On the story as an animal - Fintan O’Toole in NYRB:

‘We are in a very Trumpian world where the relationship between real events and the narratives they generate has gone wild. Wrapped up in “catch and kill,” the practice of capturing a sleazy tale and confining it in the cage of a nondisclosure agreement, is the image of a story as a feral creature with a life of its own, roaming out there on the untamed frontiers of scandalmongering, needing to be lured in with the smell of money and trapped in a net of legalities. The irony of the whole episode is that the apparent success of this operation in silencing Daniels did not contain her story. It has turned it into an invasive species that has spread uncontrollably from its natural habitat of juicy gossip and into places it does not belong: the law, politics, and even the Constitution.’

(…)

‘This is an epic so entangled in fictions that it has its own cast of made-up characters. Clifford herself long ago disappeared into her avatar, Stormy Daniels, the nom de guerre she adopted shortly after she began her career in porn films. We might add to the cast list Daniels’s surgically enhanced triple-D breasts, which she named Thunder and Lightning. Trump, of course, appears in it as The Donald, the ludicrous fantasy mogul from The Apprentice, the reality TV show where she hoped—in return, she says, for “two to three minutes” of bump-and-grind action in his penthouse bedroom—he would make her a contestant. And then there are PP and DD, the names used in the contract that is at the center of the alleged crime, in which Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen (and now the central witness in the Manhattan district attorney’s case against Trump) agreed to pay Daniels $130,000 not to speak about her relations with his boss. In this script Trump plays David Dennison and Daniels Peggy Peterson—names chosen perhaps as the boring antitheses of lurid porn star soubriquets—with their true identities revealed in a secret letter of which Cohen kept the only copy.
It is striking that Daniels—according to her smartly written memoir, Full Disclosure (2018)—reminds us that she took creative writing classes at school, would “write funny short stories about me and my friends,” and came to define herself less as a porn star than as a maker of stories: “I’m a writer.” She pictures herself as an inveterate elaborator of scripts: Just like my high school friends, my friends know that they need to be careful around me. They’ll tell me something funny that happened to them, and they’ll recognize that funny look on my face as I press Record in my mind. “Oh, shit,” they’ll say. “I’m a script now, aren’t I?” “You totally are,” I answer.
Are we all a script now? We totally are.’

(…)

‘There is thus a wicked glee not just in the idea of Trump being prosecuted for trying to close down a sex story but in the way that tale, when it emerged, revealed the self-declared king of the boudoir as a pauper without prowess. The script for what actually happened between them is entirely written by Daniels—we are surely never going to get Trump’s version. She played to her gallery with a withering description of Trump’s sexual performance that serves as a cri de coeur for so many of her sisters. After he has sex with her, he asks, “How can I get ahold of you, honey bunch?” She recounts her unspoken thoughts: How many women have been in this situation? You’re a bore, you’re the definition of bad sex, you call me this insipid name, I want to teleport out of here and be somewhere eating snacks with my girlfriends—but sure, let’s do this again.’

(…)

‘It becomes possible, then, to see Daniels, and the grief she has brought to Trump, as another kind of retribution, the embodiment of all those white trash anxieties returned to haunt the man who has so effectively manipulated them. Her surgically enhanced Thunder and Lightning are the instruments of divine wrath at his cynical stirring up of toxic resentments. Because of her unwanted role in American history as the trigger for what’s expected to be an unprecedented presidential indictment, Daniels is magnified far beyond her actual importance—and, to be fair, beyond her own intent.
In 2018, when Daniels emerged from the cage of her NDA, she was greeted by many as some kind of savior. It is worth remembering that her release into the wilds of America’s political psychodrama was yet another example of “purposes mistook/Fall’n on th’ inventors’ heads.” In this case, it was Cohen’s desire for his own shot at fame—the shit-shoveler’s demand for a turn in the big top—that hastened his own disaster. This bargain-basement version of hubris and nemesis was another story about a story. Cohen drafted a twenty-page book proposal promising an “intimate” portrait of Trump by his friend and fixer. He and his agent did a road show of the five largest publishing houses in New York, with Hachette agreeing in principle to publish it for a $500,000 advance. In February 2018 someone leaked a copy of the proposal to The Daily Beast. It included the fateful promise to tell the truth about the “unfortunate saga” of Stormy Daniels and the $130,000 he had paid her before the 2016 election.’

(…)

‘And no, Stormy Daniels was never going to save the world—or save America from Trump and Trumpism. She was not born great and did not achieve greatness—she merely had greatness thrusting upon her for a few minutes in a casino hotel in Nevada. And a rather debased form of greatness at that. She may not, to misquote Monty Python, be merely a very naughty girl but she is not the Messiah either. The inflation of her story into a historic moment is not a blow against the Trumpian culture of hyperbole, but a continuation of it.
For the reality behind that story is that it did not matter at all. Cohen went to prison, and Trump is expected to be charged, over their attempt to suppress a supremely inconsequential narrative. What would have happened if Daniels had spoken during the 2016 campaign about her tawdry tryst with Trump? Almost certainly nothing. The payment of the hush money was agreed upon at a very particular moment: three days after the release of the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump was heard to boast about how, when he sees a beautiful woman, “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything…. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” Cohen paid off Daniels because of the expectation that the release of these remarks would inflict huge damage on Trump’s campaign and that another sex scandal would destroy it. But this perception was utterly wrong. Pussygate did not harm Trump at all. Those of his supporters for whom his sexual behavior ought to have been an issue had already decided that God works in mysterious ways—and if the Almighty had chosen Trump as His representative on earth, who were they to argue? For another part of his constituency—the one he shared with Daniels—the thought of his screwing a porn star was not shocking. It was (like so much else about Trump’s appeal) vicarious wish fulfillment. (It is striking that, according to Daniels, Trump, at the climax of their encounter, “came on me, not in me,” reenacting the money shot.)
The evidence is that Trump himself understood that to the fans he shared with Daniels, having sex with her was not a negative. As he told Cohen about the Daniels story, “If it comes out, I’m not sure how it would play with my supporters. But I’d bet they think it’s cool that I slept with a porn star.” For her part, Daniels was ever more certain that “Me saying I slept with him would just be another consensual notch on his belt that his fans could pat him on the back about.” This is the ironic twist in the tale—there was no scandal to hush up.’

(…)

‘Making a drama out of Trump’s sex life is turning politics back into another freak show, the very genre in which he thrives.’

Read the article here.

One of the better articles about this affair.

Politics as a freak show, reality as pulp fiction. The latter was as far as I remember the (more or less) highbrow take on Tarantino’s movie as it came out in 1994.

And all this to help Trump avoid a costly divorce.

Mr. O’Toole doesn’t pay much attention to the audience, the ones who are hooked on the freak show.

Innocent bystanders?

Perhaps the freak show turned out to be rather dull.

Bored bystanders.

(Gail Collins: ‘Speaking of Trump stuff, I had the strangest experience when he went to court last week. Former president facing 34 felony counts. Nothing like that in all American history.
And I found myself feeling … bored. What’s wrong with me?’ – read it here.)

What remains is this, the story is a wild animal, has to be a wild animal, feeding on lust.