Trump is a criminal-but not because he screwed a porn star and paid her hush money. It has turned it into an invasive species that has spread uncontrollably from its natural habitat of juicy gossip and into places it does not belong: the law, politics, and even the Constitution. The irony of the whole episode is that the apparent success of this operation in silencing Daniels did not contain her story.
Wrapped up in “catch and kill,” the practice of capturing a sleazy tale and confining it in the cage of a nondisclosure agreement, is the image of a story as a feral creature with a life of its own, roaming out there on the untamed frontiers of scandalmongering, needing to be lured in with the smell of money and trapped in a net of legalities. We are in a very Trumpian world where the relationship between real events and the narratives they generate has gone wild.
How much was Clifford’s account worth at different times between the encounter in 2006 and January 12, 2018, when The Wall Street Journal ran its headline “ TRUMP LAWYER ARRANGED $130,000 PAYMENT FOR ADULT-FILM STAR’S SILENCE”? Who could make the most money from it? What would its political impact be? How could it be defined as crime? All of them concern, rather, the telling, silencing, commodification, and politicization of that tale. None of the main plot points-which are expected to lead to Trump becoming the first former or sitting US president ever to be charged with a crime-relate to what actually happened on the night of July 13, 2006, when a twenty-seven-year-old porn star, Stormy Daniels, aka Stephanie Clifford, had bad sex with sixty-year-old Trump in the penthouse of Harrah’s Lake Tahoe Hotel and Casino in Nevada. The problem with the likely indictment of Donald Trump is that his offense is a metafiction.
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