The calm before the Stormy
Stormy Daniels recently told English broadcaster Piers Morgan that these days one in ten messages she receives are death threats. That’s not to say that the other nine are all that great either, I expect. Some of them are probably the usual complaints from the irony-averse MAGA claque about how nasty we of the “radical left” truly are.
Despite all that Ms. Daniels, 44, remains calm — and even philosophical. She does not think that Donald Trump deserves to go to prison for what he did to and said about her. “I don’t think that his crimes against me are worthy of incarceration,” Daniels said. “I feel like the other things that he has done, if he is found guilty, absolutely,” Daniels told Morgan in an interview with Fox Nation, released on Thursday.
When Morgan asked her how it felt to see Trump appear in court, Daniels’ response was much like the response of the rest of us. She was “shocked.” “I thought he was going to get away with not being accountable,” she said. “The king has been dethroned — he’s no longer untouchable,” she added. “Nobody should be untouchable, [it] doesn’t matter what your job description is, whether you’re the president, you should be held responsible for your actions.”
Ms. Daniels ably and calmly negotiates the new political reality. Namely, that anyone who sets themselves up as an enemy of Donald Trump is prone to death threats and other abuses. (I hasten to add that’s not true of all of us. I still await, with great eagerness, my first death threat for my publicly anti-Trump stance. Only then can I truly say I have arrived.) Her calm in the face of Trumpian enmity is remarkable. Not only is she subject to the insult of threats on her life, she must also endure the injury of being called “horse faced.”
Daniels signed an NDA agreeing she would not talk about her relationship with Trump. She signed in the wake of a threat made to her by an unknown male operative, one probably working for Donald Trump. She was approached in 2018 in her car with her infant daughter and told by the thug to leave Trump alone and forget the story. He then said, “That’s a beautiful little girl, it would be a shame if something happened to her mom.”
In all Daniels has remained the picture of defiant courage, intelligence and a great sense of humour. (When one Twitter would-be wag wrote “President Trump wouldn’t touch you with a 10ft pole,” Daniels fired back, “True. He used a 3 inch one.”) She has endured the enmity of the MAGA crowd and the infamy of relentless sleazy innuendo in the press. As is almost inevitably the case, the woman is the one who must endure the total tarnishing weight of innuendo concerning “illicit” sexual encounters.
Through it all, Stormy Daniels remains the picture of courage and honesty. Donald Trump remains the opposite, of course, a coward and a liar. The MAGA crowd, infamous for getting everything wrong, blames her instead of him. Stormy Daniels holds them in deserved contempt and continues to get on with her life. Good for her. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.