Trump is a malign genius feeding off our antipathy
For over a year in 1998-99 the Republicans tried to destroy President Bill Clinton politically by exposing his tawdry affair with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Today, opponents of Donald Trump are hoping that his trial in New York revolving around allegations of inaccurately recorded hush money paid to the porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential election to keep quiet about her sexual relationship with Trump 10 years earlier will seriously damage him.
The anti-Trump media is obsessively following the trial in Manhattan, giving it more coverage than the war in Gaza and the protests by US students against it. Every twist and turn in the evidence in the case is recounted by breathless reporters to the television cameras outside the courthouse.
Yet the outcome of the Lewinsky affair, which it resembles in many ways, shows how an agile and unscrupulous politician – and Clinton and Trump arguably have more in common than either would care to admit – can escape paying a political price for unsavoury revelations.
News of Monica Lewinsky’s on-off affair with Clinton several years previously began to emerge in January 1998 after she confided details of it to a friend, Linda Tripp, who secretly recorded 20 hours of their conversations on a tape recorder.
This was eagerly pounced on by the independent counsel Kenneth
Starr, who had been doggedly but ineffectually pursuing Bill and Hillary Clinton over Whitewater, a failed realestate venture in Arkansas, in which they had been involved. Starr and his team were to pursue the president with unrelenting persistence over the following 12 months.
The investigation of Bill Clinton by Starr and the Republicans in Congress, along with the president’s determined fightback, soon became one of the great real-life American soap operas. On 26 January, Clinton famously denied reports of the affair, which was by this time all over television and the print press, saying: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”
Soon it became clear, however, that his definition of sexual relations was more specific and legalistic than commonly understood.
Starr played up the graphic details of Clinton and Lewinsky’s encounters for all they were worth. In September, he sent a 445-page report to Congress on his investigation with supporting evidence contained in 36 boxes. Ludicrously detailed, one passage reads: “On Sunday, February 4, according to Ms Lewinsky, she and the President had their sixth sexual
Clinton and Trump have more in common than either would care to admit
encounter and their first lengthy and personal conversation. The President was in the Oval Office from 3:36 to
7:05 p.m.” The precise timing of their encounters was duly recorded by his staff and security officers.
Much publicity was given to stains on Lewinsky’s blue dress and Clinton had to take a blood test to see if they came from him. By then he was testifying before a grand jury and admitted on television to “inappropriate behaviour”, while denying that he had ever lied about it, arguing that “there’s nothing going on between us … depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”.
By the end of the year the Republican-controlled House had moved to impeach Clinton, though there were already signs that they might have overplayed their hand in the eyes of the public because Clinton’s approval rating went up in September to 64 per cent. By then, the details of the Lewinsky-Clinton relationship were known to all Americans.
In the midterm elections in November, the Republicans failed to make the gains they had expected on the back of the scandal.
By then, the world was agog at what was happening in Washington. Clinton resolutely denied that he had lied under oath and refused to resign.
I was in Baghdad on 16 December when he ordered missile strikes on Iraq because Saddam Hussein was refusing access to UN weapons inspectors.
Iraqi officials and foreign journalists alike cynically attributed the attacks to Clinton wanting to show he was still in charge and to delay the House vote on his impeachment.
Clinton was put on trial before the Senate which voted to acquit him on 12 February 1999 on counts of perjury 55-45 and obstruction of justice 50-50. He emerged politically unscathed from the scandal, though it may have contributed to the Republicans winning the White House in 2000.
Thereafter the saga shifted swiftly from being grossly over-covered by the media to becoming ancient history. What lessons are there from the Lewinsky affair for the antiTrump forces inside and outside the Democratic Party? Are the mistakes of Clinton’s enemies being made again by those opposed to Trump? One error common to both is that sexual scandal is seldom quite the ace card that it is imagined to be. Clinton and Trump had well-publicised reputations as philanderers already priced in by voters who were unlikely to be surprised and shocked by their antics.
Over-eager to demonise Clinton, the investigators appeared visibly partisan and too keen to pretend that a non-criminal sexual liaison was a high crime. Though many who attacked Clinton were experienced political operators, they moved in social circles where Clinton was viewed as, at best, a plausible rogue. This made it difficult for them to enter into the feelings of, and seek to influence, people who previously thought he was a good president.
Deep anger towards Clinton impaired the political judgement of his opponents and handicapped their attack on him, but their antipathy, however intense, is dwarfed a thousand times over by the fear and loathing felt for Trump by a great chunk of Americans and much of the wider world.
Again and again, this fierce hostility, which he may well deserve, has worked to his advantage as his critics lose their sense of proportion. Whenever I gently try to contradict those convinced that he is the most devilish of devils and most foolish of clowns, I know I must preface this by saying that he is a very bad man if I want to get any hearing. Yet his track record is as a spectacularly successful politician with great skill in catching his adversaries by surprise, usually because they underestimate him.
In the 2016 presidential election, this led the Democrats to believe that Trump would be the easiest Republican candidate to beat. First time around, this underestimation may be understandable but eight years later they still make the same mistake. In between, he only narrowly failed to be re-elected in 2020, largely thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic. Even more remarkably, he survived the 6 January 2021 Capitol invasion by his supporters and easily saw off Republican rivals. Trump is a genius in manipulating the media by piggy-backing on their antipathy, guaranteeing him ceaseless free airtime.
A politician critical of David Lloyd George, British prime minister during and after the First World War, warned that it was a fatal mistake to underestimate his abilities. “Anybody who plans to fight him,” said the politician, “must think hard, think deep and think ahead – otherwise he will think too late.”
Much the same is true of Trump and failure by his enemies to understand this may put him back in the
White House.