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A Little Too Much Reality in the Show?
Watching the parade of porn stars, reality TV contestants, and former Playboy models lining up to lambaste the President of the United States, as well as the daily trove of stories of wife beating, naked nepotism, gambling, and official corruption among his cabinet members and White House staff, I was reminded of a story Bill Buckley once told.
He had been nominated by the Nixon Administration to serve as one of our delegates to the United Nations. The FBI called around to his friends and colleagues, and one, William Rusher, groaned that he had already answered all of their questions when Buckley had been nominated for an earlier assignment. The agent replied: “I know, but it is my duty to ask whether Mr. Buckley might have done anything since 1969 to embarrass the president.” The sly Rusher responded, “No, but the Nixon Administration has done a great deal to embarrass Mr. Buckley.”
Imagine the FBI interviews with nominees like Gov. Nikki Haley or Gen. James Mattis. “Have you done anything that could embarrass President Trump?” It’s mind-bending. They are honorable people with stellar careers and he is a failed casino magnate, serial adulterer, swindler of ambitious naïfs (see Trump University), sexual predator, and all-around louse. Yes, he’s the president, but is he even capable of embarrassment?
You might say that Trump isn’t pretending to be a saint, and that he’s tough and strong and ready to be “our” son of a b—- (to paraphrase FDR’s supposed description of a Latin American despot), but it’s not quite that cut and dried. Trump maintains his innocence, which is where things get confusing.
Trump vehemently denies the accusations of groping and affairs, but this week it seems that the elaborate and expensive efforts he has undertaken to conceal his behavior are unraveling a bit. The resulting prurient press party was entirely predictable.
Stormy Daniels alleges that she had an affair with Trump. At first, the world yawned. But since then we’ve learned that Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen paid her $130,000 in hush money in October 2016. (Such nice lawyers Mr. Trump hires!) That may be a violation of campaign finance laws if Trump did not report it as an in-kind contribution. Beyond that, it reveals the contempt with which Trump treats the public. There was no affair, but Cohen had a sudden urge to make a charitable contribution to Stormy? And now Trump is suing Daniels for breach of the confidentiality agreement – in the amount of $20 million – though the official Trump position is that the agreement doesn’t exist. Got that?
Some are attempting to link this to the #MeToo movement – women must speak “their truth,” lawyer Gloria Allred explained – but it’s a safe bet that Stormy is thinking finances, not feminism. Mr. Trump, who stresses that winning is the only virtue he upholds, should admire that.
The same cannot be said of Summer Zervos, one of the 16 women who accused Trump of groping after the release of the Access Hollywood tape. If you recall, Trump claimed that all of the women were lying and that he would sue them after the election. Zervos, who was a contestant on The Apprentice, has now received the go-ahead from a judge for her lawsuit to proceed. She said he groped. He called her liar. She is suing for defamation. Trump’s lawyers had argued that his depiction of Zervos as a liar was “political speech clearly protected by the first amendment.” The judge rejected that argument, and citing the Paula Jones precedent, noted that no president is immunized against suits for purely private acts. This could open the door to sworn depositions, and possible further suits.
And because character is destiny, yet another Trump acquaintance, Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model, is also attempting to invalidate her secrecy agreement. Thanks to Donald Trump, we’ve learned that the gossip magazines have a practice called “catch and kill” for stories they want to suppress. The parent company of the National Enquirer apparently performed this service for Trump, paying McDougal $150,000 for the rights to her story.
Nevertheless, McDougal seems ready to tell her tale, and Daniels will tell hers (including allegations of threats emanating from Trump world). And perhaps, just perhaps, as they settle in this weekend to watch “60 Minutes,” the party of family values will wonder whether they really wanted to sign up for all this.
Published in Culture, Politics
The affair was. The NDA and the payment of the hush money was established in 2016, during the general election season.
In my view the people who “signed up for all this” were those who voted for Trump in the primaries.
In the general election, yes. I understand the rationale of people who decided to hold their nose and vote Trump over Hillary.
