Is this a good old-fashioned sex scandal?

The Democrats thought Russia would bring Donald Trump down, but maybe it’ll be a good old-fashioned sex scandal. Paul Manafort’s conviction for fraud doesn’t directly implicate the president, but Michael Cohen’s guilty plea for violating campaign finance laws does.

Hush money was said to have been paid to silence Trump’s alleged lovers; Cohen says Trump ordered him to do it. Trump now looks a bit less like Richard Nixon (genius of the dark arts) and more like Bill Clinton (wandering hands). We are back on the safer, seedier territory of sex.

Lust has destroyed many American political careers. In 1797, Alexander Hamilton, the brilliant former Secretary of the Treasury, not only admitted to an affair but — this sounds familiar — paying hush money to cover it up.

His presidential ambitions were over; the 1800 election was won instead by Thomas Jefferson, one of a number of presidents believed to have slept with his slaves (relationships that modern audiences would not call consensual).

Indeed, it’s good to keep the allegations against Trump in perspective: worse has been done. In the 1884 election, Grover Cleveland was accused of having a baby out of wedlock, an accusation he overcame and won the presidency twice in non-consecutive elections.

The woman at the heart of the story swore she was raped.

Until the ’70s, hypocrisy, secrecy and conspiracy with the press protected many presidents from affairs in office going public. John F. Kennedy’s staff slipped women in and out of the White House with almost military precision. “I wonder how it is for you?” he said to British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in 1961, “if I don’t have a woman for three days, I get terrible headaches.”

But in the decades after Kennedy’s assassination, things changed. First, the press became more aggressive. Second, impeachment emerged as a partisan political weapon. It’s spoken of almost as a regular part of the process: if your party loses an election at the ballot box, why not try to unseat the winner with legal means? If Hillary Clinton had won instead of Trump, who doubts that the Republicans would be talking impeachment over her improper use of a private email account when she was secretary of state?

And that’s despite how difficult impeachment really is.

There have only been two presidential impeachments by the House of Representatives: Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton (proceedings started against Nixon but he quit while he was ahead). Both were acquitted by the Senate. Technically the issue with Clinton wasn’t whether he’d had extra-marital sex but whether or not he’d lied and obstructed over it, and yet many voters still perceived a puritan, intrusive attitude towards the president that they found as distasteful as his adultery. Throughout the Clinton impeachment, the public often sided with the president against the Republicans. It helped that then, as now, the economy was strong. Clinton not only beat impeachment but left office a popular man.

However, he also walked away with reduced levels of trust. Just because voters believed his infidelity was a private matter didn’t mean they approved of the tawdriness of his administration, and it reflected poorly on his vice-president, Al Gore, when he ran for the presidency in 2000.

Gore lost against the born-again Christian George W. Bush.

It’s possible for voters to become if not enraged, then at least exasperated with scandal, and America has periodically cleaned house.

Richard Nixon, destroyed by Watergate, was followed by Jimmy Carter — another evangelical — who promised never to lie. Who among the present Democratic Party can offer a virtuous alternative to Trump is unclear.

John F. Kennedy