There's Another Side to Trump's New Stormy Daniels Defense:

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May 3, 2018 at 11:22 AM 162

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There's Another Side to Trump's New Stormy Daniels Defense: 'The Leach Effect'

Porn star payoffs are just part of being rich and famous, you see.

Quote:

Bitch set me up

By Charles P. Pierce
May 3, 2018

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By now, everybody and his mouthpiece has heard that supergenius lawyer Rudy Giuliani pretty much gave away the store on Wednesday night regarding the piquant details about how hush money got “funneled”—his word, not mine—to Ms. Stephanie Clifford, d/b/a Stormy Daniels.

Give Sean Hannity credit for this much—he appeared to be completely gobsmacked by the revelation that the president* reimbursed Michael Cohen for the $130,000 he’d paid out to squash the details of a liaison that the president* claims never happened.

Thursday morning, then, was dedicated to pulling the president*’s chestnuts out of the bonfire that Giuliani had lit all around them. Somebody, clearly not the president*, leaped to the electric Twitter machine to present an intriguing legal rebuttal. Somebody wanted it to sound like the president*, though. Note the clever use of the wrong homophone of “roll” for “role.

Mr. Cohen, an attorney, received a monthly retainer, not from the campaign and having nothing to do with the campaign, from which he entered into, through reimbursement, a private contract between two parties, known as a non-disclosure agreement, or NDA.

These agreements are...very common among celebrities and people of wealth. In this case it is in full force and effect and will be used in Arbitration for damages against Ms. Clifford (Daniels).

The agreement was used to stop the false and extortionist accusations made by her about an affair,..

Frankly, I think Marion Barry said it better.

Quote:

Bitch set me up

Originally uttered by former DC mayor and current DC councilmember Marion Barry when caught by the FBI in a hotel room with crack and a prostitute in 1990. (He was still elected.) Now a catchphrase used occasionally by DC locals to express discontent with a situation, or to remind people that we had the original crack mayor - 20+ years before Toronto.

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I’m more intrigued by the other part, though, the part where the president*’s electric Twitter account argues that, because he is a “celebrity” and part of the “people of wealth,” he is constantly enmeshed in rarefied legal complications that we lowly commoners cannot understand—like having to “funnel” money to our lawyer to pay off the porn stars with whom we did not have affairs. This leads us into part of the president*’s appeal that is too little discussed. Call it the Robin Leach Effect.

Back when the president* was blighting the landscape merely as a New York glitterati nuisance, Leach hosted a program called Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, which took the denizens of America’s tract homes and double-wides into the fascinating lives of wealthy people who didn’t give a damn about them.

Oddly, this did not necessarily result in jealousy and legitimate populist ridicule. (Think Ms. Loretta Lynn’s classic rendition of Shel Silverstein’s “One’s On The Way,” )

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMzSYyjNb74

Often, it translated into a kind of identification, a combination of vicarious luxury and wistful hope that, one day, all of this could be yours. The show was a very big hit, and Donald Trump was one of Them that you hoped could be You one day.

The Leach Effect was in evidence throughout the campaign, from the moment he outflanked Iowa Republicans by dropping his helicopter onto a ballfield near the state fairgrounds and offering children and Mark Halperin a chance to see how the Other Half travels.

At every subsequent rally, at least one of the people in attendance would offer some variation of the argument that Trump was so rich, he didn’t need to gouge the public in office.

(Answers: One, no, he’s not, and two, that’s the EPA administrator’s job.)

Nobody in this country is completely immune to the attraction of money, either real money or the perception of money.

Trump counted on that to help him get elected and now, apparently, he’s counting on it to blind his devotees to the obvious absurdity of this situation, and of his clumsy attempts to get out of it. I have to admit: Emmet Flood, the president*’s new lawyer, certainly hit the ground running on Thursday.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a201265...met-flood/

Caviar wishes and champagne dreams, y’all.

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