Early Friday morning the New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow dropped an article that alleges a 2006 sexual affair between President Trump and Karen McDougal, a former Playboy Bunny. If the story is true, at the time, Trump had been married to Melania for a little less than two years and the National Enquirer purchased the rights to her story in order to kill it.
Naturally, in addition to the hysterical white noise and fire hose of anti-Trump fake news the deranged media is already spewing, they went crazy over this, which is only notable because it does mark a massive sea change in our media’s view of such things.
For 25 years, or for however long Bill Clinton has been a national figure, the media have trained/brainwashed Americans not to care about the following…
…a politician’s personal life.
…a politician’s sex life.
…a politician lying about sex.
…a politician’s extra-marital affairs.
…a politician lying about extra-marital affairs.
…a politician committing perjury to cover up an extra-marital affair.
Good heavens, we are not even supposed to care if the president of the United States has sex in the Oval Office with a young intern and is then accused by a handful of other women of sexual harassment, groping, and rape.
For 25 years, the media have told us we are electing a president, not a pope. So where did this sudden burst of moral purity come from? Why are we suddenly being told to care if a politician boinked a Playboy Bunny a dozen years ago?
Hey, need I remind you that we elected a president, not a pope!
The media’s new concern for individual morality is especially baffling when it was just ten years ago that we were told not to care if a politician smoked weed and snorted cocaine with his Choom Gang, if he palled around with domestic terrorists, if he spent 20 years in a racist church, if some sleazy local political operator helped him purchase his home, or if he was palzy-walzy with a raging anti-Semite.
Hell, ten years ago, the media cared so little about marital infidelity, they covered up for presidential candidate John Edwards as he cheated on his wife, who was dying of cancer at the time.
Time and again, whenever we thought these stories should be bigger news, the media reassured us that none of this matters, that it is all old news, litigated, and it was time to move on to what matters in the lives of the American people.
So, honestly, after 25 years of media training, I cannot tell you just how little I care about Trump’s 12-year-old sex life.
Furthermore, it is not like Trump has ever portrayed himself as some holier-than-thou figure — like, say, serial groper Al Franken. Trump being Trump is baked in the proverbial cake. Besides, something else we do not know is if he and Melania were quietly separated at the time.
This is not me making excuses for Trump. My only point is that we do not know what we do not know, and we most certainly do not know about the complicated relationship between this particular man and wife/ Therefore, the only motivation in condemning a man in such a circumstance is to feel superior by signaling your own virtue. Which makes it the perfect job for #NeverTrump.
Anyway, the media might have lost the ability to sway public opinion today, but after 25 years of being told not to care about these things — I do not care about these things, and the partisan media suddenly pretending to care only makes me care a whole lot less.
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