The Real Reason Stormy Daniels Took Hush Money From Donald Trump

From Stormy Daniels’s perspective, there was one obvious reason to accept the hush-money payment from Donald Trump: take it, or be killed.

The danger posed by Trump and his associates in the aftermath of their affair was clear for the adult film star, whose problems with Trump began in 2006 when he slept with her after dangling a potential spot on The Celebrity Apprentice. Soon after, Trump sent his former fixer, Michael Cohen, to pay her $130,000 to stay quiet about their entanglement ahead of his 2016 bid for the presidency.

In a new documentary that intimately follows Daniels’s side of their ensuing, yearslong legal battle, Daniels explains that she knew she had become a target after Trump’s political career began: The Republican Party, she says, likes “to make their problems go away.”

“I mean, people have been suspiciously killed for political reasons. It was really about two things: trying to keep the story from coming out so that it would not hurt my husband and my daughter, and I wouldn’t lose my life, and that there would be a paper trail and money trail linking me to Donald Trump so that he could not have me killed. All I had to do was sign this piece of paper and collect $130,000,” Daniels explains in Stormy.

But it wasn’t just political paranoia getting the better of her. Even before Daniels attempted to break the nondisclosure agreement that Trump had forced her into, she endured brutal bullying that, at times, threatened not just her life but also that of her child. Stormy also documents a 2011 incident in which she was approached by a strange man in Las Vegas who she claimed threatened her daughter while demanding she forget about her tryst with Trump. Daniels also shared footage of her tailing and calling the cops on an unidentified man in a car who she said she had caught videotaping and following her daughter.

Elsewhere in the documentary, Daniels—whose real name is Stephanie Clifford—reveals that she had recorded a video will in the event that she was murdered. She instructed the filmmaker whom she had quietly hired to follow her around to promise to hand the footage to a news station in the event of her death and split the proceeds 50/50 with her child.

Daniels’s next starring role will be in Trump’s New York hush-money trial, in which the GOP presidential nominee faces 34 felony counts related to falsifying business records to cover up the payments—which may have helped swing the 2016 election. Trump had previously attempted to keep Daniels, along with Cohen, far away from the trial on the basis that the two were “liars.” But on Tuesday, a judge nixed that effort, allowing them both to testify. The trial, which will be Trump’s first in a series of back-to-back criminal cases, is expected to begin sometime in mid-April.

Donald Trump may have secured the Republican presidential nomination, but Nikki Haley—who dropped out of the race two weeks ago—is still proving to be a thorn in his side.

Trump easily won the five Republican primaries held Tuesday night in Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Arizona, and Kansas. But he failed to garner anything close to unanimous party support.

Instead, Haley managed to rack up more than 500,000 votes. And that’s in addition to the nearly three million votes she won while she was still running, including sweeping the primaries in Vermont and Washington, D.C., both Democratic strongholds.

It’s likely that some of the votes Haley received Tuesday were cast early, before she dropped out of the race. But the fact that she continues to nip at Trump’s heels is a sign that he is struggling to unite his voter base.

Although Haley embraced political stances that, in many cases, were just as extreme as Trump’s, she appealed to more moderate Republicans and Never Trump voters. Some Haley voters are bound to vote for Trump, but those who are more centrist or independent aren’t guaranteed to jump to his support.

“The Haley voters are the swing voters of the 2024 election,” Marc Thiessen, the chief speech writer for former President George W. Bush, told Fox News last week. “Trump has to win them over, he has to pivot now to the general election and focus on uniting the party and the non-MAGA part of the GOP.”

“What Trump needs to understand is that MAGA voters are not going to decide this election.”

When Haley dropped out, she did not endorse Trump in her resignation speech. Instead, she urged the former president to “earn the votes” of all Republican and independent voters.

Trump, however, has made a hard pivot to the right. He has somehow become even more extreme than during his first term, garnering comparisons to Adolf Hitler and other authoritarian leaders. And while that has certainly played well with his most loyal supporters, it would seem he is failing to successfully court anyone else.

Donald Trump brazenly included more falsehoods about the 2020 election in a brief filed with the Supreme Court on Tuesday for his immunity case.

Trump was supposed to go on trial in March for trying to overthrow the previous presidential election, but he and his lawyers have delayed proceedings by arguing that the former president has legal immunity against prosecution. The Supreme Court further held things up when it agreed to weigh in on the matter. The high court will hear arguments on April 25.

