If you're interested in a much less political alternative to President Donald Trump's border speech on Tuesday night, Stormy Daniels has a suggestion. The adult entertainment star tweeted about her counter-programming idea for Tuesday night, saying, "If you're looking for anything even remotely worth watching tonight at 9 pm EST, I will be folding laundry in my underwear for 8 minutes on Instagram live."
At the end of her tweet, Daniels dropped a link to her Instagram account. While she's scheduled to sort out her laundry at the aforementioned time, Trump will be in the Oval Office delivering an address "on the humanitarian and national security crisis on our southern border."
Trump's address about the border situation will take place several weeks after the partial government shutdown began on Dec. 22, 2018. The shutdown itself is the tumultuous result of a standoff between Trump, who wants $5 billion in a federal budget deal for his U.S.-Mexico border wall, and the Democrats, who have pushed against the idea.
The government shutdown is taking place at the expense of numerous government workers who are struggling to pay for food, medicine, and housing. An estimated 800,000 federal workers may remain without pay until the end of January, according to White House Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney who spoke with NBC News on Sunday.
Perhaps Daniels will bring some levity to the situation by live-streaming herself folding her laundry as Trump's address goes on. Some may even argue that Daniels, who claimed that Trump had an extramarital affair with her in 2006 (which Trump has denied), is skilled at using Twitter to respond to the president's fiery tweets. In October 2018, Trump turned to Twitter to insult Daniels after a federal judge threw out her defamation suit against the president.
Calling her a "horseface" in his tweet in October last year, Trump said that he could "go after" Daniels and "her third rate lawyer in the great state of Texas" and that "she knows nothing about me, a total con!"
Daniels responded that through his tweet, Trump had "demonstrated his incompetence, hatred of women, and lack of self control on Twitter AGAIN! And perhaps a penchant for bestiality." Suffice it to say, it was intense.
Daniels’ provocative joke aside, some people have questioned whether Trump’s address should be aired right away or not. Some have even called for boycotting the primetime address under the hashtag "#BoycottTrumpPrimeTime" on Twitter.
It's a topic getting a lot of attention. In fact, CNN's media reporter Oliver Darcy mulled over the same question: should Trump's Oval Office address be immediately aired on major news networks? Media analysts like Columbia Journalism School professor Todd Gitlin told Darcy that if big channels do decide to air Trump's speech, they should "cut it into a piece interweaved with fact-checking [as soon as possible]" and "use corrective chyrons."
"What's the rationale, after all," Gitlin told CNN, "for rushing to serve his schedule?" Laundry-folding on a live-stream or fact-checking in real-time, it looks like people are coming up with their own approaches.
