Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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
Of course, it must be news. It’s on the cover of “In Touch.”
Or perhaps both the constant husband and the philanderer are part of the glorious mosaic that is male sexuality and therefore should both be honored as such?
I’m not insinuating anything about you faithful husbands. I’m talking about myself: I’m sick of these comments and posts that accuse us of being hypocrites! because they assume we reacted with horror to Clinton, so therefore we should feel the same about Trump. I was not horrified.
(Although, as the excellent article Bryan linked points out, Clinton’s behavior involved sexual harassment in employment situations. Morality aside, that is tortious. )
There will be no rethinking of the term because its common usage connotes illegality, which is exactly what its users want.
Opinions among deep thinkers vary on this. The comedian and talk show host Bill Maher has often said that men are only as faithful as their options, or words very much like that. Meaning that the only guys who don’t cheat on their women are the guys too unattractive to get more than one. My father claimed that all successful businessmen cheat on their wives, because the hormone that makes men good in business (he never specified the hormone by name) also makes them cheat on their wives.
I’m not endorsing this view, just telling you that some people believe it to be true.
Between this and people insisting that the contents of the Access Hollywood tape were mere “locker room talk” and all men talk that way in private, it appears some rather dark views of men are widespread these days. They certainly don’t reflect the behavior of the men I know in my own life.
P.S. That’s the first time I’ve ever seen “deep thinkers” and “Bill Maher” mentioned in the same breath…
It’s not news to me, but then I see in Trump what my mother used to call a “womanizer.” It’s who he is. I knew these types of stories would come out after the election.
Anyone who did not expect to see these stories about him has not been paying attention through the last two or three years.
I think his behavior, if the accusations are true, would justify an expensive divorce. But these affairs are none of my business. It’s his conscience.
The American people needed a job to be done, they considered a group of candidates, and they decided he offered the best shot at getting the job done.
I’m not sure what you are looking for here. Outrage? I can’t muster any.
The Republican Party was in a crisis when Trump came along. Ogerfell was decided in June 2015. There was no time for the party to retreat and regroup after that ahead of the 2016 campaign season. And there was a sharp divide in the party over immigration–the party split right down the middle. In addition, the Republican Party did not like its last candidate, Mitt Romney, anymore. And it did not like the president from their party who had been the most recently elected: George W. Bush. We had a leadership vacuum.
Trump saw a big political mess. In theory, a party has certain ideas and ambitions, and it finds and supports a candidate. There was no unified party in 2015 and 2016 to support any candidate. We were adrift, like a cork in a current, to quote President Bush.
I am thrilled that Trump got elected as a Republican. He engaged a lot of Democrats to do so. Trump was closer to Bernie Sanders on immigration than he was to any of the other Republican candidates, interestingly. But not surprising, since less immigration used to be a firm desire of the union Democrats.
Trump bought the Republican Party some time. I hope we use it wisely to come up with a new nominating process, one that starts by identifying common goals we Republicans share. In the meantime, I’m relieved he won because had he not, our country would be a whole lot more socialist than I am comfortable with.
More importantly, he bought the nation time. I couldn’t care less about the Republican Party. Perhaps his term will expose enough criminal democrats to neuter that party long enough for a viable alternative to restore some of our freedoms again.
But if I could “like” your post a hundred times, I would.
I agree with you. He bought the nation some time. I agree.
The question is whether the inevitable swing of the pendulum will be more vigorous. Whether the time the nation was bought could have been spent on a concentrated, engaging intellectual advancement of ideas as well as actions, so the gains would not be lost so easily.
It’s one thing to say “people accepted that the candidate probably boinked a porn star while his wife was tending to their newborn, and factored it into their choice” and say that’s the new normal, but there may be a great ache in 2020 for the old normal.
Biden-Harris will be there to pitch all the old standards: family values, marital fidelity, a son in the military, and so on. It’ll seem downright traditional to vote for them.
You might be right.
Without Bill Clinton casting a shadow on the Democrats’ podium, a return to “family values” might happen on their side. It would not surprise me. :)
In Massachusetts, the Republicans went full-tilt on fiscal issues during Deval Patrick’s two terms. That was because the gay marriage and gay adoption issues really tore the party and the state apart, and the Republicans had to remake the local party. The national Republicans didn’t have enough time to do that after Ogerfell. Or perhaps they lacked the will and foresight. Priebus did not strike me as a very effective leader. And we really needed one.
True.
That isn’t how I frame it.
The structure of the economy and cultural marxism is what is wrong. Trump is a symptom. He buys time. He screws with the media. He de-normailzes cultural marxism.
