Trump Absolutely Can Be Blackmailed
By 
I have no idea if he is, of course, but I did want to add one point to this:
Ronan Farrow’s new story shows that Trump habitually pays for sex. He had an affair with former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal, and offered her money after sex, which she turned down. At another point in the story, he offered adult entertainer Jessica Drake $10,000 for “her company.”
Farrow’s reporting also implies, without quite establishing as an absolute certainty, that Trump maintained a system for silencing his sexual partners. A network of sleazy operators, sometimes working in conjunction with National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, Trump’s close friend, would pay off women to prevent their stories from seeing the light of day. In any case, previous reporting by The Wall Street Journal has already established that Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, paid at least one of his former mistresses to stay quiet.
American Politics Today, A Play in One Act:
Holywood, 2015. Two people meeting in a nicely-appointed office.
AARON SORKIN: “…ok, so the sleazy tabloid hack presidential candidate Donald Trump uses to arrange his payoffs to mistresses and who may be blackmailing him is named David Pecker.”
STORY EXECUTIVE: (Strokes chin, starts pushing button under her desk) “VERY INTERESTING, Mr Sorkin. I can’t wait to hear more about your teleplay.”
[Four SECURITY GARDS enter room, pick up SORKIN, and throw him out the front window.]
So, we know Trump habitually pays for sex, and we also know he is willing to pay to keep embarrassing secrets from going public. That is to say, these secrets could be leveraged against him. One of Pecker’s former employees tells Farrow, “In theory, you would think that Trump has all the power in that relationship, but in fact Pecker has the power — he has the power to run these stories. He knows where the bodies are buried.”
What else do we know? We know Russia has a decades-old system for gathering compromising sexual secrets on prominent foreign visitors. We also know Trump harbored a burning resentment of President Obama in the wake of Obama’s mocking him at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner. And many reports of Trump’s decision-making suggest that the strongest consideration in any decision is the chance to defile or destroy something associated with Obama.
You often hear the argument that Trump can’t be blackmailed because no information about him could be embarrassing. This is clearly false. And we knew this before we knew about his payouts to mistresses, because he refused (and refuses) to release his tax returns. There’s clearly stuff that Trump thinks would be very damaging if it got out being hidden.
It’s also worth noting that is was important for Trump to stop the Stormy Daniels story from coming out, not because it would have revealed anything new about his character but because it would have taken attention away from the EMAILS! chicken-fucking. If the last weeks of the campaign had featured another purient Trump story for pundits to rub their thighs about things might have played out differently.