Montini: Why Stormy Daniels won't help Jeff Flake

EJ Montini
The Republic | azcentral.com
The actress Stephanie Clifford, who uses the stage name Stormy Daniels, arrives to perform at the Solid Gold Fort Lauderdale strip club on March 9, 2018 in Pompano Beach, Fla.

Sen. Jeff Flake is in New Hampshire this week, taking the first tentative steps toward a challenge of President Donald Trump in 2020.

Maybe.

Possibly.

Speaking of a possible run for Trump’s job, Flake told the Concord Monitor, “It’s not in my plans, but I’ve not ruled it out.”

Sex scandals hurt incumbents, right?

In every other presidential election -- and all through our history, on just about every political level -- the one thing that was pretty much guaranteed to help a long-shot candidate like Flake (if that’s what he chooses to become) is an old-fashioned sex scandal.

Enter Stormy Daniels.

The porn star who says she slept with Donald Trump (while he was married to Melania) is known to have accepted $130,000 shortly before Election Day 2016 to keep quiet about the alleged affair.

But she now has a lawyer. He not only is talking about how his client slept with Trump, but is challenging that non-disclosure agreement

Meantime, Daniels continues to make news.

Trump's non-admission admission 

And while the president had denied the affair, his ham-handed press secretary, Sarah Sanders, admitted that an “arbitration was won in the President’s favor” regarding the hush money, which is the same thing as admitting that a non-disclosure deal involving Trump exists.

And if the affair never happened, why would the president need to win any arbitration over such a deal?

Not only that, but it appears Daniels has given a “60 Minutes” interview to Anderson Cooper, and there are those who believe the president’s people will not be able to stop it from airing.

In a Washington Post article defamation attorney Megan C. Deluhery said, “She's already given the interview. CBS would need to be a party to the suit to be restrained from airing the interview, and since the obligation on Ms. Daniels arose as part of a private settlement, I don't see much legal basis to enjoin CBS — a stranger to the settlement agreement — from doing anything.”

Stormy forecast on 60 Minutes?

Waiting in the wings is Jeff Flake.

Solid family man. Smart. Measured. Completely committed to the conservative values Republicans have long stood for.

A speech Flake will give in New Hampshire is titled “Country over party.”

He said, “I’ll talk about where I think the Republican Party needs to be for the future and what we do in the post-Trump era. I do think we will get through this. This fever will cool. People will demand a governing party. A party that can govern, that can make use of the majority that it has.”

Flake has no allusions. He’s not running for reelection because he didn’t figure he could win in a Republican primary.

Why?

Not willing to pay the price

“The price for that was to accept some of the president’s positions and condone his behavior, and I couldn’t do that,” he said.

Trump’s unacceptable positions would include the president’s recently announced steel and aluminum tariffs, which Flake called an “economic disaster,” and introduced legislation to block.

As for unacceptable behavior, two words: Stormy Daniels.

Which – unlike anything in our political history – Will. Not. Matter.

On hiring a political hitman

That can’t help but be puzzling to someone like Flake, who believes that old-fashioned values of like civility and fidelity and morality actually mean something. Particularly to Republicans.

Once upon a time, anyway.

“It’s tough to see the base of the party leaving the president,” Flake admitted.

A reader who called himself a “family-values Republican” explained Trump’s appeal to me this way:

“We were tired of how things were going and wanted to rock the system so we hired a political hitman. You don’t care if your hitman cheats on his wife. He’s a hitman.”

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