This whole article is excellent.
Too many on the right are being naive about how political power actually works these days, and what the actual, important problems are, socially and economically.
The GOP has done everything wrong on the federal level fro three freaking decades: regressive economy and cultural Marxism. So now we are getting Trump good and hard.
Bought it time from what?
Look at the ACA. It’s obviously just a way to force single payer: Cloward and Piven. 100% lies. Shaming everyone into accepting cultural marxism. The statist media propaganda machine. The lust for central planning because people need and want the government to get them in on the Keynesian graft. Who wants to sacrifice their old age FICA annuity they were forced to buy? Everything is like that now.
His election bought us time from experiencing our collapse into something that was not part of the promise of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. If we don’t find a way to turn around the Republican Party into one that recognizes freedom, and the democrat party into something far more moderate at the least, and more importantly, reduce the power of the federal government, then we will descend into something that will be too terrible to think of. I see Venezuela today and look at Spain in the late 1930’s, France in the Dreyfus Affair and I fear for my country if the Marxist movement in the democrat party succeeds in getting more of what they want.
Trump is no angel. Trump is no intellectual. Trump is not even a very consistent ideologist. But he has stopped the Clinton and the Obama machines and their drives towards a Marxist kleptocracy by Clinton or a Leninist society by Obama. After Marx and Lenin came Stalin, and that was no accident of history, but the destination of the road to serfdom.
So complain about Trump all you want but understand that if he weren’t elected we would have been doomed. I don’t think any other candidate could have won against Hillary. It was his quirks that convinced people to vote for him. I am very thankful for him. The republicans should spend a lot less time worrying about Trump and instead worry about uniting the party into one that includes people who like Trump. If they remain stubborn and don’t, then I suggest we look to Venezuela and each of us should start stockpiling basic medical supplies.
@drewinwisconsin I think he gets this from talking heads more than voters, although I have no idea what the polling is on this. I know the Trump cheerleaders on Fox like Hannity etc… have a new found love for Putin and Russia, just as anti-Trump Jen Rubin now thinks moving the embassy to Jerusalem is a terrible idea just because Trump wants to do it. The entire phenomenon of people on both sides varying their opinions based on whether Trump is for or against is completely idiotic in my opinion.
I completely agree that the Russia conspiracy theory is a textbook example of the “denial” phase of grief that the left seems to be stuck in. CNN’s obsession with being the mouthpiece of the “resistance” being a driving factor there.
The Trump administration’s policies have indeed be tougher on Russia than Obama’s by far and most likely tougher than Hillary’s would have been. I don’t know how much of that is a credit to Trump himself or his staff. (of course he still deserves credit regardless) He does himself a disservice when vocalizing his seeming admiration of Putin throughout the campaign and presidency.
There’s been extensive polling showing this. Basically there’s a segment of Republican voters whose opinion of Russia has increased simply because Trump says nice things about Putin. I can dig it up if you want, but it’s well documented.
That, I’m extremely aware of and happy about. It’s why I don’t buy the “collusion” stuff for a second, since it’s clear that if Putin did “collude” he didn’t get his money’s worth out of the deal.
Foreign policy in every aspect and dimension is complicated and inscrutable. What is to be done? Get everyone to “vote better”?
Just remember, the consequence for this “effective strategy” is that we have a governor who simply doesn’t care that the attorney general is exceeding the authority granted to her by the legislature to ban guns she doesn’t like. And is telling women all over the Commonwealth to “hold it” if they don’t want to share a bathroom with a man.
This makes no sense, in the end.
Look, while I would not use your language (I dislike using extreme language, because it is not edifying, only emotional), I agree with the basic thrust, that we need to stop going to the Left, and that is was good Trump won.
But he did not win because of his quirks. He won because of her character. Joe Biden, while no better in policy terms, might have won, because he goes down easy with a lot of people (not with me, but you gotta look at the bigger picture).
Never mind not being consistent, Donald Trump is no idealogue. He does not understand policy; it is all personal with him. We have good policy today, because of Mike Pence and an excellent Cabinet. Trump is ruining that with his personality. You may like it; most people don’t. And they take it out on those running with his blessing. If Trump does not voluntarily stand aside, or at least stop talking and tweeting, every gain that he has brought us is going to be undone with the next set of elections.
The party of family values lost the election.
