Politics
Opinion: The porn star with a well-deserved place in American history
Last week, after Stormy Daniels spent nearly eight hours over two days testifying in former President Trump’s hush money trial in New York, the time seemed right to crack open her memoir, “Full Disclosure.”
I had missed the book when it was published in 2018, but now that she has been a star witness in the first criminal trial of an American ex-president, a trial that has seen the introduction of the memorable phrase “orange turd,” I wanted to read her version of her relationship with the man who claims he barely knew her and certainly never had sex with her.
Opinion Columnist
Robin Abcarian
As you can imagine, Daniels, 45, who began her career as a stripper, has had a fascinating, tumultuous life. She is smart, bawdy and hilariously self aware.
For example, in 1999, while she was unconscious on the operating table, her plastic surgeon decided to dramatically increase the size of the breast implants they’d agreed on. When she awoke, she writes, she was shocked and angry. But not for long. Her breasts, which she calls Thunder and Lightning, have been integral to her success.
“It’s amazing,” she writes, “what blond hair and big boobs instantly do, by the way.” Noted.
By the age of 22, Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, had become a successful adult film actor, writer and director.
She was so successful, in fact, that in 2009, she was recruited to run against then-Louisiana Republican U.S. Sen. David Vitter, a family values crusader who was revealed to have ties to prostitutes. “My endgame,” she writes, “was to get someone more qualified to step up to the plate.” Her motto in that brief campaign: “Stormy Daniels: Screwing people honestly.”
She had small parts in the Judd Apatow movies “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up.” For a Maroon 5 music video, she chased Adam Levine in a sexy cop costume.
Apatow’s producer Shauna Robertson invited her to tag along on the sets of “Pineapple Express,” “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and “Superbad,” which is how she learned to make films.
After the hush money scandal broke in 2018, Seth Rogen told Ellen DeGeneres, “I’ve known Stormy Daniels a long time, and I’ll be honest, she may have mentioned this stuff around 10 years ago. At the time, when you asked a porn star who they’d been sleeping with, and the answer was Donald Trump, it was like the least surprising thing she could have said.”
The reason she agreed to have dinner with Trump on that fateful evening in 2006, at the urging of her publicist, was because she thought he might help her career. She’d been impressed when she met him earlier that day that he had looked at her face, not her breasts. He wanted to know all about the business aspects of the porn industry.
She spent three hours in his hotel penthouse, and she still seems mad that he never served dinner. “I am food motivated,” she testified.
I have no doubt that she is telling the truth about their sexual encounter, nor that she submitted to him without being physically forced to, in order to get it over with. There certainly was, as she testified, a “power imbalance.” He was almost 60; she was 27. His bodyguard was posted outside his door.
Nor do I doubt, as she testified, that she was shocked when she emerged from the bathroom to find him lying on the bed in his underwear, nor that her hands were shaking so badly afterward that she had trouble putting her shoes on.
And when it was over, I have no doubt that Trump actually said, as she writes, “Oh that was just great. We’re so good together honeybunch.” (I mean, who could make that up?)
Trump, then reality television’s biggest star thanks to “The Apprentice,” had dangled the possibility of her appearing on his show. He thought it would be a ratings boon to have a porn star as a contestant.
“You’d be fabulous on it,” she says he told her. “You’d be huge.”
That is the only reason she met him again in July 2007 in his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, she writes, and took his many phone calls until January 2008 when it became clear that there was no way NBC was going to feature a porn star in its hit show.
I am not sure I fully understand why it was so important to put Daniels on the stand for hour after hour last week, and to focus so heavily on whether she and Trump actually had sex in 2006, which he denies.
Aren’t his denials, after all, transparently false? He’s a man who has bragged about grabbing women by the genitals, saying, “When you’re a star, they let you do it.” And he’s been found liable in a civil trial for what the judge called rape “as many people commonly understand the word.”
Anyway, the question in the hush money trial is not whether he actually had sex with Daniels. It’s whether he falsified business records to cover up a $130,000 payment to Daniels for her silence during the 2016 election.
Of course he did. But only a jury can decide whether that was illegal.
That makes Stormy Daniels, however riveting her testimony, a sideshow at the trial.
Whether Trump is convicted or not, Daniels has secured her place in presidential history. Sideshows, after all, are often the most memorable part of the circus.
