The Least Surprising ‘Surprise’ of the Campaign
What’s changed since the John F. Kennedy and Johnson’s time is that we can’t, officially or unofficially, look the other way indefinitely. Although we have more liberal ideas about marriage and fidelity than we once did—Ronald Reagan was our first and, so far, our only divorced president—there are new and legitimate demands in the political marketplace that disparagement of women comes at a price, and that price is defeat. The transitional figure in this shift from lechers like Kennedy and Johnson to straighter shooters like Jimmy Carter, the Bushes, and Barack Obama is, of course, Bill Clinton, somebody who projects as a modern man but is really a lech throwback. In entering the presidential race, Trump probably thought he could pull off a Bill Clinton-type fusion of the modern and the lech just long enough to get elected.
.. But our reactions tell us more about us than they do about him. We knew all along that he was this way. He told us he was this way. In 1999, he explained to Chris Matthews on Hardball that he had a woman problem. “Can you imagine how controversial I’d be?” Trump said. “You think about him [Clinton] and the women. How about me with the women? Can you imagine?”