DDay, I was getting the impression that you weren’t going to do this...so glad you did!  This is the official Stormy Live Blog!

I thought this B.B. game would never end...and it almost didn’t!

On the whole, I would have preferred much more basketball. That is it. I am done.

Trump, or perhaps only Trump's attorney Cohen, did end up paying for sex, only 10 years after.  

Really strains credulity to think Stormy was somehow on her version left in a bad position that night in 2006 that she put herself in, rather than that she believed having sex with the Donald would lead to a gig on the Apprentice or some other benefit in light of the dirt it meant she now had on him.

Not that many of his supporters are likely to turn against him given all the other stuff they've looked the other way on.  Some of them might be more impressed with His Sleazebagginess based on this dalliance.

His reputation could hardly be further tarnished.  A question perhaps is whether there is literally any degree of further humiliation that would be a final straw for Melania and what, if any, damage she could do to him if she could be so inclined.

The former Bush appointee who was on the show says the wild card is whether Mueller will dig into Cohen's role in this matter (using it to get other information out of Cohen?) who was involved in business negotiations with the Russians on Trump's behalf.

It's the Karen Douglas thing that's a marriage killer if Melania was not aware of it, not just a fling but a longstanding affair. Note the same daughter line here on the NPR March 23 article by Vanessa Romo on it:

[....] That set a precedent for their future sexual encounters, of which she said there were "many dozens." From June 2006 through April 2007, she said, "We saw each other a minimum of five times a month up to bigger numbers," and each meeting involved some type of sexual intimacy.

Throughout their relationship, Trump arranged their trysts, asking her to meet him all over the country in private and in public, she said. Mostly he would fly her out to meet him and put her up for the length of her stay, but he occasionally had her book her own travel and pay for herself, with the understanding that he would reimburse her later.

That way there would be "no paper trail," she said.

She told Cooper that Trump didn't seem to care whether people saw them together and didn't seem conflicted about cheating on his wife. She said she visited him at his New Jersey home. Once, she said, he even took her to the apartment in Trump Tower where he lived with his wife and their young son, Barron.

"Aren't you afraid to bring me here?"

"They won't say anything," Trump supposedly said.

He showed her around the "very gold" apartment and pointed out Melania's room, saying, "She likes to get away to read."

It was moments like this, McDougal said, that filled her with guilt and dread over the extramarital affair.

"Doing something wrong is bad enough, and when you're doing something wrong and you're in the middle of somebody else's home or bed or whatever, that just puts a little stab in your heart," she said.

Even worse was actually meeting Melania and posing for a picture with her, Trump and a handful of McDougal's Playboy Playmate colleagues, she said. McDougal conceded it is possible Melania knew about the Playmate's dalliance with Trump.

Still, she said she was very happy throughout the romance. She said that she loved Trump and that he loved her. He told her so "all the time" and had several pet names for her, including "baby" and "beautiful Karen."

One of her memories involves Trump favorably comparing her to his daughter Ivanka.

"He said I was beautiful like her," she told Cooper [....]

This is a repeat of behavior with Marla Maples. He purposely shoved Marla in Ivana's face. He likes to have a young partner, Ivana was getting too old for him.But this is beginning just a year and a half after he married Melania and Barron had just been born March 2006. Here is a good Vanity Fair May 2017 article on their relationship.

Homage to Stormy. It is somehow fitting that the indignation of a wronged porn star could lead to the final undoing of Donald Trump. Despite the growing power of the #MeToo movement, and the falling of predatory male icons across the political spectrum, the Predator-in-Chief has gotten away with it—until now.

As Deep Throat (whose nickname is now somehow doubly fitting) famously counseled, follow the money. So if we follow the money, Stormy’s rage against Trump and his fixer, Michael Cohen, has now led to the following chain of revelations.

Cohen was not running a law firm. He was running a money laundry. Send payments to Cohen, and you could pay disguised bribes to Donald Trump. As The New York Times has reported, Cohen’s dummy company received at least $4.4 million in funds including money from a Russian oligarch close to the Kremlin, Viktor Vekselberg, as well as money from corporations doing business with the Trump administration, including Novartis and AT&T.

It was the lawyer for Stormy, Michael Avenatti, who first made much of this information public. The special counsel, Robert Mueller, might have unearthed these and other details in due course, but Stormy’s battle gave the issue a nice boost.

All of this is likely to put Michael Cohen at even greater legal jeopardy, and incline him to sing to prosecutors a couple octaves higher. In Trump’s America, in the era of #MeToo, in the era of Eric Schneiderman exposed as a thug, the person of relative honor is a porn star.

Stormy didn’t abuse or assault anybody, she didn’t try to bribe the government, and she didn’t launder money for the Kremlin. It’s a pretty low bar, but it may be enough to help bring down Trump.

You were expecting, maybe, Mother Teresa? ~ ROBERT KUTTNER

​Kuttner on TAP, today