The Stormy Daniels payoff changed the course of history
It's worth revisiting why Michael Cohen was desperate to hush her up in October 2016.
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By Stephen Robinson
Donald Trump has downplayed the $130,000 hush payment made on his behalf to adult film performer Stormy Daniels as a “simple private transaction.” In reality, it may have changed the course of US history.
Trump, of course, is now on trial in New York for charges related to the October 2016 payoff, including falsifying business records with an intent to unlawfully influence an election. Arguably, the New York indictment is the least headline-grabbing of the four he faces, in part because the hush money scheme pales in comparison with stealing classified documents, inciting an insurrection, or trying to overturn an election.
Politically, however, it can’t be overstated just how large a role the Daniels payment played in helping Trump squeak his way into the White House. Instead of getting lost in the legal weeds, it’s important to take a step back and examine the context surrounding the payoff and why it was an existential matter for Trump in the weeks leading up to his victory in November 2016.
Why Trump desperately needed to hush Daniels
About a month out from election day 2016, the Trump campaign was on the ropes. The infamous Access Hollywood tape that showed Trump boasting about groping women in September 2005 was the ultimate October surprise. In the wake of its release on October 7, a number of prominent Republicans withdrew their support, and swing state voters were abandoning him in droves.
Days before the tape’s release, Trump had a narrow one-point lead in Wisconsin among likely voters. The first polling conducted after the poll’s release showed Hillary Clinton ahead by six points, and by October 10, her lead had grown to 19 points.
CNN’s Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake wrote on October 11 that “the 2016 electoral map is rapidly slipping away from Donald Trump.” Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania were all “lean Democrat,” and Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina were tossups. Cillizza and Blake estimated that “if the election were held today, Hillary Clinton would win 341 electoral votes to Donald Trump's 197.”
Unfortunately for us all, the election wasn’t held on October 11, and less than a month later, Trump would sweep all six of those states.
This improbable comeback is usually linked to FBI Director James Comey’s October 28 letter that publicly announced the FBI had “learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation” into Clinton’s private email server use. The emails were only tangentially related to the FBI’s investigation into Anthony Weiner’s illicit text messages to a 15-year-old North Carolina girl, but this added an extra salacious element to the story, which soon appeared on the front page of the New York Times and dominated the news cycle.
Pollster Nate Silver stated that the letter likely cost Clinton the election, and Clinton herself agrees. Late deciders in the election overwhelmingly broke for Trump — by 17 points in Florida and Pennsylvania, 11 points in Michigan, and 29 points in Wisconsin.
Behind the scenes of the Daniels payoff
The Daniels affair wasn’t the only extramarital tryst Trump was trying to keep under wraps in the months before the 2016 election.
In June 2016, a month before the Republican National Convention, Karen McDougal, an actress and former Playboy model, tried to sell her story about an alleged affair she had with Trump from 2006 to April 2007. (Trump married Melania in 2005 and their son Barron was born in March 2006.) The National Enquirer secured the rights to McDougal’s account for $150,000 but had no intention of publishing the story. National Enquirer publisher David Pecker confirmed last week during his testimony in Trump’s criminal trial that this “catch and kill” tactic was specifically done to benefit Trump’s campaign, bolstering federal prosecutors’ case that the McDougal deal was meant "to suppress [her] story so as to prevent it from influencing the election."
But with Trump’s campaign on the ropes in the wake of the Access Hollywood bombshell, Daniels became an urgent concern. She told National Enquirer editor-in-chief Dylan Howard on October 8 that she was willing to go on the record about her alleged affair. This was the day after the Access Hollywood tape’s release, so the timing of a new scandal about Trump having an affair with an adult film actress might have been fatal to his political hopes.
Trump was spinning the Access Hollywood recording as merely “locker room talk” — not something he’d actually do in real life — but Daniels, like McDougal, claimed that Trump cheated on his wife who’d given birth to their son just a few months earlier. This revelation that Trump was cheating not only on his wife but on his mistress with an adult film actress would have solidified Trump’s sleazeball image with the undecided voters he needed to swing his way.
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According to a CNN analysis of 2016 exit polling, 14 percent of all voters believed both Clinton and Trump were unfit for office. This group voted for Trump 69 to 15 percent. Most were independents and Republicans (38 percent), and just 18 percent were Democrats. Trump needed these voters more than Clinton. Indeed, if they had just sat out the election, Clinton would’ve beaten Trump in a rout, 53 to 44 percent. These so-called “double haters” were the most susceptible to a negative story about a candidate pushing them in the opposite direction.
Trump’s former lawyer and personal “fixer” Michael Cohen wouldn’t finalize a deal with Daniels until late October. Daniels’s attorney Keith Davidson, who also represented McDougal, told Cohen, Howard, and Pecker that Daniels was close to an agreement with another media outlet that actually would have run her story. This lit a fire under Trump, and Cohen wired $130,000 to Davidson on October 27, the day before the Comey letter blew up Clinton’s campaign. Stormy Daniels on the front page alongside Comey’s letter likely would’ve changed the course of history.
None of this was normal, despite what Republicans now say
In March of last year, then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy tried to downplay New York’s case against Trump, claiming that the payment to Daniels was “personal money” and thus a private matter. The problem with this argument is that Michael Cohen served prison time for tax fraud, false statements to a bank, and campaign finance violations related to this payment.
Cohen didn’t benefit from Daniels’s silence. He wasn’t running for president or hiding an affair with her. That was Trump.
On April 5, 2018, Trump denied knowing about the $130,000 payment or even where the money came from. Less than a month later, he admitted to knowing about the payment but denied having a sexual relationship with Daniels. But as Sen. Mitt Romney quipped last week, “So far as I know, you don't pay someone $130,000 not to have sex with you.”
