opinion

Being spanked by Stormy Daniels may be the least of it for Trump now

That blurry space at the border of news, entertainment and satire has grown exponentially the last 14 months, driving talk-show careers and "Saturday Night Live" ratings for their riffs on an unpredictable White House resident. But Anderson Cooper’s “60 Minutes” interview with the porn star known as Stormy Daniels exploded that space into a minefield Sunday.

Around the globe, people gathered around TV sets to hear from the woman who could ultimately take down a sitting U.S. president, though she said that was never her intent.

Her intent was to spank him. At first, anyway.

Stephanie Clifford said she was not a victim of sexual harassment and doesn’t want to be associated with the #MeToo movement. But she said she wasn’t attracted to Trump, either. From the sound of it, she was more interested in getting an appearance on his "Celebrity Apprentice" show, which he offered but never delivered on.

For the record, sexual harassment can come as a quid pro quo, but Clifford didn't frame it that way. She said it all began after the two had been introduced at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe in 2006, and he invited her to his hotel suite. He was bragging, she said, about being on the magazine cover, but she wasn't impressed.

“Like, I was, ‘Does, just, you know, talking about yourself normally work?'" she said she asked Trump. "'Someone should take that magazine and spank you with it.’”

So the 60-year-old married businessman complied, she said, turning around and pulling his trousers down.

Trump was not yet president but he was married to his third and current wife, Melania, who had recently given birth to their son. Clifford told Cooper she asked about his wife and “he brushed it aside, saying, 'Oh yeah, yeah, you know, don't worry about that. We don't even — we have separate rooms and stuff."

Clifford was 27. Later, she said Trump told her she reminded him of his daughter and that she was special, beautiful and smart. He reportedly said the same things of Karen McDougal, another woman with whom he allegedly had an affair in that same time frame. Trump has implied previously that if Ivanka were not his daughter, he’d be interested in her.

This is the same Donald Trump who has banned transgender people from serving in the U.S. military, saying it would be too costly and disruptive. The Trump who, seeking to make Hillary Clinton uncomfortable at one of their debates, brought along women who said they’d had sex with Bill Clinton. The Christian man of whom James Dobson said before the election “we have only two choices, Hillary or Donald. Hillary scares me to death," so Christians couldn't stay home. Dobson heads Family Talk, a Colorado-based Christian ministry that “promotes and teaches biblical principles that support marriage, family, and child development.”

But tempting as it is to linger on the marital breaches, the most damning allegations as far as Trump's presidency goes involve the alleged cover-ups with lies, intimidation and a financial payout to buy a woman's silence.

Initially, Clifford said there was no request for her to keep quiet. Then in 2011, after she agreed to be paid by a magazine to share the story, the magazine backed out, saying Trump's attorney Michael Cohen threatened to sue. A few weeks later, Clifford says she was approached and threatened by a man in a parking lot warning her to “leave Trump alone. Forget the story” because “It'd be a shame if something happened" to her infant daughter's mother. Cohen has denied having anything to do with that.

Scared, Clifford said she stayed silent. After Trump won the GOP presidential nomination, she accepted $130,000 from his lawyer for her silence. That could be a violation of campaign finance laws if the money, which Cohen claimed was his own, was an in-kind contribution from him to Trump’s campaign. Trump has denied the money came from him.

Then in January, after The Wall Street Journal reported on their affair, Clifford said she was pressured by her former attorney and former business manager to sign public statements denying it. Now her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, is suing the president to have that agreement invalidated because the president never signed it. Trump's lawyers claim Clifford is already liable for for more than $20 million in damages for violating agreement by speaking out.

The "60 Minutes" interview aired after a week of revolving doors for the Trump cabinet, as warmongers and foreign policy hawks replace more mainline conservatives, and people with knowledge that could influence the special prosecutor’s Russia probe felt the heat.

And there's even a Russia angle to Cohen. The Washington Post reported Special Counsel Robert Mueller has examined Cohen's efforts to launch a Trump-branded project in Moscow in 2015.

So, this is our country and this is our president. A man who before holding office reportedly pulled down his pants to let a porn star he met that day smack his bottom with a magazine. The man who claimed the White House with 81 percent of the white evangelical vote, 61 percent of the Mormon vote, 58 percent of the votes of Protestants and other Christians, and 60 percent of white Catholics' votes.

The question is, does any of this cost him any of their support? And if not, does Congress just keep looking the other way or will it move on these latest allegations? Don't hold your breath yet.

Rekha Basu is an opinion columnist for The Des Moines Register. Contact: rbasu@dmreg.com Follow her on Twitter @RekhaBasu and at Facebook.com/ColumnistRekha. Her book, "Finding Her Voice: A collection of Des Moines Register columns about women's struggles and triumphs in the Midwest," is available at ShopDMRegister.com/FindingHerVoice