It was the decision by the party’s primary voters to select Trump as their standard-bearer in the first place that caused this great rift in the conservative movement that still has us at each others’ throats almost 2 years later. It shows no signs of healing any time soon.
I’m guessing the last time anybody in the party of family values watched 60 Minutes was around the time anybody really considered the Republican Party the party of family values. Say, 2004?
I’m inclined to agree with this sentiment. All this fuss about what’s on the boob tube (as it were). Any relation between what happens in any of these programs, and the “personalities” who partake in them, and those who fawn on them, and what happens in real life is purely coincidental because, as I’m fond of saying, if it was actual “reality,” it wouldn’t be on television.
Bill Clinton. Now, those women look like reality to me.
Well, what happens next? Why did she do that?
45% of those primary voters. And he was only carried over the 50% line by California, after everyone else dropped out.
The lack of a decisive result means it’s really not over, though the good news is that the “rift” really seems to be about one man. I don’t know how it will “heal” but eventually we’ll be able to move past it when he leaves public (political) life.
Because it was an election year and it was an easy way to extort $130k out of a man who didn’t want to lose an election.
The real interesting question is why Trump thought paying a blackmailer would be a smart idea.
Since he’s sitting in the White House while this kerfuffle is ongoing, that seems reasonably clear.
Because he got elected?
Maybe, but I’m not so certain. I think he exposed a number of underlying disagreements within the party and the conservative movement on immigration, free trade vs. protectionism, isolationism vs. nation building, and the whole Tea Party agenda.
And that’s the pity of it all. So unnecessary. The whole purpose of conservatism is to conserve the values that brought Western Civilization, and, in turn, this country into being. That is being overlooked, in favor of “winning” at all costs – whatever that means. I want to be wrong, but I believe we are paying a high price for giving in to this devaluing of what we used to believe.
Well, how to it come to this?
Do you have a better option?
Regressive economy, horrible demographics, Debt to GDP, unfunded liabilities, cultural marxism is unstoppable, Alinsky tactics clearly work, the media.
People want their cut of the Keynesian statism or they want it fixed. They are sick of cultural Marxism.
Ted Cruz would have been better on net, but we didn’t have a two-stage national primary or whatever to give him a chance.
http://observer.com/2018/03/why-conservatives-will-support-trump-through-stormy-daniels-scandal/
On somewhat of a sidenote, that Micheal Cohen is a snake and an ass. I remember hearing him on Hannity’s radio show representing the Trump campaign debating DC McAllister loosely representing Cruz. He was a complete jackass, I was pretty sure if he talked to me like that I would have mashed his teeth down his throat. Made me respect Trump less he had a person like that
I totally get the position that the ship has already as sailed and that the left is really really super horrible. Still hard to argue with the premise of this comment. What have we traded long term to win an election? Time will tell I reckon.
I have no idea how I combined 2 comments lol
Exactly.
I believe what he lamenting is that we did not have a better option. Somehow we ended up with 2 despicable people as the only 2 options……still not sure how that happened but it’s pretty crazy
Seventeen candidates requires a national two-step primary 17->2.
People want their cut the Keynesian scam and they are sick of cultural Marxism. Trump promised it, so they voted for him. Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania.
They believe in central planning and magical Keynesian graft.
What are you going to do? Medicare part D was an instant 9 trillion unfunded liability dreamed up by Karl Rove. Everything is like that.
He paid it before he got elected. But even then, once you show that you’ll pay once, you’re practically begging to get milked like a cow.
Presumably he wanted to be re-elected also, and getting noticed paying hush money doesn’t help with that. It raises actual, legitimate questions about whether or not Trump can be coerced into doing other things.
Bryan, great article! I hope everybody reads it.
And to various people who keep harping on this theme:
stop calling me a hypocrite!
No, I was not shocked, appalled, disgusted when Clinton was outed as a heterosexual male.
(Everybody could see what kinda guy he was; personally I liked those bedroom eyes!)
