Being linked in history forever to a porn star called “Stormy” is what the Falwells and Grahams deserve.
This latest episode running on the “2016 and Beyond” channel, which never runs out of new plot lines and twists to transfix the audience, is brought to us all by the same team of writers who won all those awards for their stunning conclusion to the 25-years-running Clinton Show, which had debuted in February of 1992. The series finale began with the heroine’s boring, predictable, and soul-crushing win, and ended with her shocking but strangely exciting and well-earned defeat.
Now, the writers have turned their attention to the victor, whose term in office thus far has been still more packed with scandal than anyone had thought possible. It is here that our tale begins.
To give them credit, the evangelicals in 2016 faced a dilemma that had no moral or easy way out. On the one hand, the social justice warriors on the liberal Left had been trying for years to sue, hound, and boycott them out of existence for insufficient acquiescence to the gender-erratic. With Hillary Clinton in the White House, it seemed that they might get their way.
But on the other hand, the GOP front-runner and then nominee was basically Bill Clinton to the Nth power, exemplifying everything they professed to despise.
One possible option was a transactional or a limited form of endorsement, in which they supported his stands — against abortion, and against the legal harassment of social conservatives — without specifically embracing him as a character, or mentioning character at all. Transactional alliances are a staple of politics, and go on all the time, when members of Congress who seldom agree find common ground on discreet kinds of issues, and push them, or co-sponsor bills. This might have lessened their vulnerability to the charges flung at them for flagrant hypocrisy, but would have come at the price of surrendering their self-proclaimed status of moral authority.
Given the sow’s ear of Trump, they called him a silk purse, and pretended he was one. Which was what would lead them astray.
Franklin Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie were adulterers, and great public figures. Alexander Hamilton was blackmailed for adultery and Thomas Jefferson had a slave mistress. The civil rights crisis was led to its peaceful conclusion by Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, and John Kennedy, three of the greatest adulterers who ever drew breath.
Kennedy and King had private lives that could be justly called dissolute, but their professional lives defined public virtue, in that they spent their adult lives trying to bring more and more freedom to more and more people, were ready and willing to die for their country, and did. Character counts, but there are different ways one shows character, and the ways these people showed in regards to their country overcame their shortcomings in their most private lives.
From this, the evangelicals took the message not that great men could have vices, but that Trump could or must be a great man because he shared some vices with great people. A transactional endorsement could have been understood, but their attempt to preserve their moral authority destroyed what was left of it. Which brings stormy weather indeed.
