Louisiana backstory puts puzzling twist on Trump-Daniels tale
by Quin Hillyer, Commentary Writer
April 02, 2023 04:14 PMEXCLUSIVE — With the political world obsessed with the seemingly questionable indictment in New York of former President Donald Trump, here’s what puzzles me: Why did Trump pay off somebody to keep quiet something that was already prominently in the public domain?
The whole transaction between Trump’s lawyer and porn performer Stormy Daniels was weird. A full five years before the payoff, almost the entirety of Daniels’ tale was published online in an entertainment-focused publication called In Touch. And even then, she had been telling it openly for five years, including to Democratic consultants in 2009 during an “exploratory” tour for a putative U.S. Senate campaign.
That 2009 story is rather amusing, in a wacky “only in Louisiana” way. The then-incumbent Republican senator, David Vitter, had been caught in a prostitution-related scandal that local Democrats wanted to highlight. Andrea Dube, a Louisiana Democratic consultant, told me last week that what happened resulted from “a bunch of staffers in their twenties coming up with dumb ideas because they were bored between campaigns.”
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Here’s the answer: Trump isn’t playing as much for acquittal as he is for Republican primary votes. His denials may hurt his case with jurors but may help him play a martyr for the MAGA cause, around whom the GOP electorate presumably will rally in anger at the politicized prosecution. Part of his emotional appeal always has been that he admits nothing, apologizes for nothing, and his very pose of certainty gives supporters psychological cause to believe him.
Trump wants less to win the courtroom than to win the White House. He thinks that maintaining at least a thin veneer of deniability will help him weather the political Storm.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/exclusive-louisiana-backstory-puts-puzzling-twist-on-trump-daniels-tale
