Some time ago (and along with others no doubt) I began to ponder the possibility that in order to defeat Donald Trump and his wrong side of history, democracy in America has to come up with someone who is both as crazy and yet strangely talented as he is.

After I saw an especially good “Real Time with Bill Maher” episode one Friday night a while back, I came up with the too crazy thought that maybe Bill Maher should be the next Democratic candidate for president.

When I raised this prospect with friends over drinks they laughed so loud that I had to stress I just meant it as a joke. But now Entertainment Columnist Vinay Menon’s Toronto Star report this past Friday has pointed to a new and possibly slightly more suitable candidate.

See Menon’s : “When Trump looks in the mirror, he sees Stormy Daniels … To glimpse Stormy Daniels on prime-time television is to realize what Donald Trump is now up against: himself.”

(And note of course that the lovely Ms Daniels will be on “60 Minutes” tomorrow night!)

A slight amount of research on the web will also reveal that Stormy Daniels (aka Stephanie Clifford from the wrong side of the tracks in Baton Rouge, capital of Louisiana) has already had the kind of getting-your-feet-wet pass at a political career also known to the early Donald Trump.

Stormy Daniels with her lawyer Michael Avenatti (l) and Anderson Cooper( r ), who interviewed her for 60 Minutes, March 25, 2018.

See, eg, this report posted with a flourish of footnotes on Wikipedia : “A group of fans attempted to recruit Daniels to run against Republican Senator David Vitter in Louisiana in 2010.[8] The recruitment process was centered around the website DraftStormy.com.[22] On May 21, 2009, she formed an exploratory committee.[23] Daniels was unaffiliated with any party until April 2010 when she declared herself as a Republican.[3] She made several listening tours around Louisiana to focus on the economy, as well as women in business and child protection[24] and stated that if elected, she would likely retire from the adult industry.[25] In August, 2009, her campaign manager’s car was blown up, although no one was in the car at that time.[26] She announced on April 15, 2010, that she would not be running for Senate, saying she could not afford a run for the Senate seat and stating that the media never took her candidacy seriously.[27]”

From Huey Long’s Baton Rouge to “the city that lives by neither the dollar nor the clock”

I naturally have no idea of whether Ms. Daniels still considers herself a Republican. But I do know that she has been (also allegedly like Donald Trump) a successful business person (after starting with none of his advantages – in an “average lower-income household,” where there were “days without electricity”). And in a pinch she could challenge Trump for the 2020 Republican nomination.

From what little I know, Stormy Daniels is also almost certainly smarter than Donald Trump. (And knows it, which explains why she is going to be on 60 Minutes and so forth. As Vinay Menon points out, she is already practicing a lot of President Trump’s tricks against him.) As Wikipedia also reports : “She attended Scotlandville Magnet High School in Baton Rouge, LA and was the President of the 4H Club and editor of the school newspaper.”

Moreover, I do know she is not just a porn actress. She has written and directed more than a few of the increasingly more sophisticated and artfully story-lined products of the self-described adult entertainment industry for some time now. In 2016 she won “Director of the Year – Feature Release” for her film “Wanted” at the annual XBIZ awards, which have evolved “as the proliferation of adult entertainment into pop culture continues.”

Huey Long’s Louisiana State Capitol building in Baton Rouge.

It may or may not be significant as well that the somewhat grandiose (and even scary?) Louisiana State Capitol building in Baton Rouge, where Stormy Daniels was born and raised, “is often thought of as ‘Huey Long’s monument’ due to the influence of the former Governor and US Senator in getting the capitol built” in the early 1930s. And Huey Long was the controversial Louisiana populist politician who claimed to believe “Every Man a King” – and was finally “assassinated in the State Capitol” in 1935.

Baton Rouge, while the capital, is only the second-largest city in Louisiana. New Orleans is the largest.  And that finally reminds me that I just recently read Harry Shearer’s engrossing review of Nathaniel Rich’s King Zeno – “a sprawling novel about a pivotal year and a half” in the history of New Orleans, 1918—1919. Shearer’s review says some of the most interesting things about the legendary city of New Orleans I’ve bumped into in quite a while. And they somehow remind me of Stormy Daniels and Donald Trump :

Harry Shearer in a scene from his indispensable 2010 documentary on the impact of Hurricane Katrina, “The Big Uneasy.”

* “The city’s racial divide was never textbook southern; New Orleans had the largest population of free people of color before the Civil War, while at the same time serving as the nation’s largest slave market. The free people of color became part of the city’s ruling class … ”

* “ But ‘jass music,’ as it was first known, started to bridge those divides long before the civil rights movement.” The trumpet-playing King Zeno in Nathaniel Rich’s novel of 1918—1919 “longs for the chance to play his music for white people, to drive them crazy past the point of caring about color.”

* “The city continues to feel more European, and Caribbean, and even African, than American … [But the] ‘federal flood’ of 2005 marked a turning point … Having survived the most existential of its many crises … New Orleans renewed itself as it restored itself.”

* “Crime has returned, but the problems New Orleans faces now are those of success–like gentrification and the possible dilution of the intense local culture … the city is still recognizably New Orleans …  a city that lives by neither the dollar nor the clock. The infamous corruption … is ridiculously penny-ante compared with, say, New Jersey or Illinois … Brutal crime coexists … with refinement and that most rare of civic virtues, grace”.

So … if you ever do get the chance, vote early and often for Stormy Daniels – a lady who is just as crazy as Donald Trump but smarter and who may sometimes even be capable of grace : a virtue America had  every day in the age of President Barack Obama,  now drifting so far away.