So don’t try to shame me into moral outrage where Trump is concerned. Those posts are getting so,so boring.
Right, that’s all still there, on some level. But that’s not what the arguments are about, if you watch them unfold.
I mean, every time Mona speaks and people here throw tomatoes at her, it’s all because of her lack of fealty to Trump the man and assert that she’s deranged. Whether or not she is deranged (personally, I don’t know how she maintains fresh astonishment every week), her criticisms of Trump are very consistent with all prior beliefs that she’s held, and she has been willing to praise Trump when he did things that she liked. But she gets no credit for that, and is somehow a RINO.
Meanwhile, Republican voters attitudes towards Russia have dramatically improved, seemingly only because Trump says nice things about Putin. Also, many supporters of Trump seem willing to rationalize away his decisions to not follow through on certain core promises that he made to his base, especially with regard to immigration.
I would prefer it greatly if the rift really were about ideas, because then it would be at least somewhat possible to talk about those ideas and thus heal the rift without getting stuck on Trump the man. But that seems hard to do, even on Ricochet.
Wasn’t that the point?
Nothing illegal, even if true.
Paying a blackmailer isn’t illegal, so far as I know. Was she blackmailing him? Probably, else why would he pay her?
Jack Kennedy did much worse than this. So did Bill Clinton.
Yawn.
Having paid hush-money in order to get elected in the first place could help with re-election, compared to losing the first election because of not paying hush-money.
And maybe now is a good time to get noticed paying that hush-money. 2020 is still quite far away, far enough away that, if the worst rumors surrounding Stormy Daniels and buying her off prove true and come to light now, voters might not care about them enough to matter by the time 2020 rolls around.
Try seeing this from Trump’s perspective: Trump doesn’t seem to mind scandal much as long as he wins. You or I may not be like that – heck, I’m sure many of us have teeny tiny skeletons in our closet we’d be mortified to risk exposing to the public by running for office! Trump, on the other hand, isn’t easily mortified. Paying hush-money before the election, then letting all the dirt come to light an adequate time before the next election, may have been Trump’s most realistic path toward getting elected President twice, a feat which requires first getting elected President once.
Okay so the man who is the President of the United States
1. Has an affair with a porn star
2. While his wife was at home with their infant son
3. Then he pays that porn star hush money
4. A month before the presidential election
And it’s “simply not news”?
This whole comment is right on. With Trump the debate is about him and his personality. The man has no ideas.
Now, with Rand Paul, it is about ideas. This is why I highlighted the paragraph I did. And I believe that Paul’s idea are bad. They are not conservative; they are libertarian; and I don’t believe this is where the Republican Party should be. His ideas on foreign policy, in general, and how best we should guard against terrorism, in particular, are closer to his father than to any consensus within the party.
While that kind of debate may produce hard feelings, I think they need not. The Trump debate, being about personality, cannot be won, because you are either the type of person Trump is, or you are not.
“Hush” money?We may wanna rethink that term.
I’m wondering whether there weren’t contracts, like there usually are in a settlement, wherein these ladies admit that nothing Trump did was wrong and the payment was purely in the interest of ending a disputed claim? I would like to see those documents. I hope they give Trump a basis for a whopping counterclaim, if it comes to that.
I’ve seen you say this several times. Is there a greater context that I am missing, or are you somehow insinuating that Clinton’s sexual misdeeds are run of the mill, normal guy things? And if so, are those of us who are faithful to our wives something less than heterosexual men?
Where in the world would you get this? This sounds exactly like what my leftist friends say. Don’t confuse mocking Democrats for their Russian conspiracy theories with the belief that Putin is an innocent lamb.
President Trump has indeed been much tougher on Russia than Barack (“more flexibility”) Obama ever was.
I gotta say, this lady sux at blackmail. See, if you’re gonna blackmail somebody, it’s kinda the sine qua non that you don’t reveal the dirt publicly, innit? I mean, once you’ve published, you can be damned!