Stormy sideshow: Focus on real scandals

To judge by the blockbuster ratings for 60 Minutes, I must be one of the few politically sentient adults to have missed the Stormy Daniels interview on Sunday night, just as I earlier missed Karen McDougal’s high-rated interview on CNN. This was partly because I was having dinner with my family at a restaurant that was mercifully TV-free. But it’s also because I just don’t care what these women have to say about their alleged flings with President Donald Trump.

Admittedly, it’s fun to see liberals and conservatives compete in the hypocrisy Olympics. Liberals who were oh-so-understanding of Bill Clinton’s relationship with a White House intern are now gleefully attacking Trump for his purported relationships with a porn star and a Playboy playmate. Conservatives who claimed that Clinton was the second coming of Beelzebub are now happy to give Trump a “mulligan” for his moral infractions.

But who, at the end of the day, really cares? Voters knew what kind of man Trump was when they elected him. Thricemarried, he has made no secret of his infidelities. He is said to have loved the New York Post article in which his mistressturned-second-wife Marla Maples claimed: “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had.” A month before the 2016 election, voters were treated to the Access Hollywood tape on which Trump bragged about how he “moved … very heavily” on a married woman, and also about how as a “star” he was allowed to grab women “by the pussy.” Trump’s very lack of pretensions to morality render him bulletproof against charges of immorality.

Attempts to prove that Trump violated campaign-finance laws by having his lawyer pay off Stormy Daniels are likely to prove no more successful than a similar case against John Edwards involving his pregnant mistress. It will probably be impossible to link Trump to the unidentified man who Daniels says threatened her.

Focusing on Trump’s sexual misconduct is, in fact, likely to backfire, just as it did with Bill Clinton. The sordid details of Clinton’s assignations with Monica Lewinsky titillated the public, but also made it easy for Democrats to claim the whole scandal was simply about sex rather than “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

I hope that’s a trap that Trump critics avoid today. Instead of focusing on who got spanked with what, let’s focus on the real scandals. There are so many of them that you need a scorecard to keep them straight.

Let’s talk about the alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russialinked figures. The two sides had at least 70 publicly reported contacts in 2016, and two Trump aides have pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about those communications. If there is an innocent explanation, what could it possibly be?

Let’s talk about Trump’s assault on the rule of law. Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in order to stop the investigation of the “Russia thing,” and came close to firing Special Counsel Robert Mueller and Attorney General Jeff Sessions for the same reason. More recently, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was vilified by Trump and fired a day before he would be eligible to receive his pension. The public explanation is that McCabe “misled” investigators about his contacts with the press — but he denies the charge and says he was sacked “because of the role I played, the actions I took, and the events I witnessed in the aftermath of the firing of James Comey.”

Now Trump is stepping up his false and malicious attacks on Mueller, raising concerns that he will try to fire the special counsel, thereby triggering the biggest constitutional crisis since Watergate.

Let’s talk about Trump’s unwillingness to divest himself of his business holdings or to release his tax returns. What is he hiding? Are he and his family benefiting financially from the presidency? Do they have financial links to the Kremlin or other sordid sources of cash?

Let’s talk about his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s failure to win a top-level security clearance after reports about his conflicts of interest. The Washington Post has reported that officials in the United Arab Emirates, China, Israel and Mexico discussed how they could manipulate Kushner “by taking advantage of his complex business arrangements, financial difficulties, and lack of foreign-policy experience,” while The New York Times has reported that Kushner’s family company won hundreds of millions of dollars in financing from financiers that he met with at the White House.

Let’s talk about the president’s pathological dishonesty. The Post reports that Trump makes an average of six false or misleading statements a day. Among the most recent statements, Trump denied that he was going to fire national security adviser H.R. McMaster or shake up his legal team before doing just that.

There are plenty of other Trump transgressions to discuss, too. The more time we spend discussing Trump’s dalliances with women who remind him of his daughter, the less time we spend on genuine scandals that have the potential to end his presidency. Don’t fall for the (click) bait.