Trump admits he paid hush money to porn star and lied about everything

The story of Trump’s extramarital affair with porn star Stormy Daniels, and how his longtime “fixer” Michael Cohen paid $130,000 to cover it all up without Trump’s knowledge, completely fell apart Thursday morning.

The details of the ludicrous and never-believable tale have been unraveling for months. But Trump set fire to the whole thing himself when he took to Twitter Thursday morning and told an entirely different story than what Cohen, the White House, and Trump himself have been saying.

“Mr. Cohen, an attorney, received a monthly retainer, not from the campaign and having nothing to do with the campaign, from which he entered into, through reimbursement, a private contract between two parties, known as a non-disclosure agreement, or NDA,” Trump tweeted.

It was only a week ago that he insisted, during a bizarre call-in appearance on his favorite show “Fox & Friends,” that Cohen performed only “a tiny, tiny little fraction” of legal work for him.

If so, why was Trump paying a substantial retainer — $35,000 a month, according to Trump’s newest attorney, Rudy Giuliani — to “reimburse” Cohen for the $130,000 of hush money he paid to Daniels?

All of that contradicts Cohen’s own claims, not that Cohen has any more credibility than his client, that he was not reimbursed by Trump.

But it gets worse from there. Trump, who campaigned on a platform of understanding and even relating to the “economic anxiety” of struggling working-class Americans, now says this entire ridiculous scheme is standard operating procedure for really rich people like him.

“These agreements are,” he continued, “very common among celebrities and people of wealth.”

Good luck selling that argument in the heartland.

Then Trump admits to another lie: that he had no knowledge of the agreement Cohen made with Daniels on his behalf to keep the whole thing quiet. As of Thursday morning, he apparently knows a great deal about it.

“The agreement was used to stop the false and extortionist accusations made by her about an affair despite already having signed a detailed letter admitting that there was no affair,” Trump tweeted, insisting that it was a “private agreement.”

And because serious questions have been raised about whether that payment may have been an illegal campaign contribution, Trump — who, again, supposedly had no knowledge of this agreement as recently as April 5 — now is expert enough on how the payments were made to know there was no such violation.

“Money from the campaign, or campaign contributions, played no roll [sic] in this transaction,” he tweeted. But when he was asked a month ago, on Air Force One, about the payments, Trump said, “You’ll have to ask Michael Cohen. Michael is my attorney. You’ll have to ask Michael.”

The story of the hush money cover-up broke in January. At the time, the White House dismissed the entire thing as “old, recycled reports.” Cohen, meanwhile, said in a statement that Trump “once again vehemently denies any such occurrence.”

The story has changed over and over since then, but on Thursday Trump broke it wide open. And however he and his advisers are now trying to spin the payments, one thing is very clear: Trump paid hush money to a porn star to keep her quiet about an affair just weeks before the 2016 election. And now he has admitted it on Twitter for all the world — and all the lawyers investigating him — to see.