openpolitics.com

But privately, the president has lobbed sharp attacks at Daniels and her media tour, calling her allegations a “hoax” and asking confidants if the episode is hurting his poll numbers. The president even has griped to several people that Daniels is not the type of woman he finds attractive.

.. Stephanie Clifford and who was 27 years old during the alleged encounter, also said that she did not find Trump, then 60, attractive and that she viewed the encounter simply as a “business deal.”

.. The president and his White House staff have hewed to a remarkably disciplined and restrained playbook — a departure for the normally brash Trump, who is usually reluctant to let a slight go unanswered.

.. “His absence of comment, to me, was a concession to a not very shocking or newsworthy conclusion, which is that he carried on extramarital affairs,” said Davis, a partner at the law firm Davis Goldberg Galper. “He was silent and wasn’t attacking or criticizing or contradicting her.”

.. Trump’s friends and advisers have been cautioning him that he has little to gain by getting into a back-and-forth with Daniels.

“He’s really not in a punch-back mode,” said one friend who has discussed the matter with the president in recent days and spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. “Everyone is telling him, look, you can’t win here, so just do nothing.”

.. The president has convinced himself, said one Republican in frequent touch with the White House, that the scandal will blow over — in part because, for decades, Trump deliberately presented himself as a Manhattan millionaire playboy.

.. Trump also believes his base of loyal supporters, including Christian conservatives, will not abandon him, just as they stuck by his side after the “Access Hollywood” tape was reported in The Washington Post in October 2016.

.. “The president is correct believing that his solid group of supporters, including evangelicals and Protestants, are not going to leave him on this issue,” said Sam Nunberg, a former Trump campaign aide. “He’s delivered for them on judges, which is really the most important issue, and on life” — a reference to abortion policy.

.. Still, Trump’s friends say that the allegations ..  have caused a strain in his marriage.

.. she thought he would probably be most bothered by the scandal’s impact on his family.

.. “I think it probably would upset him because it would upset Melania, it would upset his daughter,” Sunshine said.

.. Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the first lady, issued a public appeal for privacy that seemed to reference the president’s 12-year-old son, Barron, who was born around the time of the alleged affair with Daniels.

.. Inside the West Wing, senior officials believe Daniels’s account to be largely credible and consider it a serious news story that could deal real and lasting damage to the president

..  In 2016, Trump acknowledged to some of his closest political advisers that he had met Daniels but repeatedly denied to them that he ever had a salacious encounter with her, two people familiar with the matter said.