Exclusive: pornographic actor says Trump ‘didn’t want to be president’ in her book Full Disclosure 
 
 In a tell-all memoir, the pornographic actor Stormy Daniels details salacious descriptions of her time with Donald Trump, wonders if he is fit to be president and claims that he offered to cheat for her in his reality TV show. 
 
 Stormy Daniels: 'little girl from Baton Rouge' posing big problem for Trump Read more 
 
 A copy of the book, Full Disclosure, was obtained by the Guardian. In it, Daniels describes her mounting disbelief as Trump began to win primary contests in 2016 for the Republican presidential nomination. Former castmates whom she had not heard from in years, but who had heard her story about sleeping with Trump in 2006, would call her up to marvel at the news. 
 
 “It will never happen, I would say,” Daniels writes. “He doesn’t even want to be president.” 
 
 But as Trump kept winning, she writes, she began to think she might be in danger. The story she had to tell about Trump seemed more sensitive the more he won. And she had already been threatened once, years earlier, and warned never to tell the story about Trump, she has claimed. 
 
 Those moments of fear and doubt – and Daniels’ decision on the eve of the election to sign a $130,000 hush agreement – hang around a detailed description of Daniels’ alleged tryst with Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, California. In the book, Daniels writes in sometimes excruciating detail about the president’s genitals and describes her disgust with herself for letting the scene play out. 
 
 She continued to answer Trump’s many phone calls over the next year in hopes that he would make good on his promise to put her on his reality television show, The Apprentice, Daniels writes. Trump even suggested that a cheat could be arranged to allow her to survive through more episodes of the show, she writes. 
 
 “We’ll figure out a way to get you the challenges beforehand,” she quotes him as saying. “And we can devise your technique. 
 
 “He was going to have me cheat, and it was 100 per cent his idea.” 
 
 Whenever she saw Trump on television for years afterwards, Daniels writes, an internal monologue would play out: “‘I had sex with that,’ I’d say to myself. Eech.” 
 
 Trump has denied any affair with Daniels, although he admitted to personally reimbursing his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, for the money Daniels received in the hush agreement. 
 
 With its intensely intimate portrait of a clownish and insecure Trump, the book lands after weeks in which the White House has struggled to debunk a portrait of an outmatched and incompetent president in a separate book, Bob Woodward’s Fear, and to debunk an editorial by an anonymous administration official claiming that subordinates routinely ignore and subvert the president’s orders. 
 
 Stormy Daniels: I was told to 'leave Trump alone' in parking lot threat Read more 
 
 The proliferation of damning narratives have been dismissed by the White House as made-up stories, floated as a distraction, Trump claims, from his achievements. But his approval rating appears to be slumping toward the mid-30s, a historic low for presidents at a similar stage in their first terms. 
 
 Opinions about Trump’s presidency are scarce in Full Disclosure, although when Daniels tells a story about Trump growing agitated about a golf course plan she notes: “There was nothing that made him seem as petulant and prone to tantrums as he has been as president.” 
 
 The crux of the book follows Daniels’ decision to go public with her story about Trump just before the election, after years of hiding the affair, she writes, from her then-husband. Going public meant that she and her daughter would be less vulnerable to attack, she reasoned. She recounts a story she has told elsewhere, of being approached by a large man in a gym parking lot in 2011 and warned not to tell the story about Trump. Trump has said the parking lot story is “a total con job”. 
 
 Beginning with Daniels’ youth as a girl named Stephanie Clifford growing up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Full Disclosure tells a vivid story of childhood poverty, neglect and abuse, including sexual abuse by a middle-aged man beginning when Daniels was nine years old. The stories are intercut with light moments such as her time with a beloved pet horse and a crush on Patrick Swayze so intense she kissed a hole in her Dirty Dancing poster. 
 
 “The deck has always been stacked against me,” she writes, but: “I own my story and the choices I made.” 
 
 The memoir narrates Daniels’ first experiences as a stripper while still in high school, and how she broke into the porn industry, through which she rose to become an award-winning director, writer and star. 
 
 Stormy Daniels has spoken. It doesn’t look good for Trump – or us | Jill Filipovic Read more 
 
 It was in that role that Daniels attended a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, in 2006, where she and two colleagues greeted golfers between holes. There she first sees Trump: “He had a red cap, a Trump crest as a placeholder for the MAGA slogan not one of us could see coming.” 
 
 Trump’s bodyguard invites Daniels to dinner, which turns out to be an invitation to Trump’s penthouse, she writes, in a description of alleged events that Daniels has disclosed previously but which in the book are rendered with new and lurid detail. She describes Trump’s penis as “smaller than average” but “not freakishly small”. 
 
 “He knows he has an unusual penis,” Daniels writes. “It has a huge mushroom head. Like a toadstool … 
 
 “I lay there, annoyed that I was getting fucked by a guy with Yeti pubes and a dick like the mushroom character in Mario Kart ... 
 
 “It may have been the least impressive sex I’d ever had, but clearly, he didn’t share that opinion.” 
 
