don't think there should be.
President Joe Biden is the good guy and Donald Trump is the bad guy. Of course, Biden also manipulates language and uses it to square policies and decisions that are difficult to understand, such as the vacuum that he has left in the Middle East or the commercial pulse with Europe, his main and now almost only ally.
But Biden, like other leaders in other democracies, preserves, behind the rhetoric and half-truths, the ideas and values that sustain the State and democracy itself. The big difference between Biden and Trump is that the current president knows that there are red lines that cannot be crossed. Trump does not understand these limits.
If Joe Biden wins re-election next year, the story of Trump and Daniels will go down like that of Clinton and Lewinsky. If so, American democracy will have another chance to regenerate itself. However, if he does not succeed, if he is defeated by Trump in November 2024, the future of the United States will be more bleak and authoritarian.
