Storm clouds are once again circling the White House — well, make that Stormy Daniels’ clouds.
Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, is the pornographic film star linked to a $130,000 payment from President Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen. The transfer of funds appears to be “hush money” to prevent Daniels from talking about an alleged extramarital affair with Trump as the 2016 presidential campaign wound down.
The brewing scandal has made its way to the White House daily press briefing, alongside such heady topics as North Korea’s nuclear program and international trade wars. “We’ve addressed this extensively and I don’t have anything else to add,” press secretary Sarah Sanders said yet again.
But the allegations have the potential to treat the public to a Through the Looking Glass version of Washington 20 years ago, when Democrats insisted it was trivial to obsess over whether a sitting president told lies about sex, even in a legal proceeding, while Republicans — especially social conservatives — maintained that personal character counts.
“If all the sexual allegations now swirling around the White House turn out to be true, President Clinton may be a candidate for sex addiction therapy,” feminist icon Gloria Steinem wrote in 1998. “But feminists will still have been right to resist pressure by the right wing and the news media to call for his resignation or impeachment.”
The roles will surely be reversed if more tawdry Trump-Daniels details emerge. This time social conservatives will publicly defend a president whose private behavior they must (just as privately) regard as immoral because he takes the right position on abortion and other important issues.
Liberals and feminists, in an age of #MeToo, will similarly want to see Trump — who has been accused of more serious, nonconsensual transgressions with women — brought low by the allegations (which the president categorically denies) which stand as his worst sexually themed scandal since the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape leaked.
Some of these liberals have even begun to rethink their near-unanimous defense of Bill Clinton during the late 1990s, a project that, having already led to the resignations of Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., and Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., might soon extend to the reappraisal of Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass.
Whatever the legal consequences of his fight with Daniels, politically, Trump will likely survive for the same reason Clinton did, which also happens to be the same reason he weathered “Access Hollywood.”
Nobody voted for either man because they thought they were paragons of virtue, especially in the sexual realm.
Fox News’ Tucker Carlson recently brought up the parallels between the two presidents and onetime golfing partners.
“In 1992, I covered the campaign, and I and every other conservative in town believed that if voters only understood who Bill Clinton was as a person, they wouldn’t vote for him,” he told me. “And now I know, having watched Trump, that voters knew exactly who Bill Clinton was from day one — they knew he was a philanderer, they knew he was dishonest, he was disingenuous, they knew he was all of that, and they voted for him anyway. Why? Because the things he ran on were matters of concern to them: the economy, crime, immigration, these were middle-class concerns.”
Our current political environment is more tribal. So even though the media will be less inclined to give Trump a pass than Clinton, the only voters who won’t be more inclined are already predominantly part of Never Trump or the Resistance.
Trump himself has never been shy about brandishing a Clintons’ misdeeds in his own defense.
Just because Trump will likely emerge unscathed from this scandal does not mean all his political allies will. The Republican Party has already had a problem attracting women voters that the late 1990s Democratic Party of Clinton did not, one that will test the GOP’s strength in the midterm elections later this year.
Social conservatives have long been zinged for hypocrisy. And while that is not a charge that can be leveled against Trump by anyone who has heard him speak to Billy Bush, it is a real problem for people like Jerry Falwell Jr. Like Steinem, they could regret it.
Perhaps everyone will reverse course once again in another 20 years.
