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Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are trying to run on issues, but nobody can hear them.
Stormy Daniels has dominated the domestic political news environment over the past week, with high-profile media appearances by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Daniels’s attorney Michael Avenatti making headlines and leading the Sunday shows.
Among dedicated Trump haters, that’s made Daniels and Avenatti stars. Jacob Weisberg in Slate hails the attorney as a “brilliant egomaniac who could bring Trump down” while TPM’s Josh Marshall hails his ability to keep Trump off balance and force him into mistakes.
He's right about this. Even if people rag on Avenatti's TV ubiquity, it's unquestionable that the aggressive media and legal posture has put Trump and Cohen off balance and forced a series of major errors that are now baked into the legal process going forward. No question. https://t.co/Ysb7MmjFDQ
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) May 6, 2018
At the same time, Trump’s approval rating seems to have gone up moderately during the storm. Stormy-related issues do appear to potentially put Michael Cohen in legal jeopardy, and, potentially, he is vulnerable to cooperating with Robert Mueller in a way that puts Trump himself in legal jeopardy, but all of that is, for now, purely hypothetical.
In concrete terms, the problem with the Daniels issue for Democrats is it doesn’t really add anything to what everyone already thinks about Trump. People who stuck with a thrice-married birther who claimed Hillary Clinton literally founded ISIS through the “grab ’em by the pussy” controversy aren’t about to be suddenly scandalized by the news that he engaged in some legally questionable tactics to cover up an affair with a porn star. It’s wrong to say that the carnival aspects of the Trump Show don’t do him any harm — his approval ratings remain under water despite healthy economic conditions — but it’s hard for the circus to hurt him more at the margin given everything that’s already happened.
Democratic Party leaders, for exactly this reason, aren’t talking about Daniels; they’re talking about issues that they think can cut into Trump’s base and/or improve their own image among voters. But they’re having a hard time breaking through.
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