Students Storm Washington; Stormy Daniels Will Take to 60 Minutes

Lynn Yaeger
Updated
John Dowd and H.R. McMaster are out, Stormy Daniels’s turn on 60 Minutes is in.

“This can be a very mean-spirited town,” Rex Tillerson, the former secretary of state, who the president fired by tweet, mused on Thursday. Oh, but Tilly, Washington, D.C. can also be the most inspiring place on earth, on days when hundreds of thousands people take to its streets and chant, “Enough is enough!” The chorus of voices on Saturday, shouting up to the heavens, was almost enough to make you believe that things will change, and faster than anyone thinks.

But alas, for the moment, the meanness persists. On Saturday, just as anti-gun students and their supporters were pouring into Washington or attending sister marches all over the country, the President announced his latest strictures on transgender people serving in the military, a cruel edict meant, you can’t help but think, to distract us from the other developments of the past week.

Because, as ever, the last seven days were quite the whack-fest: On Thursday, John Dowd, President Trump’s lead attorney for the Russia investigation, resigned, his rumored replacement being Joseph E. diGenova, a Washington lawyer and frequent talking head on Fox who has a penchant for conspiracy theories, including that the President is being framed by the FBI. Later that same day, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster ate dirt—an event noted on Twitter by his former boss thusly: “I am pleased to announce that, effective 4/9/18, @AmbJohnBolton will be my new National Security Advisor. I am very thankful for the service of General H.R. McMaster who has done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend. There will be an official contact handover on 4/9.” Bolton, in case you are too young to remember, is a notorious ultraconservative warmonger, an extremist character known for his thick mustache and his alarmingly hawkish positions.

Some people believe the McMaster sacking was related to the leaking of White House briefing papers given to the president just before he phoned up Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, after the controversial election in Russia. These documents warned the President, “DO NOT CONGRATULATE.” But—and why are you not surprised?—Trump did just that, adding, “We had a very good call.” And, wait, there’s more Cambridge Analytica news! Turns out the Trump campaign was not the company’s only client. The data firm, which used Facebook to profile and target voters, was also hired by presidential hopefuls Ted Cruz and Ben Carson. In Carson’s case, the fee paid to Cambridge was $220,000, or around $189,000 more than the price of the dining room table he ordered for his HUD office—or $90,000 more than Stormy Daniels was given by Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen in hush money to shut her up about her alleged affair with the president.

Oh Stormy, what will you tell us tonight on 60 Minutes? What dark secrets lurk in the CD sleeve your lawyer has teased us with? In a caption accompanying a photo of a CD, attorney Michael Avenatti wrote: “If ‘a picture is worth a thousand words,’ how many words is this worth????? #60minutes #pleasedenyit #basta.”

Basta indeed. Bring it on, Stormy! Enough is enough.

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