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Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., a 30-year incumbent, lost to a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)-backed challenger in a high-profile primary on Tuesday evening.
Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old socialist, defeated DeGette in a Democratic primary for a deep-blue House seat anchored in Denver, according to The Associated Press, scoring a major victory for the socialist left on Tuesday evening.
The DSA had been aiming to cast DeGette’s loss as evidence of its growing momentum after a slate of socialist candidates won Democratic primaries in New York City last week.
“Today, the East Coast, next week the Mountain West,” the DSA wrote in a social media post last week.
Rep. Diana DeGette speaks during a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 10, 2024. (Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
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If elected in November, Kiros, who was born in Ethiopia, will likely join the ranks of the far-left group known as the Squad and become one of a handful of the House chamber’s outspoken socialists.
The millennial challenger was endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and the anti-incumbent leftist organization Justice Democrats. Controversial socialist streamer Hasan Piker, who has said Hamas is “a thousand times better” than Israel and praised the Chinese Communist Party, also backed Kiros’ insurgent primary run.
DeGette, a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus who supports abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), sought to win a 16th House term by flexing her leftist bona fides. She argued her seniority on an influential House committee would allow her to push for Medicare-for-All legislation — a longtime priority of the party’s far-left flank.
DeGette, who was endorsed by former CPC Chairwoman Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., also spotlighted her experience as an impeachment manager during Trump’s second impeachment trial in 2021.
Though DeGette and Kiros shared few policy disagreements, they diverged sharply over Israel and antisemitism. Kiros also sharply criticized DeGette for accepting corporate PAC contributions.
Kiros, a PhD student and lawyer, was fired from a New York firm in 2023 after publishing an open letter, arguing that pro-Palestinian student protesters calling for the elimination of Israel were not antisemitic and appearing to defend Hamas.
Melat Kiros participated in a League of Women Voters Congressional District 1 candidate forum at Montview Presbyterian Church in Denver on May 28, 2026. (RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post)
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She has also described the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks against the Jewish state as the “inevitable consequence of apartheid” and declined to characterize the deadly firebombing of protesters in Boulder last year who were urging the release of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza as antisemitic.
“I don’t know what was in the heart of the perpetrator,” Kiros told Colorado’s 9News in a recent television interview. “All I know is that he went and attacked innocent people because of what they might have believed.”
A June 2025 bipartisan resolution condemning the attack as part of a “rise in ideologically motivated attacks on Jewish individuals” won every present lawmaker’s support, except for Reps. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who voted present.
Kiros has also suggested the United States deserved 9/11.
“Inevitable in the sense that we destabilized a lot of the Middle East that forced people to believe that another act of violence was the only response,” Kiros told 9News when asked if she thought the terror attack was “the inevitable consequence of American foreign policy.”
“And again, just like I said before, our responsibility is to get rid of those conditions that lead to violence in the first place,” Kiros continued.
DeGette argued that Kiros’ embrace of Piker and her comments about antisemitism and 9/11 were disqualifying.
“I’m shocked and disgusted that Kiros is doubling down on excusing terrorism and the murder of innocent people,” the 30-year incumbent wrote on Facebook earlier this month.
Streamer and creator Hasan Piker speaks at a press conference during day two of Web Summit Vancouver at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, Canada, on May 13, 2026. (Sam Barnes/Web Summit via Sportsfile via Getty Images)
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Colorado’s 1st Congressional District is the most liberal seat in the state and voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris by 56 points in 2024.
The primary fight was further scrambled by University of Colorado Regent Wanda James, also running for DeGette’s seat. Though James did not pose the same threat as Kiros, her vote share could ultimately have swayed the contest.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed off on a 100% state tax on money any Californians receive from Trump’s $1.8-billion “anti-weaponization” fund for his political allies.
Newsom unveiled his proposal in May, after Trump’s Justice Department said it would create a fund to compensate Trump’s allies who claim they have “suffered weaponization and lawfare” under Biden’s Justice Department.
The settlement fund was criticized by politicians on both sides of the aisle, including Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who described it as a “slush fund to pay people who assault cops.”
The fund remains in legal limbo. Earlier this month, a federal judge in Virginia extended a court-ordered block on the plan, which critics warned could be used to pay pardoned Jan. 6 rioters.