 Daniels’ alleged relationship with Trump included one moment in 2007, she writes, in which she is with Trump in a hotel room watching a Shark Week broadcast on cable television when he receives a phone call from Hillary Clinton, then running against Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination. 
 
 “Then, to make it crazier, Hillary Clinton called,” Daniels writes. “He had a whole conversation about the race, repeatedly mentioning ‘our plan’ ... 
 
 “Even while he was on the phone with Hillary, his attention kept going back to the sharks.” 
 
 Amid an explosion of controversy on social media on Tuesday morning after the publication of this story, Daniels’ attorney, Michael Avenatti, said on Twitter the most important thing about the book was “not the description of her sex with Mr Trump”. 
 
 It was, he said, “her description of her life and role as a modern woman unafraid to speak truth to power”. 
 
 Daniels did not comment on Tuesday but Avenatti appeared on CNN. Challenging Trump, Cohen or any other protagonist to prove otherwise, he said the book “firmly establishes my client is telling the truth”. ||||| The adult star who flirted with a Senate run goes public on Sunday night in an interview that could increase the pressure on the president 
 
 Stormy Daniels got her start in politics the same way most people get a used dresser – from a post on Craigslist. 
 
 “Seeking a female candidate to challenge David Vitter in the Republican primary for the United States Senate in 2010. We are looking for a candidate with a history in some aspect of the adult entertainment industry,” read the ad placed in 2008. 
 
 Vitter, the Republican senator from Louisiana who championed family values, had been ensnared in a prostitution scandal and some cheeky pranksters wanted to troll him on it. 
 
 But soon, what started as a gonzo prank idea was turning into something if not serious then at least real. “WE HAVE FOUND OUR PORN STAR,” read a follow-up post. 
 
 The porn star in question was Daniels, and in no time she was grabbing national headlines with her slogan that promised “Screwing People Honestly” – unlike her male opponent. 
 
 Trump offered me cash after sex, says former Playboy model Karen McDougal Read more 
 
 As wild as that was, that turned out to only be the prelude to Stormy Daniels’ main event. She currently faces a much more powerful male adversary, the president of the United States, as she prepares to go public on Sunday in a TV interview to give details about her alleged 2006 affair with Donald Trump. 
 
 The interview with Anderson Cooper, which is expected to break viewership records for CBS’s venerable 60 Minutes news magazine show, is easy to dismiss as frivolity. But her allegations, and the legal maneuvers Trump’s allies have employed to try to keep them quiet, could have implications spanning not just sex and sexual politics – but campaign finance laws and violence against women. 
 
 “You don’t know who become the pivotal players in history,” said Jonathan Tilove, who chronicled Daniels’ first steps in politics as a correspondent for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. 
 
 ‘My daughter’s name is Stephanie, not Stormy’ 
 
 Born Stephanie Gregory Clifford in Baton Rouge in 1979, Daniels grew up with her mother, who worked as a trucking company manager. Her dad was seldom around. As a girl she loved dancing and horses, but if her parents hoped she might pursue a childhood dream of becoming a vet, it was not to be. She left home and began stripping at 17; by 21 she was performing in adult films under the stage name Stormy Daniels. 
 
 She considers it her real name, but her mother, Sheila Gregory, can’t abide it. 
 
 “My daughter’s name is Stephanie, not Stormy,” she said when the Guardian reached her at home Tuesday. “Please forgive me if you think I’m being rude,” she added, before hanging up. 
 
 Gregory may not have made peace with her daughter’s career, but by any measure, Daniels is extremely successful at what she does, both in front of the camera and behind it. She started directing in her mid-20s, and won best new starlet at the 2004 AVN awards, referred to as the “the Oscars of porn”. The following year, she made a number of cameos in mainstream film, including Judd Apatow’s blockbuster hit The 40-Year-Old Virgin. (On social media, Apatow has said he admires her work.) 
 
 It was clear she was smart, prepared and comfortable with the media frenzy Bradley Beychok on Stormy Daniels 
 
 In 2009, when her Louisiana campaign began, Daniels was living in Florida and not registered with either party. And as those who worked with her, most of whom did not want to speak on the record, quickly realized, she was not going to be a prop, but sensed opportunity. “She was smart enough to know that we weren’t trying to drag her through some college prank, that maybe this was an avenue to explore,” said a person with knowledge of the campaign. 
 
 Her platform, thin though it was, was socially liberal and fiscally conservative. But mainly it was about trolling Vitter, and she was a master provocateur. Asked if she was pro-life, for instance, she said she was “pro-condom”. Asked if she really just wanted to embarrass Vitter, she replied flatly: “I don’t see how I could possibly embarrass him more than he’s already embarrassed himself.” 
 
 Most notable though, was her ability to stay in the public eye, despite her never formally entering the race. “It was clear she was smart, prepared and comfortable with the media frenzy,” said Democratic operative Bradley Beychok, who met with Daniels during a “listening tour” in Baton Rouge. 
 
