"It's an act of cowardice," San Antonio Spurs head coach Greg Popovich said of President Donald Trump's decision to flee Washington, D.C. for his Mar-a-Lago mansion just ahead of massive marches in the capital and across the country on Saturday, which saw hundreds of thousands take to the streets demanding legislative action against gun violence.
"A real leader," said Popovich, "would have been in Washington D.C. this weekend, not in his penthouse at Mar-a-Lago, would have had the decency to meet with the group, to see what is going on and how important it is and how important our children should be to us."
But Trump didn't hide out in his Florida vacation home all weekend: The president returned to the White House just before CBS aired its "60 Minutes" interview with adult film actress Stormy Daniels Sunday evening, notably without first lady Melania Trump.
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While it isn't yet clear whether Trump watched Daniels' much-anticipated interview—in which she offered details of her alleged affair with the president and claimed she was threatened to stay silent—the president has reportedly been fuming in private about "what he perceives as wall-to-wall Stormy coverage on cable news."
"You know why he won’t tweet about it? Because it's true. It's 100 percent true."
—Michael Avenatti, attorney of Stormy DanielsAs the potential scandal has continued to escalate and as the legal battles intensify, Trump has remained completely silent about the matter on Twitter, a fact that Daniels' lawyer Michael Avenatti says is because he knows her account is factual.
"Isn't it interesting that we have a president that will tweet about the most mundane matters, but he won't tweet about my client, the affair, the agreement, or the $130,000 payment?" Avenatti said Monday in an interview on CBS "This Morning." "You know why he won't tweet about it? Because it's true. It's 100 percent true."
Asked if she had any message for the president during the interview, Daniels responded, "He knows I'm telling the truth."
As Common Dreams reported last weekend, Trump's legal team has attempted to move Daniels' lawsuit against the president—which argues the confidentiality agreement she signed is void because Trump never signed it himself—to federal court and out of public view.
As the "60 Minutes" interview continued to dominate morning news coverage on Monday, the lawyer for Trump's personal attorney Michael Cohen sent Daniels a cease and desist letter for implying that Cohen was involved in what she characterized as a threat against her life in 2011.
"A guy walked up on me and said to me, 'Leave Trump alone. Forget the story,'" Daniels recalled. "And then 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."
