White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told a gaggle of reporters this week that she was under no obligation to entertain their Stormy Daniels fixation.
The star of “Dumb Blonde” and her alleged sexual liaison with President Trump in 2006 was once again the focus of the White House press corps Tuesday, but new developments were in short supply.
Mrs. Sanders told CNN reporter Jeff Zeleny and a trio of his peers that different iterations of the same question would not elicit a different response.
First lady Melania Trump “has said ’he would push back ten times as hard, no matter if you’re a man or a woman. He treats everyone equal.’ Why the silence?” Mr. Zeleny asked.
“I don’t think it’s silent when the president has addressed this,” Mrs. Sanders replied. “We’ve addressed it extensively. There’s just nothing else to add. Just because you guys continue to ask the same question over and over and over again, doesn’t mean that we have to keep coming up with new things to say. We’ve addressed it. We addressed it significantly and there’s nothing new to add.”
The porn actress whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, has parlayed accusations of an affair with Mr. Trump into appearances on late-night TV shows and a high-profile interview on CBS News’ “60 Minutes.” The 39-year-old adult-film star claimed Sunday that she was confronted in a parking lot in 2011 by a mysterious man who told her to “leave Trump alone” and “forget the story.”
“He leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, ’That’s a beautiful little girl. It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.’ And then he was gone,” she told CBS.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly denied an affair with the performer.
“You called [Mr. Trump] a counter puncher many times,” another reporter asked Mrs. Sanders on Tuesday. “Why has he not punched back on this one?”
“I didn’t say he punches back on every single topic,” she replied. “If he did, he would address a lot of the stories that every one of you has every minute of the day. He has a country to run and doing a great job with that. That’s why the economy is booming, ISIS on the run, making the judiciary, pushing his agenda through. Sometimes he chooses to punch back and sometimes he doesn’t.”
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
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