Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for adult film actress Stormy Daniels, appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show on Thursday amid talks of running for the White House in 2020. | Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images Media Avenatti to 2020 Dems: Stop ducking Fox News

Michael Avenatti isn’t sure that he’ll ever go on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show again — but he thinks every Democrat who’s serious about running in 2020 should if they want to prove they have what it takes to go up against President Donald Trump.

“Sometimes you’ve got to go into the belly of the beast. You can’t call yourself a fighter and then turn out to be a paper tiger,” Avenatti said in a Friday interview, dismissing the Democrats who have written off appearances with Carlson, and Fox News more broadly, given the channel’s often clearly pro-Trump bent.


Carlson said explicitly to Avenatti during Thursday night’s show that he wouldn’t insult the lawyer, best known for representing Stormy Daniels but now traveling the country talking up a White House run of his own. But over the course of the appearance, Fox News showed five different chryons that used the phrase “creepy porn lawyer” (the phrase apparently seemed so familiar that in one of them, the producers just went with the initials CPL).

Avenatti couldn’t see the chryons while on air, but said he learned about them as soon as he went back to the green room and talked with the people who’d come to the studio with him. He immediately started firing back on Twitter, but he said he’d already made his feelings known to the host for how the interview itself went: “Before I left the set, I told Tucker he was a joke, and his show was a joke.”

Avenatti’s unusual presidential exploration is rooted in the idea that Democrats have to be more aggressive, combative and TV-savvy in order to beat Trump. Many operatives and pundits continue to roll their eyes at him, but he’s been getting a response at events in Iowa and Ohio, and he says he has 43 events already on the schedule to support Democrats around the country, from New Hampshire to Alaska, in the coming weeks. During the interview at a Starbucks near the White House, two people stopped him to say they were fans, and another stood on the sidewalk outside and took his photo on an iPhone.

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He also dismissed the complaint that many Democrats say they have about cable news appearances: that they’re only asked about Trump, creating a feedback loop of commentary about Trump.

“It seems kind of foolish to me. If you have the ability to go on television and speak cogently on issues that matter to people, why not do it?” Avenatti said. “One of the reasons they continue to have me on is because people evidently want to see me on.”

Find him another potential presidential candidate who’ll take on opponents on TV like he does.

“I don’t understand why politicians duck the opportunity,” he said.

