Mitt Romney may be a God-fearing, chocolate-milk–chugging Mormon who would never step out on his wife of 55 years, but he’s also a veteran businessman who’s learned a thing or two about financial transactions in his time. And one thing he knows beyond a shadow of a doubt? You don’t fork over north of $100,000 to keep someone quiet about an affair that didn’t actually happen.
Speaking to CNN on Tuesday about the criminal trial currently taking place against Donald Trump, the Utah senator called bullshit on the ex-president’s claim that he never slept with porn star Stormy Daniels, despite paying her $130,000 on the eve of the 2016 election not to tell her story. “I think everybody has made their own assessment of President Trump’s character,” Romney told CNN’s Manu Raju. “And so far as I know, you don’t pay someone $130,000 not to have sex with you.”
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Trump has long denied sleeping with Daniels, but admitted to the 2016 payment, which is currently the focus of his criminal trial in Manhattan. (In 2023, he was charged with, among other things, falsifying business records to cover up the hush money transaction.) According to Daniels, she and Trump had sex in a hotel suite in 2006 after meeting at a celebrity golf tournament. In her memoir, Daniels wrote, of the alleged dalliance with Trump: “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.” Later, former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham would recount in her memoir that when Daniels’s anatomical claims surfaced, Trump called the White House aide to insist his penis was normal-shaped.
That Romney would call BS on Trump when so many others in the Republican Party have fallen all over themselves to defend him should not come as a surprise. In 2021, Romney was one of just seven GOP senators who voted to convict Trump over January 6. Romney has also also called the ex-president “a phony,” a “fraud,” and a “whack job.”