We can be sure of one thing: If this Stormy Daniels thing is hurting Donald Trump politically, it will be for reasons that have nothing to do with sex.
No one cares if they ever had an, er, intimate assignment. Though I’d like to remind Daniels called it “the worst 90 seconds of my life.”
Right now, the most pressing question is whether Trump committed a crime during the 2016 presidential campaign, when his people paid Daniels to keep quiet about their mini affair, an affair that Trump denies ever happened. His attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty violating campaign finance laws and serving more than a year in prison, but that apparently hasn’t led Trump to question his own conduct.
“The agreement was used to stop her false and extortionate allegations of an affair,” Trump tweeted a few years ago. “Campaign money, or campaign contributions, were not involved in this transaction.”
We’ll stop here to note that our former president was a bit off the mark when it came to the word “role.” Mentioning only because it gives me the opportunity to remember that he once messaged me calling me a liar with “a pig’s face” in which he misspelled “too”.
But about the sex. Our political history shows that while people are extremely interested in hearing politicians’ bad behavior, they don’t base their votes on it.
We have a Republican presidential primary coming our way, and if Ron DeSantis is a big player, I think we can assume Florida’s governor will win any moral deadlock. This man is apparently a very devoted husband. Whose wife, frankly, seems to be the brains behind his political career.
DeSantis more or less follows his party’s game plan, which is to change the subject when Trump’s legal troubles surface and attack Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for presumably filing the charges.
“I don’t know what’s involved in paying hush money to a porn star to keep quiet about some alleged affair,” he said recently. “I just can’t talk to that.”
Ah! The mention-by-the-mention approach! And adding “alleged” to any discussion of the affair. Much better than the DeSantis tactic of citing “people like our founding fathers” when it comes to exemplary private conduct. Once you get past George Washington, it’s not long before you come face to face with Thomas Jefferson’s four-decade entanglement with the enslaved Sally Hemings.
The great tradition of political sex scandals goes way back. After all, the ancient Romans did speculated about whether Emperor Nero and his mother had an incestuous… going on. In early America, even the deeply dashing John Adams was a target – people gossiped that he had sent General Charles Pinckney across the Atlantic to fetch four beautiful English women for them to share. (“I declare on my honour, if this is true, General Pinckney has kept all four for himself and defrauded me of my two”, Adams declared.)
The people who are really touched by this kind of public gossip are the politicians who are being targeted, some of whom are suffering greatly. I can’t believe Bill Clinton isn’t haunted by the fact that if one quote from him will go down in history it will probably be, “I had no sexual relationship with that woman.”
Or take my favorite subject, Grover Cleveland, who was the target of huge headlines falsely claiming that he fathered a child out of wedlock. None of that bothered the citizenry – he won the popular vote for president in three consecutive elections. But the publicity tormented him, and for years his detractors enjoyed it to sing“Mom, mom, where’s dad?”
I’m not sure Grover ever completely got over it, even when his supporters had to reply, “Got to the White House, ha, ha, ha.”
Now publicity will never be a torture device for Donald Trump. In fact, he’s reportedly all excited about the opportunity to become one of the famous “perpetrator walksin which a suspect is paraded past reporters by Manhattan police officers after being arrested.
And as we’ve seen, the American voters who loved Trump in the early days won’t be deterred by a sex scandal. In fact, DeSantis’ support among Republicans appears to be waning, perhaps even falling.
There are much better lines of attack. What do you think is worse for a president of the United States?
A. Tried bullying a Georgia official to change the election results.
B. Ignored Justice Department demands he return a pile of classified government documents he took with him when he left office.
C. Encouraged his followers to attack the Capitol January 6, 2021.
D. No, no, I’m getting a headache.
We haven’t even gotten to his advice to people who don’t love their kids. That was part of it a recent Trump videoin which he boasted that thanks to his reforms, farm children would not have to pay inheritance tax on agricultural property.
And Trump said he had also been sympathetic to landowners who “don’t like your kids that much.”
Yes! “And there are people who don’t,” he continued. “And maybe rightly so, it doesn’t matter because, frankly, you don’t have to leave them anything.”
OK, Don Jr., this sort of thing just might make you a likeable figure.