Michael Avenatti

Both legal lions and laymen can be excused for having doubts about the first indictment of a former president, as we toggle back and forth between the historical significance and the lurid facts involved. As Florida governor Ron DeSantis put it: “Look, I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair.”   Charges that Donald Trump falsified internal business records in covering up $130,000 in payments to “actress” Stormy Daniels aren’t what people will focus on. This case is headed for the cable TV shows long before it sees the inside of a courtroom. The Trump indictment certainly adds an extra coating of sleaze to The Donald’s image.

Another week, another silver bullet misses Donald Trump. Once more we suffered through the same endless roll of waves of crimes, accusations, near-indictments and just bad words to which we'd become accustomed during the Trump presidency. We went from "Trump has classified material under lock and key at Mar-a-Lago" to a group of people paying $1,800 to fly a banner reading "ha ha ha ha" over the resort to mock a Trump staying 3,000 miles away in New York. On cue, the regulars on MSNBC and CNN brought out their running-dog former CIA and FBI officers to tell us tick-tock, the walls are closing in, this time it will stick, Trump is going down, he'll be in jail before he runs again for office. If we can't stop him with the electoral system, we'll use the judicial system. This. Is. The.

Which Spectator contributor will be jailed next? Taki and Michael Avenatti have both done time after bylining in these august pages — and Roger Stone only swerved his 40-month sentence by the grace of President Trump. It could be argued that The Spectator’s decision to publish Michael Avenatti was not our finest moment. The Creepy Porn Lawyer, as Tucker Carlson insisted on calling him, is not the best egg in the anti-Trump basket. But we believe in free speech, and Avenatti was eager to trash Beto O’Rourke and that’s always good idea.

Dr Anthony Fauci has exhibited plenty of behavioral red flags over the past year. Don’t believe me? Google ‘Fauci magazine covers’. The results say it all. My favorite was an InStyle cover from last July where the ‘The Good Doctor’ was posing by a pool. The Daily Beast described the cover in slobbering detail: ‘His black rimmed square sunglasses reflect a sun ray back into the camera’s eye. His blue and white button-up is undone at the neck and his jeans fit tight. It’s as if Fauci is playing Daniel Craig playing Roger Stone in an inevitable biopic.’ Can we get a wellness check on these writers, who are drooling over an elderly bureaucrat sitting in a folding chair wearing Dwight Schrute-style sunglasses?

It’s actually sort of cute, at least from a distance. There the Democrats are, playing on their hobbyhorses with all the other neighborhood children. Wobbly Chris Matthews is there, rubbing his leg and shouting. Hello, Chris! There’s Don Lemón and Rachel Maddow and Pastor David French and Bill Kristol all in a circle with their little friends from the New York Times and the Washington Post. They’re doing their nervous war dances, sending smoke signals, and hopping along on their make-believe mares, tilting at that giant windmill called Donald Trump, the evil genie they assemble daily to subject to ritual excoriation. What would they do without him?

His fans are relieved. He’s getting off scot-free. I’m referring of course to Jussie Smollett, the Empire actor whose charges were dropped today in Chicago. It’s a good week if you’re in the crosshairs of the law — unless, of course, you’re Michael Avenatti, the quondam lawyer for Stormy Daniels who got busted, if that’s the appropriate word, for trying to shake down Nike for a cool $25 million. In Greek, Nike means ‘victory’ but Avenatti looks to be going down to a nasty defeat. The slick talking lawyer had delusions of grandeur all along, reckoning first that he could bring down Trump with a lawsuit, then viewing himself as presidential timber. He’s the one that got felled by law enforcement.

Beto O’Rourke is many things. But he is definitely not a fighter. And that’s why it would be a huge mistake for the Democrats to nominate him to take on President Trump in 2020 for the White House. Simply put, Beto cannot beat Donald Trump. Someone else, maybe. But not Trump. It’s not Beto’s fault he’s not a fighter. After all, he’s led a very charmed, privileged life as a white male. He’s faced very little adversity. He didn’t come from nothing. He didn’t have to fight and scrape his way to the top because of his gender or race or economic circumstances. He has no experience doing battle in high-stakes business or leading tough negotiations. He hasn’t ever fought for working people in contentious situations.

‘It will be Stalingrad every day,’ if the Republicans lose the House in November, Steve Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist, told me earlier this month at his house in Washington. But, he adds, ‘I think he’s on fire right now. I think the Kavanaugh thing, ironically, will play against the Democrats.’ ‘They’re going to start to turn on each other,’ Bannon says of the Democrats if the Republicans continue to close in the polls. ‘The Clinton Junta has never been held accountable. How do you lose the presidency? She’s never been held accountable for that.’ That, says Bannon, creates the perfect storm for her to run. ‘It’s not that she’s going to run,’ Bannon told me.

I can't actually believe that Democratic ‘It Girl’ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a Republican mole, any more than I really believe that Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael What’s-his-name is. But is the idea really so far fetched? Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court seemed to be foundering, buffeted as it was by a tsunami of groundless charges reaching back into his high school days. None was ‘credible,’ pace the talking points of Senators Feinstein, Spartacus, et al. But what sent that narrative into a tail spin was the Julie Swetnick Show, brought to you by the latest casualty of the memory hole, Creepy Porn Lawyer Something Avenatti.

Another woman accuses Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct. A third says she was at multiple parties in the Eighties where women, including herself, were drugged and gang raped by the Supreme Court nominee and his friends. But she kept going back. And never complained until two days before an important Senate vote. And, coincidentally, Christine Blasey Ford’s attorney was her attorney in a sexual harassment suit 10 years ago. And we’re supposed to believe all this. Only the media – ever credulous when it comes to stories about Republican bad behaviour – and hardcore #Resistance types buy it. Unfortunately, even Fox misreports the story when it says that Blasey Ford has four people who will corroborate her allegations. It’s just not true.