President’s sex scandal won’t help Jeff Flake

Sen. Jeff Flake is in New Hampshire this week, taking the first tentative steps toward a challenge of President Donald Trump in 2020. Maybe.

Possibly.

Speaking of a possible run for Trump’s job, Flake told the Concord

Monitor, “It’s not in my plans, but I’ve not ruled it out.”

In every other presidential election — and all through our history, on just about every political level — the one thing that was pretty much guaranteed to help a long-shot candidate like Flake (if that’s what he chooses to become) is an old-fashioned sex scandal. Enter Stormy Daniels.

The porn star who says she slept with Donald Trump (while he was married to Melania) is known to have accepted $130,000 shortly before Election Day 2016 to keep quiet about the alleged affair.

But she now has a lawyer. He not only is talking about how his client slept with Trump, but is challenging that non-disclosure agreement

Meantime, Daniels continues to make news.

And while the president had denied the affair, his ham-handed press secretary, Sarah Sanders, admitted that an “arbitration was won in the president’s favor” regarding the hush money, which is the same thing as admitting that a non-disclosure deal involving Trump exists.

And if the affair never happened, why would the president need to win any arbitration over such a deal?

Not only that, but it appears Daniels has given a “60 Minutes” interview to Anderson Cooper, and there are those who believe the president’s people will not be able to stop it from airing.

In a Washington Post article, defamation attorney Megan C. Deluhery said, “She’s already given the interview. CBS would need to be a party to the suit to be restrained from airing the interview, and since the obligation on Ms. Daniels arose as part of a private settlement, I don’t see much legal basis to enjoin CBS — a stranger to the settlement agreement — from doing anything.”

Waiting in the wings is Jeff Flake. Solid family man. Smart. Measured. Completely committed to the conservative values Republicans have long stood for.

A speech Flake will give in New Hampshire is titled, “Country over party.”

He said, “I’ll talk about where I think the Republican Party needs to be for the future and what we do in the post-Trump era. I do think we will get through this. This fever will cool. People will demand a governing party. A party that can govern, that can make use of the majority that it has.”

Flake has no illusions. He’s not run-

ning for re-election because he didn’t figure he could win in a GOP primary. Why?

“The price for that was to accept some of the president’s positions and condone his behavior, and I couldn’t do that,” he said.

Trump’s unacceptable positions would include the president’s recently announced steel and aluminum tariffs, which Flake called an “economic disaster” and introduced legislation to block.

As for unacceptable behavior, two words: “Stormy Daniels.”

Which — unlike anything in our political history — Will. Not. Matter.

That can’t help but be puzzling to someone like Flake, who believes that old-fashioned values of like civility and fidelity and morality actually mean something. Particularly to Republicans.

Once upon a time, anyway.

“It’s tough to see the base of the party leaving the president,” Flake admitted.

A reader who called himself a “family-values Republican” explained Trump’s appeal to me this way: “We were tired of how things were going and wanted to rock the system so we hired a political hit man. You don’t care if your hitman cheats on his wife. He’s a hit man.”