According to what Michael Cohen told a federal judge, President Trump directed him to pay off Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal in the fall of 2016 “for the purpose of influencing the election.” That implicates the president in a federal crime — and one that he may never have even needed to commit to win the election.
[Also read: The GOP wanted Trump to win 2016 at any cost — the cost was Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen]
Under normal circumstances, any presidential candidate’s White House dreams would be dashed by serious allegations he cheated on his wife with a porn star and a Playboy model. But Trump was not a normal candidate. That he cheated on his first wife with his second was a well-established part of his lore. “Life was just a bowl of cherries,” he told ABC in a primetime interview back in 1994. As I wrote in May, “Everyone who pulled the lever for Trump two years ago knew, quite literally, they were electing a playboy … Many of Trump’s votes came from people who were already overlooking his reputation in the interest of achieving Republican policy goals, keeping Hillary Clinton out of the White House, or some combination of both. And plenty of his loyal followers would have believed him had he denied it.”
Yes, Trump won by a razor-thin margin, but pretty much everyone who voted for him knew they were voting for a man who had cheated. And anyone who was voting for Trump on the basis of his character probably belonged to his hardcore base, and would have easily believed him had he denied the allegations anyway. It’s also probably worth mentioning Bill Clinton was out stumping for his wife, reminding voters a ballot cast for Clinton was a vote to put her philandering husband back in the White House as well. Clinton’s comeback over the past two decades may have been all the proof Trump needed not to orchestrate an elaborate cover-up.
What we learned on Election Day was that not enough voters were sufficiently bothered by Trump’s philandering to to keep him out of the White House — for some, it was because they so despised his opponent; for others, it was because they believed in his policies and message. Would allegations that merely altered the scale of his cheating have made much of a difference? Given that the cover-up Cohen claims to have coordinated at the president’s orders involves criminal activity, it may have been better for Trump to have taken the risk in 2016.
