LOS ANGELES—The adult industry leaped to the top of national headlines last week when The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, paid $130,000 in “hush money” to veteran porn performer Stormy Daniels, to keep her mouth shut about a sexual episode with Trump that, the report said, took place in 2006. Cohen allegedly made the payment to Daniels just a month before the 2016 presidential election.
A week after the bombshell Journal story broke, the Wicked Pictures contract star is still making news, despite having offered no public statements or reaction to the widespread story that quickly expanded from allegations of a single sexual encounter with Trump to an affair which lasted, as AVN.com reported earlier this week, nearly a year.
As a result, Daniels has dominated not only news headlines, but social media and internet activity over the past week. A Facebook search for “Stormy Daniels” on Thursday afternoon showed more than 30,000 people posting about her, nearly seven full days after the Journal story appeared.
On the Friday that the Journal story appeared, “Stormy Daniels” rose as high as the Number Two Twitter trend in the United States, and third-highest in the world.
While Google does not list names of porn stars on their daily Trending Searches, Daniels birth name was ranked as the sixth-top Google search trend last Friday, while “Stormy Daniels,” while down from its January 12 spike, has continued to draw a high volume of traffic, as can be seen on the chart at this link.
Of course, the news that Daniels—before reportedly accepting the hush money from Cohen—spoke to several journalists and in 2011 granted an extensive interview to the tabloid weekly InTouch has helped keep the Daniels/Trump story alive. InTouch published the complete text of that 5,000 word interview on Thursday.
In that interview, Daniels recounts that her affair with Trump continued for nearly a full year, and that he told her that she was “just like” his daughter, Ivanka Trump.
According to the Journal report, Trump had his initial sex romp with Daniels at a celebrity golf tournament in July of 2006, roughly 19 months after he married his third and current wife, Slovenian fashion model Melania Knauss—now Melania Trump—and only about four months after the birth of their son, Barron Trump.
While for most prior presidents, allegations of paying off a porn star to cover up an extramarital affair would surely be a legacy-destroying scandal, for Trump, the Stormy Daniels story was not even the biggest scandal of last week, a week in which Trump was quoted as calling a number of countries with predominantly black populations “shithole countries,” and in which he let a nuclear false alarm that terrorized the island of Hawaii pass without comment or reaction for two days, at which time he dismissed the mistaken missile alert as “a state thing.”
Nonetheless, the salacious nature of Trump’s alleged dalliance with the 38-year-old star—who in 2009 flirted with a run for the United States Senate as a Republican—was enough to set off a wave of amused, delighted and incredulous reactions on the social media platform Twitter.
Here are 10 of the best Twitter responses to Trump’s alleged Stormy Daniels sex payoff scheme.
“So Trump cheated on his new wife, almost immediately after they had a child together... with a porn star.
Whatever he did was so bad that he paid the porn star, Stormy Daniels, $130,000 to be quiet.
FAMILY VALUES!!”
"Sloppy Stormy Daniels wanted 1.7 million, but I know the best negotiators, the best. We got her down to 130,000. Obama negotiated a bad deal for her. Sad. And Sneaky Alana Evans BEGGED to come up to the room and said she would do ANYTHING, but I said no. Loser! #MAGA"
"Hush, little porn star, don't say a word.
My lawyers gonna get your cash transferred.
And if my payoff you do refuse,
Papa's going to say you're just fake news.
Stormy Daniels"
“is it a coincidence that "Stormy Daniels" is an anagram for ‘Ms. Denial Story?’”
“Don't know why, ain't no sun up in the sky, Stormy Daniels”
“The only surprising thing about Trump paying hush money to a porn star is that he didn’t bring it up that time he addressed the Boy Scouts”
“Donald Trump’s day so far:
- Had affair with Stormy Daniels
- Paid her off during election
- Hit on three pornstars in a weekend
- Assaulted one of them
- Media unsure whether to lead with porn, shithole, or treason scandal
- Trump faked his physical today
- It’s still only 9pm”
“Stormy Daniels may have been paid $130K to keep quiet, but I wonder how much Jack Daniels it took for her to erase the image of him naked”
“If Donald Trump paid pornstar Stormy Daniels $130,000 to pee on him he wasted a lot of money. 7 billion people would be happy to pee on him at no cost.”