In tweets posted on May 3, 2018, Trump (dubiously) denied having an affair with Daniels and claimed the “monthly retainer” Cohen received and used for an NDA with Daniels “was used to stop the false and extortionist accusations made by her.”
In reality, however, there’s little doubt about Trump’s guilt, regardless of whether or not he’s ultimately convicted.
If the payment was part of a traditional non-disclosure agreement, why would Cohen front the money for his billionaire client? It’s also roll-on-the-floor laughable to suggest that payments made to stop what Trump calls “false and extortionist accusations” shortly before Election Day 2016 had “nothing to do with the campaign.” The accusations also weren’t technically “extortionist,” as the worst you could say about Daniels and McDougal is that they sought to profit from their relationship with Trump and sell their story to the tabloids.
The average person might sympathize with Trump wanting to keep the affair private to protect his family from a public scandal. However, there’s evidence that Trump wasn’t that concerned about Melania or even Barron discovering the truth. Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg alleges Trump told Cohen that if they could postpone paying Daniels until after the election, they could stiff her like any number of his former contractors, because “at that point it would not matter if the story became public.”
Pecker testified last week that although Howard believed Daniels’s story was true, Pecker didn’t want to shell out more money on Trump’s behalf.
"Perhaps I call Michael and advise him and he can take it from there, and handle,” Howard responded in a text message shown to the jury. The timeline clearly shows a desperate Cohen scrambling to “handle” the matter before the election. Even if you believe that Trump paid Daniels to remain quiet about a non-existent sexual relationship, it still benefitted him politically.
During an appearance last Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, Trump toady Lindsey Graham blew off Pecker’s “catch and kill” assist for Trump.
“You know, apparently a lot of people do this,” Graham said. “Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tiger Woods … No, I think the whole thing is a crock.” (Watch below.)
Indeed, Pecker confirmed he spent "hundreds of thousands of dollars” to acquire and bury negatives stories from women about alleged relationships or sexual harassment before Schwarzenegger ran for governor in California. However, there was something in it for Pecker’s publications when helping Schwarzenegger and Woods — Schwarzenegger agreed to work as an editor-at-large and spokesperson for Pecker in exchange for unflattering stories being buried, and Woods granted an exclusive interview to one of the Enquirer’s sister publications. But in Trump’s case, the moves to quash the McDougal and Daniels stories resembled campaign contributions that skirted legality.
Graham wants to spin this as “normal” political behavior, but on the stand Pecker admitted to violating campaign finance laws when killing stories for Trump. Cohen’s payment to Daniels was more than $100,000 over the federal campaign contribution limit. There’s no legal limit to what Trump can contribute to his campaign, but he has to report the contributions, which he didn’t. Graham resorts to defending this criminal behavior with impassioned gibberish about the “statute of limitations” and “liberal” prosecutors executing a “political hit job” on Trump.
RELATED FROM PN: Trump's right, the system is RIGGED. In his favor.
Republicans and right-wing media have spent the past three years whining that suppression of the New York Post’s “blockbuster Hunter Biden laptop story” cost Trump the 2020 election. The utterly shameless Rep. Elise Stefanik claimed at a House select subcommittee hearing last year that “according to polling, of the people who were made aware of the Hunter Biden laptop story, 53 percent would have changed their vote, including 61 percent of Democrats. This is the definition of election meddling … it’s collusion, it’s corruption, and it’s unconstitutional.”
It’s also a blatant lie, as PolitiFact gave Stefanik’s statement a “false” rating.
The most important issues for voters in 2020 were the economy, health care, the Supreme Court, and covid. Joe Biden’s screwup son didn’t make the list. He wasn’t on the ballot. Donald Trump was the actual Republican nominee in 2016, and his successful efforts to silence Daniels at the moment of his greatest political vulnerability may have tipped the balance in a close election.
This isn’t a minor offense. The presidency commands a value far greater than the $130,000 Trump paid Daniels, and we’re all poorer for the deal having been made.
Aaron talks Trump trial on Jennifer Horn’s podcast
By Aaron Rupar
Still hungry for more discussion of the Trump trial and its implications for November? Then check out the conversation I had with Jennifer Horn on the new episode of her podcast, the aptly named “Is It Just Me … Or Have We All Lost Our Minds?”.
Horn is a co-founder of the Lincoln Project and former co-chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party. We got into the Trump trial, campus protests, and the state of the presidential race. But we also discussed some topics off the beaten path, such as how coming of age during the age of Trumpism affected the views of her college-aged children, who in their adult lives have only known an off-the-rails GOP and a political environment where every presidential election is a national crisis.
Listen to the podcast below:
And if you’d like to hear even more from me, I joined a local Twin Cities news talk station on Thursday to talk about a range of topics (listen here), and on Wednesday I recorded a podcast with Mike McFeely of the Fargo Forum where we talked at length about all things Trump, including how I got my start covering him (listen here).
Whew, it was a busy week. Here’s to the weekend.
That’s it for this week
We’ll be back with more Monday. If you appreciate this post, please support Public Notice by signing up. Paid subscribers make this work possible.
Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.
The goal of paying hush money to Daniels and killing the potential stories about it was obviously to influence the election and image of Trump in the run up to November 2016. This sleezy episode is undeniable and it shows the sort of family values the Trump team brought to the Oval Office. We are worse off for it.
Nice shout out to the Hunter Biden laptop "suppression." It works all too well as a rejoinder to the MAGA worms who try to make it sound like paying off Stormy wasn't a big deal - and the fact remains that it WAS public knowledge to political junkies of all stripes before the 2020 election.
And as for this trial being "election interference" now in 2024? Well what was paying off a pornstar to stay quiet about 45 seconds of sex in the days before the 2016 election?