Stormy Daniels, American hero

This is the ballad of a working-class girl from Baton Rouge who outfoxed a Manhattan billionaire

Stormy Daniels.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Evan Agostini/Getty Images, Wavebreakmedia/iStock, Maksymowicz/iStock, WMarissen/iStock)

Like millions of other Americans, I could not help myself and watched all 27 minutes of Anderson Cooper's interviews with Stormy Daniels, the pornographic actress with whom President Trump has been accused of having a brief affair in 2006.

It was a fascinating piece of television and not, except very briefly, obscene. Nor were the handful of pornographic asides the most interesting aspects of their conversation. (Though how fitting is it that our tangerine-toned CEO-in-chief should, like so many sordid and powerful narcissists before him, apparently find the prospect of being flogged by a woman intoxicating?) More compelling was her claim that before she agreed to sign a nondisclosure agreement she was harassed by unnamed thugs working in some vaguely defined capacity for Trump. If this is true, then those of us who have suggested that the Trump-Cohen-Daniels saga is far more dangerous for the president than the Russia nonsense are looking more right all the time.

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.