Remember Karen McDougal? She used to be big. Well, biggish. Well, on the road to biggish, definitely, when it was “revealed” a couple of weeks ago in America’s bible of titillation, the New Yorker, that the 1998 Playmate of the Year had an affair with a married Donald Trump back in the day and had been effectively paid off à la Stormy Daniels prior to the 2016 election, though if the New Yorker’s story is accurate, poor Karen got stiffed in an unfair manner, and, regardless of the details, why wouldn’t she be allowed to cash in on something like this?
Well, she should have, but events intervened. The whole Rob Porter thing blew up, which not only made both White House chief of staff John Kelly and über White House inside gal Hope Hicks look very bad, but raised the whole ugly issue of interim security clearances—security clearances after a year—leading, ultimately, to a downgrading of White House son-in-law Jared Kushner’s clearance.
After that, well, unmerciful disaster followed fast and followed faster, for both Jared and Hope, the White House, and the country, after the terrible slaughter of 17 high school students in Florida. The immense debate over gun control that resulted from the killings seemed to eclipse all else, particularly since Trump was determined to position himself on the crest of the wave, whatever it was and wherever it was going, by whatever means necessary and the Second Amendment be damned, if only in appearance though not in fact.
But the Kushner/Hicks/Kelly thing, or rather, things, kept percolating, with new revelations every day, provoking Trump into new rages every day, conflagration heaped on conflagration, to the extent that we are now facing a trade war that we don’t need and a new arms race that we don’t need—a new fake arms race that we don’t need to go along with the old fake arms race that we don’t need, to the extent that the 1998 Playmate of the Year has to borrow a buck to buy a cup of coffee. What has happened to America?
Afterwords
The “problem” is that political sex scandals in America are driven entirely from the Right. Ninety percent of what the mainstream press does is report what “important” people say. Imagine if Bill Clinton’s attorney had paid off a porn star,1 or if a publishing pal had deep-sixed a true confessions piece from a Karen McDougal? Both gals would be up before congressional committees, and all over the tube, in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. But because it’s El Trumpo, nothing.
The case of Hope Hicks, a former model for Ralph Lauren, is even more interesting, and even more underreported. The whole revelation regarding Rob Porter, it appears, was set in motion when a British newspaper, the Daily Mail, published a photo of Rob with new main squeeze Hope, causing old main squeeze, whose name, as far as I know, has never been published, to contact Rob’s ex-wives, to push along their accusations of abusive behavior on his part, which eventually exploded when the Daily Mail published a photograph of one of the ex-wives with a black eye that, she claimed, was given to her by Porter.
One would have expected a little sniggering at Rob’s expense, first that he goes through the ladies so fast, that he, shall we say, fucks upwards, and that his comeuppance came from a woman scorned, not to mention, you know, screwing in a Republican White House! But nothing—well, as far as I know, because I don’t watch TV. Hicks has had a remarkable in with the prestige press, because, again, as far as I know, that original wicked Daily Mail photo has not appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or Politico, or even, it seems, the New Yorker. Which is why I’m publishing it here.
UPDATE
The Washington Post tries to do both Karen and Stormy a solid by pushing along the story with this piece, providing “evidence” that the payoff to Stormy amounts to an illegal campaign contribution, an argument that could also apply to Karen’s agreement/non-agreement with the National Enquirer. The problem is, it’s the Federal Election Commission that handles these things, and, these days, the FEC can’t exactly be considered pro-active, particularly since the commission has a Republican majority and particularly particularly because it takes a unanimous vote to initiate an investigation.
- The details of that payoff remain murky, and what lies beneath the murk is likely to remain there, because (again) Republicans. ↩︎
