The muddled Michael Cohen recording now making the rounds may stop short of being a modern version of President Richard Nixon’s “smoking gun” tape or the Zapruder film, but it is still bad news for President Trump.
Trump’s longtime attorney and fixer has not only turned against him. He has kept recordings of at least some of their conversations. That is bound to cause unflattering information to be made public at some point (the tape released on Tuesday has Trump and Cohen discussing how to quash a story about a Playboy model who alleged an affair with the future president).
Cohen may well have more dirt on Trump than does special counsel Robert Mueller, depending on how deeply the Russia investigators have waded into the president’s finances. What is less clear is whether Trump will face any political consequences as a result.
With the exception of the barb Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, aimed at cheating FBI agent Peter Strzok (proving partisan selective outrage remains on this issue), conservatives and liberals have largely flipped on the question of whether personal character trumps public policy positions.
President Bill Clinton was a useful foil when Trump faced criticism for his treatment of women during the 2016 presidential campaign. Now Clinton is a valuable precedent. Liberals insisted the 42nd president’s sexual misconduct did not matter because he sided with feminists on hotly debated topics — especially abortion.
“I would be happy to give him a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal,” said journalist Nina Burleigh at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Socially conservative Trump supporters might not use that kind of language, but if Henry IV thought Paris was worth a mass, most of these conservative Christians think the Supreme Court is worth a Stormy Daniels.
Frequent Trump surrogate Robert Jeffries went so far as to smear President Ronald Reagan as a “womanizer” in defense of the current president. This is outrageous — Reagan was divorced but no womanizer, and certainly not one in Trump’s league. But it is true that in 1980 conservative Christians supported the first divorced winning presidential candidate over Jimmy Carter, an upstanding evangelical, because they preferred Reagan on the issues.
This is not an entirely unreasonable or hypocritical position, by the way. The cultural space for conservative Christians is narrowing, as is the liberal definition of what constitutes religious liberty. Anti-discrimination laws are being enforced in ways that heighten the tension between such liberties and gay rights. Abortion is a life-and-death issue.
If Trump gives social conservatives Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, and they in turn reverse Roe v. Wade, what embarrassing — or even discrediting — Michael Cohen revelation would be worth tolerating? Trump will have succeeded where more devout Republicans have failed.
“[H]ow many times did you look so innocent into your wife’s eye and lie to her about Lisa Page?” Gohmert demanded of Strzok. It was a variation of a question conservatives often posed of Clinton during the 1990s: If your wife can’t trust you, how can the American people?
But Trump has so far kept his word to social conservatives on judges, abortion, and religious liberty, accumulating a record at least comparable to President George W. Bush’s despite being unfaithful in other areas and not being able to claim Jesus Christ as his favorite philosopher. That has to count for something.
At the same time, many liberals have begun to reflect on whether they did the right thing by letting Bill Clinton, and even Ted Kennedy, off the hook while they wielded political power. Some have concluded this ultimately wasn’t good for feminism in the long term.
This is of course awfully easy to say now that Kennedy is dead and Clinton has outlived his usefulness, though the ouster of Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., does show some commitment to consistency. It is nevertheless possible conservative Christians, who believe there are eternal consequences to the choices we make in this life, may similarly regret their priorities in the Trump era.
Longtime conservative activist Paul Weyrich despaired of our culture when the American people failed to mobilize against Clinton’s infidelities in the 1990s, instead emphatically declaring it a private matter to which impeachment was a gross overreaction.
“Politics itself has failed,” Weyrich lamented. “And politics has failed because of the collapse of the culture.” He concluded that he no longer believed “there is a moral majority.”
The Moral Majority was the name of an early Christian Right group founded by the father of Jerry Falwell Jr. The younger Falwell stands with Trump.
Conservatives of that generation, the columnist Ben Shapiro observed, “remember arguing that Bill Clinton was unfit for office based on his treatment of women and his perjury, and they remember losing that argument.”
What the next generation of conservatives will remember has yet to be written.
