WASHINGTON—Two months after the Wall Street Journal reported that Donald Trump’s lawyer had paid a porn star $130,000 to buy her silence about her 2006 sex with the future president, someone found her on Twitter and called her a “scank.”

“The correct spelling,” Stormy Daniels wrote back, “is skank.”

Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, was serving notice. She would not be handling this saga with the contrition or silence a woman in her position is expected to perform.

Assured in the spotlight, content with her sexual behaviour and unwilling to let herself be depicted either as a victim who deserves an apology or a villainous temptress who needs to make one, Daniels has departed from the path taken by most of the other Other Women in America’s political past.

To some degree, her unabashedness appears to be working. Aided by a fiery and media-savvy lawyer, Michael Avenatti, who has tantalized the public with Trump-like hints of future disclosures, Daniels has been unusually successful in shaping the arc of a story about which Trump has been uncharacteristically quiet.

The porn star, it seems, is out-shameless-ing the president who has turned shamelessness into a formidable political weapon.

“It takes away all of the argument against her. It takes it all off the table. Because she’s really owning it,” said Alison Dagnes, a political science professor at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania who has studied political sex scandals.

There is a long history, Dagnes notes, of the U.S. media and public hounding and demonizing women who have sex with married politicians. Dagnes said she is “pleasantly surprised at how seriously the media is taking Ms. Clifford and how responsibly they are reporting on this.” Part of the reason, she said, is how impressive Daniels has been.

Daniels has tried to strike a balance between you-only-live-once capitalism and convincing demonstrations of credibility. In between stripping appearances on a national tour she has titled “Make America Horny Again,” she sat for an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes — answering Anderson Cooper’s intimate questions with a breezy frankness and a level gaze.

“I have not seen her pornography. If I did I might have a different reaction. But my reaction is: oh my God, I love her,” said Hinda Mandell, a Rochester Institute of Technology communication professor who has studied political sex scandals. “She conveys a straightforward, very confident, unflinching-in-her-answers demeanour. And I watched her interview with my parents who are in their 70s, and they were like, ‘We love her.’ ”

The public is clearly interested in Daniels. With 22 million viewers, the episode was the highest-rated for 60 Minutes in 10 years. It is not clear, however, whether the saga will change perceptions of a man long known as a womanizer and adulterer.

An April poll found that a majority of people didn’t believe Trump’s claim that he knew nothing about the payment to Daniels — but that an even larger majority, 73 per cent, didn’t think the Daniels matter was important. Trump’s approval rating has actually nudged upward since the Daniels story has been in the news.

“I just haven’t seen any evidence the Stormy Daniels story has affected either his base or even national opinions about him,” said Republican consultant Matt Mackowiak. “His base is far more motivated by what he wants to do for the country than what he’s done in his life … I think people can compartmentalize.”

Mackowiak said, though, that Avenatti “may be winning right now, in a short-term way, from a PR standpoint.” And the story, once treated tentatively by much of the media, is now an indisputably newsworthy matter that appears to be getting darker for the president.

When FBI agents raided Michael Cohen’s office and home on Monday, part of what they were looking for were documents related to his payment to Daniels. And so the saga has now entered the kind of legal phase that is often more damaging to adultering politicians, Mandell said, than the revelations about the sex.

“The actual intimacy, or sex act … is just the beginning of the story. It’s kind of what draws people in, it’s what get news organizations talking about it. But then once news organizations and law enforcement begin to peel back the layers of the scandal, thinking of it kind of like an unfolding onion, that’s where you can find corruption or malice or untoward actions,” she said.

Trump may have hurt himself by telling reporters last week that he did not know about Cohen’s payment. Prosecutors in the Cohen case argued Friday that this means records about the payment are not covered by attorney-client privilege.

Trump already faced Daniels-related legal headaches before the Cohen raid. Avenatti and some outside legal experts say that Trump could be in jeopardy if he knew Cohen had made the payment: the payment, made in the last month of the 2016 election, could be considered a campaign donation; it was not reported; if Trump helped to conceive a scheme to hide it from election authorities, he could be accused of participating in a conspiracy.

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Trump doesn’t have to be accused of such a crime for the Daniels matter to become a long-running problem. In March, Daniels filed a lawsuit seeking the cancellation of the agreement that is supposed to keep her silent about the alleged affair, claiming that Trump never actually signed it — and Avenatti is seeking to subject Trump to a deposition under oath, an obvious challenge for a habitually untruthful politician.

Several Democratic legislators have brushed off questions about the Daniels matter, urging reporters to ask them about policy matters. Jim Manley, a Democratic strategist and longtime former aide to party senators, said the party should not shy away from a story that is bigger than sex.

“I really don’t care if it doesn’t poll that well. Because his conduct is so beyond the pale that he needs to be held accountable for it,” Manley said. “This is way beyond the tawdry details of a porn star. It goes directly to the question of accountability.”

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