Stormy Daniels has spoken. It doesn’t look good for our president – or for sex in America.

In an interview with 60 Minutes on Sunday night, Daniels told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that she had a one-night stand with Donald Trump, and agreed to be paid $130,000 for her silence after a man threatened her and her daughter. According to Daniels, a man approached her in a parking lot, “and said to me, ‘Leave Trump alone. Forget the story.’ And he leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, ‘That’s a beautiful little girl, it would be a shame if something happened to her mom.’”



When Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, approached her with a payoff, she agreed.



The threats sound ham-fisted and cartoonish, almost like something out of a mafia movie. But then, “ham-fisted and cartoonish” also describes Michael Cohen, many of Trump’s long-serving employees and contacts, and the president himself.

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This is a president who hired “the Mooch” to run communications in the White House, and whose original team of mostly male toadies seemed more like Goodfellas extras than professional politicos.

Trump has well-known and longstanding ties to organized crime. And he has made a career of publicly threatening journalists or anyone who crosses him with physical violence. Given Trump’s history and his apparently lifelong habit of surrounding himself with buffoons and hooligans, Daniels’ threat story doesn’t seem all that far-fetched.



Trump, known for angrily all-caps tweeting at the slightest provocation, has been notably silent on Daniels. He is stuck between a rock and a hard place: enforcing the non-disclosure agreement Daniels signed implies there’s something she shouldn’t disclose; ignoring it means other women will come out of the woodwork (one already has), and that White House employees who were (probably illegally) forced to sign similar contracts won’t fear reprisal for violating them. Trump’s legal team is trying to silence Daniels anyway, claiming she has violated the confidentiality agreement and could be on the hook for as much as $20m.



The political scandal here is enormous: a president allegedly trying to pay off a woman he had an affair with; a president allegedly having her threatened by a low-level goon if she didn’t comply; and now a president using the legal system to bully a citizen with a story about him.



It’s not unusual for public figures to be the subject of sexual rumors, or for people to lie about affairs with public officials in order to gain either money or fame. Of course we should take Daniels’ claim with a grain of salt. If she’s lying, then that’s appalling. What’s striking here, though, is that the president isn’t trying to disprove her claim or give investigative reporters the chance to assess it. He’s simply trying to silence her.



This is a pattern. Trump is embroiled in another legal case with a former Apprentice contestant who sued him for defamation after he said she was lying when she claimed he made unwanted sexual advances toward her. Trump’s claim, made by his lawyer Marc Kasowitz, is that the president’s speech was political and therefore protected by the first amendment.

It’s an extraordinary claim – that a politician can say whatever he wants about a private citizen, even if it’s a lie, and the person on the receiving end of his denigrations has no recourse. It’s also Trump’s strategy: insult, bully and threaten people until they do your bidding.

It’s a dark insight into the president’s psyche, and especially into how he deals with women. It’s not working with Daniels. But her 60 Minutes interview also painted a more detailed picture of how our president treats people, and it’s not pretty.

The affair with Daniels allegedly happened not long after Trump’s wife, Melania, gave birth to their son, Barron. It certainly doesn’t reflect well on Daniels that she was willing to have an affair with a married man, but she’s also not the one who made the vows – Trump is. And while he was disregarding his commitment to his wife, he was also, in a particularly creepy anecdote, comparing Daniels – a porn star he was trying to sleep with – favorably to his daughter.

The bribery and the silencing should be a political scandal. But there’s another story worth discussing here, too: how unfettered male power begets sad, bad sex. In her interview, Daniels is clear that she wasn’t a victim and that the sex was consensual, but also that she wasn’t attracted to Trump and didn’t want to sleep with him.

But, she said: “I realized exactly what I’d gotten myself into. And I was like, ‘Ugh, here we go.’ [laugh] And I just felt like maybe – [laugh] it was sort of – I had it coming for making a bad decision for going to someone’s room alone and I just heard the voice in my head, ‘well, you put yourself in a bad situation and bad things happen, so you deserve this.’”



What a sad state of affairs, that women think that sex is something they ever “have coming” and is a “bad thing” that happens as a result of “a bad situation” rather than a fun and mutually satisfying activity. And this is a woman who negotiates sexual activity for a living – someone who is surely skilled at discussing what she will and won’t do for what price.

That even she feels the weight of heavily gendered social expectations about sex and proceeds accordingly, seemingly unable to assert what she wants or doesn’t want in a private setting, is an unhappy statement about sex in America. And it is a particularly feminized problem: can you imagine a heterosexual man being in a room with a man who wanted to have sex with him, and despite not being attracted or the least bit interested, consenting to sex because “I had it coming for making a bad decision for going to someone’s room alone”?



That Trump exploits his position to have sex with women who aren’t all that into him isn’t an indictable offense, but it is a sad reflection on a small, insecure man and on American sexual mores more broadly.

Too many men already see sex through the same lens as Trump: something you get, not something you expect your partner to want as much as you do, and something that boosts your masculine authority while sullying women’s worth and integrity. And too many women have adopted that same script.



The alleged threats and payoffs are the scandal here – one big enough that, if proven true, could (and should) end a presidency. But Daniels’ story should open up another conversation as well, adjacent to but distinct from the #metoo movement: One that interrogates male power, sex, female subservience, and pleasure (or lack thereof). At the very least, our president embodies the worst of male sexual entitlement and rank misogyny. We knew that before the election, and put him in the highest office in the land anyway. What does that say about us?