In a brief filed Tuesday, Trump’s lawyers made their case as to why he is immune from prosecution for actions he took while still in office. Most of the arguments aren’t new, but one part of the filing stands out: In a list of the charges against Trump, the filing alleges that Trump was simply communicating with “the Vice President, the Vice President’s official staff, and members of Congress to urge them to exercise their official duties in the election certification process in accordance with the position, based on voluminous information available to President Trump in his official capacity, that the election was tainted by extensive fraud and irregularities.”

The indictment also rewords special counsel Jack Smith’s other charges against Trump, claiming the former president is being indicted for having “communicated with state officials about the administration of the federal election and urged them to exercise their official responsibilities in accordance with the conclusion that the 2020 presidential election was tainted by fraud and irregularities.”

Absolutely no evidence of fraud has been found regarding the 2020 election. Even investigators that Trump himself hired have been unable to find a shred of proof to back up his claims that the vote was rigged against him.

More importantly, the indictment does not say that Trump was acting based on information that the election was fraudulent. The indictment alleges that Trump knew he had lost but still insisted that fraudulent ballots had been cast and that electronic voting machines were switching votes to Democratic.

“These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false,” the indictment said. “In fact, the Defendant was notified repeatedly that his claims were untrue—often by the people on whom he relied for candid advice on important matters, and who were best positioned to know the facts—and he deliberately disregarded the truth.”

People including then–Vice President Mike Pence and senior Justice Department officials, whom Trump had appointed, repeatedly told him there was no evidence of fraud, according to the indictment. So did the director of national intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, senior White House attorneys, and state-level allies.

In fact, a top adviser warned about the efforts to overturn the election quite clearly: “I’ll obviously hustle to help on all fronts, but it’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership,” an unnamed senior campaign adviser wrote in an email on December 8, 2020, referring to Trump’s “Elite Strike Task Force” led by Rudy Giuliani.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court allowed the country’s toughest immigration law—Texas Senate Bill 4—to go into effect. But not every member of the nation’s highest court agreed with the decision.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that the court was inviting “further chaos and crisis in immigration enforcement.”

“The Court gives a green light to a law that will upend the longstanding federal-state balance of power and sow chaos, when the only court to consider the law concluded that it is likely unconstitutional,” she wrote.

Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan also dissented from the opinion.

In practice, the law will allow state police to arrest anyone they suspect to be an undocumented immigrant, and charge them with misdemeanors or felonies in the event of repeat offenses. It will also allow them to deport undocumented people back to points of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border. But S.B. 4 and its myriad allowances for local authorities also holds the potential to threaten foreign relations between the two nations, with Texas making judgments otherwise relegated to the federal government and allowing the state to ignore federal immigration standards and court proceedings.

The ultimate legality of the law—which the Department of Justice has argued is unconstitutional—is still undergoing consideration by the ultraconservative Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

“The Court confronts a state immigration law that will transform the balance of power at the border and have life altering consequences for noncitizens in Texas,” Sotomayor wrote.

Still, the reality of Tuesday’s decision already warranted celebration among some of Texas’s most conservative officials.

“Texas has defeated the Biden Administration’s and ACLU’s emergency motions at the Supreme Court. Our immigration law, SB 4, is now in effect. As always, it’s my honor to defend Texas and its sovereignty, and to lead us to victory in court,” said Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott also chimed in, describing the 6-3 decision as “clearly a positive development.”

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court handed Texas Governor Greg Abbott the reins to enforce a contentious law in the state’s radical immigration policy, Operation Lone Star.

Within less than 24 hours, the Supreme Court first allowed a pause on the new law to lapse, then issued an indefinite stay, and finally, on Tuesday afternoon, issued an opinion that canceled that stay and allowed the law to go into effect while litigation continues in lower courts.

“The time may come, in this case or another, when this Court is forced to conclude that an administrative stay has effectively become a stay pending appeal and review it accordingly. But at this juncture in this case, that conclusion would be premature,” read an opinion by Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Texas Senate Bill 4 could still be blocked at a later date. But for now, it will allow Texas police to question and arrest anyone they believe might have illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border, and will grant police the authority to charge them with misdemeanors for first-time offenders and felonies for repeat offenders. It will also allow Texas law enforcement to deport immigrants back to a port of entry along the border. The controversial bill was signed into law by Abbott and was originally supposed to take effect on March 5—until the Justice Department and several civil rights groups got involved, arguing that the bill went way too far, stepping on the toes of the responsibilities of the federal government.

This is a developing story.