Trump supporters still have their family values in their families, they are just done with the pretense that electing some moral pillar who will reverse the cultural trend(s) by sheer example. It seems that for some conservatives the Presidency is the last hope of stemming the tide of moral depravity outside of the church itself. What do we say to our kids? They exclaim. Your kids have porn on their cell phones, drugs in their veins, despair in their hearts, and confusion in their brains. They don’t watch Presidents on TV, don’t follow the news, they are dancing to hip-hop beats with three-syllable curse-words with modifiers rhyming with trigger. The culture is so decadent and dysfunctional that Mr. Saint President will merely become the target of scorn and contempt. They don’t hate Trump for his character, they hate him for his effectiveness. They hate Pence for his character.
People are done with having their Presidents assaulted by press and pundits for every reason under the sun. We are now immune.
True cultural warriors have decided that we will fight the media – the main source of the depravity, and we won’t be foolish enough to hang our credibility on one man’s morality that we may come to find exposed as a hypocrite. Denny Hastert was the highest elected Republican for a number of years and longest serving Republicans Speaker of the House. A family man by night, sexual pederast by day.
The whole leading by example approach has failed miserably. George W Bush was a fine family man as far as I know, but he was a murderer, a goofball, and dumb. That’s what our kids heard about him. Why follow him as an example?
The press were always complicit in protecting Americans from the decadence of their leaders, looking the other way when Saint JFK had interns service cabinet members in the White House pool, or when Johnson would use the most crude language when excoriating some backbench congressman on the phone from his White House toilet. They downplayed or outright suppressed the Clinton sexual scandals as a matter of course, and sided openly with the Clinton/Carville/Stephanopoulis/Hillary spin. But by that time it was 92% partisanship and 8% decorum. In that quaint innocent world of the 60’s, the press had decorum. They weighed the pros and cons of reporting salacious details and decided they would take the high ground and not subject the populace to the ordeals that were unsolvable anyway.
But like the rest of this new yellow sex-obsessed press, Mona Charen is a product of this new paradigm and one can’t blame her for capitalizing. It wouldn’t be prudent to be, er, prudent, and focus on the Mueller probe, or the Omnibus bill (boring!).
.
Continued-
It’s a shame to see the intellect, scholarship and syndicated reach of Mona Charen wasted on the Stormy Daniels story and absent where it’s really needed.
Feel free to argue with this. Have at it
No ideas? What planet are you from? Restore American greatness by correcting trade imbalance, halting the refugee influx, reducing illegal immigration, repealing Obamacare, rolling back regulation….I don’t know the man personally; I voted for him because of his ideas.
it was Clinton who had “no ideas”. Stronger together”–what the hell does that mean? She’s still stuck in 1968.
Got that? I have no way of knowing “the type of person Trump is” . He’s not my husband, brother, friend. I wasn’t voting for someone to fill those rôles. I liked his ideas. And I still do.
I see him as a conduit and and someone that is much more suited for execution right now than a guy with a great big thought out coherent world view or whatever. I’m just saying complaining about the fact that he isn’t in the weeds on policy like he should be doesn’t matter.
The GOP is just a bunch of Keynesians controlled by K Street, and their need to get reelected. Then throw in the fact that they don’t address cultural marxism and Alinsky tactics worth a crap. Trump is both a symptom and an improvement. I don’t like it, but that is where we are.
As Skyler notes above, there are bigger storms on the horizon than Ms. Daniels.
We are witnessing a takeover of America by the left. It’s notable with this attempted (ongoing?) coup that they seem quite prepared to do anything – absolutely anything – for complete power.
There is a cabal of media, academia, government bureaucrats, and elements of our intelligence agencies whose desires comport with totalitarian solutions believing all the while in their personal virtue. This is as natural to these people as Canadian geese wintering in Florida. The geese don’t conspire ( collude maybe) they just do it. They arrive in separate flocks, but they all go to the same general area.
These folks want to take us to more government, more socialized government, more wealth redistribution, more control. Bottom line, no freedom.
Anyone who understands history and basic political science knows that things change gradually, then suddenly. There’s always a tipping point, and there are always people in high places who are completely blindsided once things change ‘suddenly’. Those in high places are last to feel the effects. If anything is useful about Democracy it’s the adjustments over time due to people’s common wisdom. A feedback mechanism that keeps the country from going off course.
But now we have people who write for the publication founded by W.F. Buckley jr. – the guy most famous for saying, “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University” – decrying “populism”!
It seems the new wave of writers are a virtual Harvard faculty who would naturally disagree. They want to run the show. According to them, the ‘people’ who voted in Trump are stupid, wrong, or both, and they must intervene.
Hahahahaha … Thatsa good one boss!