Should We Care That Much?

[Note -- before starting, I want to welcome back all the readers from Russian IP addresses who appear to have now returned to reading the column, after a couple months' hiatus.  I always like to note when I see you're out there, except after I do, you disappear for a few months.  So welcome back!]

So the past week has been full of all kinds of curious stories about affairs that President Trump is supposed to have had years back.  It is, of course, immensely exciting for the media and the left (but I repeat myself) to go into all that as part of the "Trump is a bad guy" narrative, and I get why they are doing that.

They are not -- do not deceive yourself -- trying to make the first lady into a martyr, because that would make her somehow a victim, or "good", and that would prevent them from publishing future stories destroying her character.  No, they are simply doing this to prevent the president from having the standing to do the things in his job that he is actually trying to do -- and, in many cases, succeeding.

So how do I actually feel about all that salacious stuff?

Well, I will say that if Mike Pence, a man of considerably more personal character, had been the president and had been doing the same things, and accomplishing the same results, I suppose I would have been quite happy, since I am more inclined toward his sense of morality than that of the man Donald Trump appears to have been, before becoming president.

But I voted for Mr. Trump knowing all that -- not who, exactly his possible extramarital associates were, nor caring; but the man's character had been out there for decades as a non-political public figure.  As I wrote before, he has been married three times, and there was a reason for that.

Beyond that, the character issue with Mr. Trump is a complex one.  We essentially have written off one facet of his character, or at least what his character was ten years ago, because he appeared to be the one person running for president who was capable of doing certain things -- exposing and attacking the swamp, for example (Marco Rubio could not do that), and doing them with a bluster and a force that would do things to raise America's standing after the devastating hit it took under the Obama years.

I am not related to Mr. Trump, so his private actions do not affect me personally.  All that stuff matters far less to me than his presidency.  You can trot out all the porn stars you want, but as long as taxes get cut, the swamp gets drained, the Wall gets built, Fix-NICS gets passed, it really doesn't matter what goes on in his bedroom -- and it particularly doesn't matter what went on there ten years ago.

I do have to ask myself this, though, as a test.  Suppose that a year or so into Barack Obama's administration, it had come out that he had had a long affair with a porn star ten years earlier.  What would the press have done, we ask?  More importantly, how much would I have been condemning his character in these pages?

I have to say that I probably would have written about it -- possibly with an undertone of Obama carrying the Jack Kennedy running-women-in-and-out-of-the-White-House just a bit to far in his attempt to emulate Camelot.  But I'd like to think that I would have come to the conclusion that his devastation of the national psyche, crippling the military, wrecking the economy and lowering our standing in the world might just have been a lot more important.

So I did not watch the interview with the porn star last night, if for no better reasons than (A) all the above, and (B) her credibility may be just a tad suspect.

But most importantly, none of this is nearly as important as the governing of the USA, and whether or not the nation is in the hands of a serial adulterer is something that we already made up our minds about a year ago November.

I'm not happy about it, but I'm tolerating it, as the Wall gets built.

Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton
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