 The Craigslist post turned what should have been a low-key election into a national spectacle, and Louisiana is just quirky enough of a place that national election forecaster Nate Silver didn’t rule her out. “She’s certainly not without her, um, charms,” Silver wrote at the time. 
 
 Daniels’ campaign would prove quite literally explosive. At the height of her political momentum, the Audi belonging to her political manager burst into flames, and though no one was ever apprehended, blurry surveillance footage showed someone loitering around the car and getting into it shortly before it detonated. 
 
 Soon after that, and amid a domestic violence arrest, Daniels opted out of the race. Vitter would go on to win, riding the wave of anti-Obama backlash in 2010. But when he ran for governor a few years later, his Democratic opponent won in an upset by reviving the prostitution scandal that Daniels had worked to highlight. 
 
 Target on her back 
 
 Today, as she prepares to take on the president, Daniels is – improbably, perhaps, at 39 – on top of her industry, with a confidence and acerbic Twitter profile to match. 
 
 Her second foray into politics began in February, when the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, had paid Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about her story just before the 2016 election. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest This image released by CBS News shows Stormy Daniels with Anderson Cooper. Photograph: AP 
 
 In response to the bombshell, the tabloid In Touch Weekly published an interview with Daniels it had been sitting on since 2011, kept under wraps due to legal threats from Trump’s circle. In the interview, Daniels describes in explicit detail a consensual, nearly year-long sexual dalliance with Trump, allegedly begun weeks after his wife Melania gave birth to their son, Barron. 
 
 Sunday’s interview, however, will be the first time Daniels has spoken about the matter since Trump forged his own political career, and the first time she will address the efforts to muzzle her, which she has been fighting in court. 
 
 Details from Daniels’ account further shape the narratives that first emerged about Trump and his relationship with women during the 2016 election. More than a dozen women came forward to accuse Trump of sexual harassment and assault in the lead-up to the election. And while Daniels’ alleged affair with Trump was consensual, the context is nonetheless informative about how he views women. 
 
 The sexual misconduct allegations against Donald Trump – the full list Read more 
 
 And Daniels is not alone. Another adult film star, Jessica Drake, who accused Trump of trying to buy sex from her, claims she also has “confidential information” about Trump’s relationship with Daniels, according to a 2016 non-disclosure agreement or NDA. 
 
 On Tuesday, the former Playboy model Karen McDougal became the second woman this month to challenge Trump’s efforts to silence her, announcing she was suing the president to be released from a 2016 legal agreement that restricted her ability to speak about her alleged affair with the future president. 
 
 Separately, a judge this month ruled that a defamation suit brought by former Apprentice star Summer Zervos, who accused Trump of harassing her, may go forward, clearing the path for other sexual misconduct allegations against the president to be aired. 
 
 “It is settled that the president of the United States has no immunity and is ‘subject to the laws’ for purely private acts,” the judge declared, citing the precedent set by a lawsuit brought against Bill Clinton by his alleged mistress Paula Jones two decades ago. 
 
 Meanwhile, the president, who has denied all the claims brought against him, remains committed to keeping Daniels quiet. 
 
 Daniels’ legal team, in a clever bit of maneuvering, has offered to pay back every dollar she was paid in the NDA for the chance to speak freely. Her team claims the agreement is null and void because Trump never signed it, and they are moving ahead with the CBS interview despite a threat from Trump’s camp of up to $20m in damages. 
 
 Daniels now has a target on her back, and her lawyer has said she’s been physically threatened and is under 24-hour security. But her background in adult entertainment may give her a rare liberty other women Trump has tried to shame into silence do not possess. Namely, she is not easily embarrassed and she doesn’t care if people don’t like her. 
 
 “Slut and whore are words used by people who feel threatened,” she responded to a troll on Twitter who accused her of promiscuity. “I find power in them.”
– The Guardian appears to be the first media outlet to have gotten its hands on Stormy Daniels' new memoir, Full Disclosure, and it reports she gets explicit in what she discloses. The Guardian reprints her fairly NSFW description of the president's genitals, which she likens to a character from the game Mario Kart. She calls that alleged 2006 encounter possibly "the least impressive sex I'd ever had." The book also treads some familiar ground: of being threatened to stay quiet about the alleged tryst while in a parking lot in 2011, of what she says was Trump's fascination with TV's Shark Week (adding that he fielded a phone call from Hillary Clinton while watching it), and her hopes of securing a slot on the Apprentice. She says she continued to take Trump's phone calls in hopes that television gig would come to pass, and quotes Trump as suggesting that once on the show, she could cheat as a way of ensuring she remained part of the cast for a while. She describes him as saying, "We'll figure out a way to get you the challenges beforehand. And we can devise your technique." The Guardian notes the book begins well before Daniels first met Trump, describing her impoverished and abuse-ridden childhood in Baton Rouge, La., her first go as a stripper while still a teen, and her entry into the porn industry. CNBC reports the book is out Oct. 2.