Fast-tracked into law as part of Senate Bill 122, Newsom’s plan imposes “a tax on any settlement fund payment from the federal Anti-Weaponization Fund, or any subsequent fund, settlement, or agreement, as provided, at a rate of 100%,” according to the bill text. The tax applies to all tax years between 2026 and 2030.
Newsom signed the bill Tuesday. In a statement, his office said the tax is meant to ensure that, should Trump’s fund proceed, California recipients won’t “receive favorable state treatment on those payments.”
“We believe democracy is worth defending, the rule of law matters, and public dollars should support victims—not those who attacked the very institutions that protect our freedoms,” Newsom said in the statement.
University of Southern California law professor Ariel Jurow Kleiman, an expert on tax law and policy, said that while Newsom’s tax is a “novel legal strategy,” she believes there is “no categorical legal restriction” preventing California from implementing it.
States have a “wide degree of discretion” to design their tax systems — including how they define income — so long as they do not violate their constitutions, Jurow Kleiman said.
If a California resident wanted to challenge the tax in court, they would need to show they were harmed by it to have standing to sue, according to Jurow Kleiman. That would mean receiving a payment from Trump’s settlement fund and then paying the 100% California tax. Unless the settlement fund is established and distributes payments, that scenario is unlikely.
While there have been proposals to levy a 100% tax on income above certain thresholds — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in 2023 said he supports a 100% tax on income exceeding $1 billion — Jurow Kleiman said she is not aware of any governments that have adopted such a policy.
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The House has officially shipped a colossal bipartisan housing package to President Donald Trump, and lawmakers are hoping that, at the very least, he doesn’t veto it.
Trump was supposed to sign the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act last week, but his last-minute decision to ghost the signing ceremony with House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., put into question whether the bill was dead.
His refusal to sign the bill, which passed with overwhelmingly bipartisan support in both chambers, was to leverage the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, which doesn’t currently have the votes to succeed in the Senate.
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Trump has refused to sign the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. (Shawn Thew/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Trump appears to be in no hurry to sign the bill, despite Republicans who are hungry for a win in the affordability fight ahead of the midterm elections.
“It’s so unimportant … compared to the SAVE America Act,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday. “I think the SAVE America Act is exactly what it says. It’s saving America from crooked elections.”
“Here’s what I would like to sign, much more than a bill that — big deal, it’s a yawn,” he continued. “Some people say it’s wonderful. To me, compared to the SAVE America Act, just about everything is a big yawn.”
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It’s legislation that is loaded with nearly 60 provisions from both sides of the aisle in both chambers that’s designed to make it easier for homes to be built and for younger Americans to buy their first home. It also includes a ban on hedge funds buying up housing stock that Trump pushed Congress to include during the State of the Union earlier this year.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., one of the architects behind the bill in the upper chamber alongside Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., charged that Congress handed the bill to Trump “on a silver platter.”
“When you ask me what happens next, if he cared about the American people, he’d have already signed the damned thing, and we’d be underway,” Warren said on WCVB’s “On the Record” on Sunday.
But Trump doesn’t have to put his signature on the bill for it to become law.
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The Senate advanced a massive, Trump-backed housing package geared toward lowering the costs of homes and supercharging the housing supply. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., pitched it as legislation to prevent America from becoming a “nation of renters.” (Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Protect Borrowers; Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
The Constitution grants presidents the ability to veto a bill within 10 days of it being transferred over to the White House. In that scenario, Congress could override a veto of the housing package.
It’s happened before under the Trump administration. In early 2021, Congress overrode Trump’s veto of the annual National Defense Authorization Act — a massive Pentagon funding authorization package that some House Republicans are trying to use as a vehicle to pass the SAVE America Act.
But during that 10-day period, if Trump doesn’t sign the bill, it would automatically become law. That’s unless Congress completely adjourns, in which case a “pocket veto” could happen. The Senate is currently in recess and the House is scheduled to leave town by week’s end, but neither count as a full adjournment.
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Johnson, who spent the last few days meeting with Trump at the White House about the housing bill and the SAVE America Act, said: “I hope he does sign it.”
“If he doesn’t, it’s still law,” Johnson said. “We’ll still celebrate it, but he’s trying to make a point, and I think he’s making it very effectively. And the fact that you all ask me every three steps down the hallway illustrates that he has achieved the desired objective, and that is to make SAVE America the number one thing, because if we don’t get that right, everybody’s concerned about what happens next.”
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