Donald Trump’s Real Porn-Star Problem

Remember the Clinton scandals. They provoked no decisive legal thunderbolt but a series of agonizing, consequential defeats.

It’s happening again.

.. If you want to talk about foreign influence on elections, the funneling of Chinese money into the 1996 Clinton presidential campaign is still stunning, even these many years later.

.. If the Clinton wing of the Democratic party is honest with itself, it has to understand the price it paid for its corruption. In 2000, the Democrats lost a presidential election they should have won. After all, in a previous time of peace and prosperity, the Republicans got three terms, even when the vice president wasn’t half the political talent that Ronald Reagan was. In 2000, America was on an economic roll, there was an actual budget surplus, and the threat of jihad was barely on the national radar screen. Yet Gore felt as if he had to distance himself from Clinton. He had to distance himself from the drama.

.. she lost a general-election campaign to the most disliked politician in the history of favorability ratings of presidential candidates.

.. While it may well be the case (though I’m skeptical) that some sort of climactic scandal will topple Trump, I think it’s far more likely that he’ll live the way he’s always lived — the way the Clintons always lived — doing what he wants, when he wants, as a phalanx of lawyers clean up his mess and a squadron of associates and allies take the fall.

.. it’s more likely that his future resembles Hillary’s than Richard Nixon’s.

.. Never Hillary was in the more than 231,000 fewer votes Hillary received in Wisconsin than Barack Obama did in 2012. It was in the 293,000 fewer votes in Michigan, 303,000 fewer votes in Ohio, and the 162,000 fewer votes in Iowa. It was in the hundreds of thousands of Obama voters who didn’t just stay home but switched parties to vote for Trump.