Evidence is not really about the props. Natalie Harp, the Walt Nauta of Dan Scavinos makes the idea of loyalty to Trump laughable. It’s not about spanking but Trump’s infidelity and obstinance, like trying to identify the exact magazine that was used in the ‘spanking’.
Trump has consistently denied the affair but changed his story around the payment. He initially denied the payment — as did Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen — but acknowledged it as legal proceedings against Cohen advanced. Trump’s argument is that the payment was not from campaign funds.
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March 2023: Trump attacks Bragg and the ‘witch hunt,’ again denies affair
Trump intensified his attacks on Bragg and other continuing investigations on Truth Social starting March 3.
On March 9, he wrote he did "absolutely nothing wrong, I never had an affair with Stormy Daniels, nor would I have wanted to have an affair with Stormy Daniels."
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Todd Blanche offered a similar nothing-to-see-here defense during the opening statement. “They put something sinister on this idea, as if it was a crime,” he said of the conspiracy allegation. “You’ll learn it’s not.”
At its climax, Mr. Blanche’s opening statement took aim at Michael D. Cohen, the star prosecution witness who paid Ms. Daniels the hush money in the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign, silencing her story of a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen is expected to testify that he acted at Mr. Trump’s direction to avoid damaging his campaign. And when Mr. Trump reimbursed him for the $130,000 hush-money payment, Mr. Cohen will likely say, the former president authorized his company to falsify internal records to disguise the true nature of the repayment.
Mr. Blanche assailed Mr. Cohen’s credibility in the opening statement, noting that the former fixer had previously pleaded guilty to federal crimes, including for his role in the hush-money payment. He described Mr. Cohen as an “obsessed” former employee seeking revenge, arguing that it was he, not Mr. Trump, who was responsible for the records.
Mr. Blanche also cast doubt on Ms. Daniels, characterizing her as an opportunist out for a payday. He contended that if she testified, it would be nothing more than a distraction, since she was not involved in the false records at the heart of the case.
“She doesn’t know anything about the charged 34 counts in this case,” he told the jury during his opening statement. “Her testimony, while salacious, does not matter.”
But Mr. Blanche took a step further, and denied that Mr. Trump had sex with Ms. Daniels, echoing a claim his client has consistently made since the story first became public when he was president. Mr. Blanche also accused Ms. Daniels of all but trying to extort Mr. Trump, drawing an objection from prosecutors that was sustained by the judge.
Stormy Daniels used a copy of Forbes magazine to spank Donald Trump during a year-long sexual relationship. Forbes spent some time trying to disclaim the use of their publication as a sex toy.
Perhaps the most common suggestion—originally offered by Mother Jones and later amplified by Stephen Colbert: Forbes, which ran a story on Trump and his children in its 2006 Forbes 400 issue. Trump appears on the magazine’s cover, standing with Donald Jr. at his left and Ivanka Trump at his right. Given Trump’s longtime obsession with his spot on the Forbes 400 list, Forbes seemed like a logical assumption.
There’s just one problem: the spanking allegedly occurred in July 2006, months before that issue hit newsstands.
“The timeline isn’t right,” says Stephane Fitch, who wrote the 2006 Trump story for Forbes and now runs his own editorial services firm. “I really don’t think it would be possible unless her memory’s failing her and the swatting took place a little bit later.”
[...]
Daniels also told 60 Minutes that Trump asked, "Have you seen my new magazine?" As The Daily Beast notes, that wording lends credence to a different theory—that Trump didn’t use Forbes, but instead brandished a copy of his own publication: Trump Magazine. Trump had licensed his name to the quarterly magazine’s publishers, who sold it on stands and distributed it to many of Trump’s properties. He appeared on the cover of the spring 2006 issue, right around the time of (though perhaps a few months before) the alleged incident with Daniels. The cover boasted that Trump was “ON TOP OF THE WORLD” and dismissed the looming housing crisis with: “BUBBLE? WHAT BUBBLE? Real Estate Tips From Trump U.”
Unlike Trump’s Forbes cover—which was dated October 9, 2006 and hit newsstands in mid-September—this magazine had been published by July 2006. It also seems to better fit Trump’s description of “my new magazine.” Could this be what Stormy Daniels used to spank Donald Trump?
www.forbes.com/...
The rise of Trump is in part due to a paranoid-schizoid politics found both in the personality of Trump himself and in a large-scale regression of many in the populace to a more primitive state of denial, splitting, and demonization. The Trump phenomenon shares much with many other nationalist politics on the rise around the world, but mostly an inability to tolerate difference and loss, including loss of a romanticized past or idealized future. Hence our politics today needs something that psychoanalytic theory has tried to offer: an understanding of how to work through trauma, loss, and persecutory phantasies.
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