By Rhonda Garelick
Behold: Out from the chaos, lies, secrets, and misdirection of the Trump administration has emerged a figure of bracing honesty, clarity of purpose, even purity: Stormy Daniels — perhaps the one adversary who could take down this presidency.
Daniels and Trump have much in common. Both are theatrical creatures: He was a star of reality television, she is a star and director of adult films. Both have highly constructed, artificial appearances: hair obviously colored, visible makeup. Her extravagantly enhanced bosom finds its analog in his outrageously inflated comb-over. Both have used stage names: Daniels was born Stephanie Clifford and Donald Trump has, in the past, gone by the pseudonym “John Barron”when impersonating his own publicist. And both are at home in the world of erotic entertainment, where female sexual allure is a commodity to be assessed and purchased.
But there is one important difference between them: Stormy Daniels’s artifice is utterly forthright, all tools of a trade she neither excuses nor disavows. As a performer, Daniels pretends for a living. And her particular form of pretending involves sex, which is generally a domain considered private, even secret. But Daniels makes no secret of her profession. On the contrary, she speaks…
