time to bring out the popcorn?

As I noted in my "Donald Trump, One Year On" post, President Trump currently stands accused of sexual impropriety by no fewer than nineteen women. Bill Cosby's stack of accusers puts this number to shame, but it's still cause for shame for any decent human being with a conscience. I don't know what the status is of those various accusations against Trump, but they don't seem to be making much news these days, despite the gravity of the claims against him. Viewed in this way—call it the "Teflon perspective"—the upcoming Stormy Daniels interview on CBS is merely one more log on an already-large woodpile.

Stormy Daniels is a porn star who claims to have had an affair with Donald Trump in 2006. Ten years later, in 2016, Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, paid Daniels $130,000 as part of a nondisclosure agreement to keep the affair hushed up. In January of this year, this payment was reported in the Wall Street Journal. There is an implication that the payment, given the closeness (to Trump) of the people involved and the timing of the payment itself, may represent a violation of campaign-finance law. Daniels is scheduled to air a purportedly tell-all interview with CBS on Sunday, March 25.

Trump supporters no doubt dismiss Daniels out of hand, already sure of what she's going to say, and confident that nothing she'll say will rise to the level of a provable, damning assertion. But is such dismissiveness warranted? At the very least, if I were Trump and his team of lawyers, I'd be worried that Daniels might reveal physical details about Trump that only Melania Trump can confirm ("Yup, he does have a mole right there, and his semen does, in fact, taste like rosewater"). This, at least, would establish that an affair really happened. Add to that any confirmatory paperwork ("We stayed at hotel X on night Y; here are the receipts"), and the makings of a narrative begin to emerge—a narrative whose details can be independently verified. For Trump, I'd say, caution is paramount.

At the same time, we can look at how a mountain of evidence against Bill Clinton failed to bring that president down. In Clinton's case, there was even a semen-stained dress, which I suppose helped nudge the lecher to the grudging admission of an "inappropriate relationship" with Monica Lewinsky. Clinton, to be sure, was impeached for lying under oath, not for a sexual dalliance that was—until Lewinsky changed her story very recently—considered consensual. Trump and his legal team have apparently been trying to strong-arm Daniels (real name: Stephanie Clifford), a fact that can be used against them. At the same time, Trump—perhaps aware of the Streisand Effect—hasn't been at his most aggressive in trying to suppress Daniels's testimony; it looks as though the CBS interview is going to go full steam ahead.

I'm withholding any further judgment until after the interview has aired and been analyzed by some of the talking heads. Trump's womanizing ways are already well known, so there's a chance that his randy reputation will preemptively blunt the impact of this scandal. At the same time, I'm pretty sure his enemies across the ideological aisle will watch the interview with relish, looking for clues that, yes, this time, Trump will be cast down, and his downfall will come at the hands of a woman. YouTube will soon be filled with interview-analysis videos, some of which I'll watch. That said, I often think the left is like Charlie Brown running at that football, forever hopeful that this time, it's going to be different. Trump, meanwhile, is like Lucy, yanking the football away again and again. In truth, we won't know the fallout of the Daniels interview until a couple months from now. If it's serious, then it might have implications for the midterm elections in November. If it's not, then that's another strike against the "blue wave."