Imagine the FBI interviews with nominees such as Gov. Nikki Haley or Gen. James Mattis. “Have you done anything that could embarrass President Trump?” It’s mind-bending.
You might say that Donald Trump isn’t pretending to be a saint, and that he’s tough and strong and ready to be “our” son of a b**** (to paraphrase FDR’s supposed description of a Latin American despot), but it’s not quite that cut and dried. Trump maintains his innocence, which is where things get confusing.
Trump vehemently denies the accusations of groping and affairs, but this week it seems that the efforts he has undertaken to conceal his behavior are unravelling a bit.
Stormy Daniels alleges that she had an affair with Trump. At first, the world yawned. But since then we’ve learned that Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen paid her $130,000 in hush money in October 2016. That might have been a violation of campaign finance laws if Trump did not report it as an in-kind contribution. There was no affair, but Cohen had a sudden urge to make a charitable contribution to Stormy? And now Trump is suing Daniels for breach of the confidentiality agreement though the official Trump position is that the agreement doesn’t exist. Got that?
Some are attempting to link this to the #MeToo movement — women must speak “their truth,” lawyer Gloria Allred explained — but it’s a safe bet that Stormy is thinking finances, not feminism.
The same cannot be said of Summer Zervos, one of the 16 women who accused Trump of groping after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape. If you recall, Trump claimed that all of the women were lying and that he would sue them after the election. Zervos, who was a contestant on “The Apprentice,” has now received the go-ahead from a judge for her lawsuit to proceed. She said he groped her. He called her a liar. She is suing for defamation. Trump’s lawyers had argued that his depiction of Zervos as a liar was “political speech” and “clearly protected by the First Amendment.”
Yet another Trump acquaintance, Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model, is also attempting to invalidate her secrecy agreement. Thanks to Donald Trump, we’ve learned that the gossip magazines have a practice called “catch and kill” for stories they want to suppress. The parent company of the National Enquirer apparently performed this service for Trump, paying McDougal $150,000 for the rights to her story.
Nevertheless, McDougal seems ready to tell her tale, and Daniels will tell hers. Maybe the party of family values wonders whether they really wanted to sign up for all this.
Writes for Creators Syndicate.
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