To counter damage from the “Access Hollywood” tape recording him boasting about groping women as well as allegations by a number of women that it was more than just “locker room talk,” Mr. Trump recruited Ms. Broaddrick and other women who had accused Mr. Clinton to join him on the campaign trail last year.
.. “It’s about time,” Kathleen Willey, another woman who accused Mr. Clinton of sexual harassment, said Wednesday in a telephone interview from her home in Richmond, Va. “We’ve waited for years for vindication.”
.. Paula Jones, another accuser, said they were not taken seriously until now. “It’s like me and Juanita and Kathleen have been screaming for years for someone to pay attention to us on the liberal side, and it’s like no one would hear us,” she said by telephone. “They made fun of me. They didn’t believe me. They said I was making it up.”
.. Many chose to defend him for his White House trysts with Ms. Lewinsky because, despite the power differential between a president and a former intern, she was a willing partner. To this day, Ms. Lewinsky rejects the idea that she was a victim because of the affair; “any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath” when the political system took over, as she wrote in 2014.
.. Ms. Willey later said she suspected the Clintons were somehow involved in the death of her husband, which was called a suicide.
.. Nina Burleigh, a journalist, wrote a column at the time joking that she would give Mr. Clinton oral sex for protecting abortion rights.
Politics For some evangelicals, a choice between Moore and morality
“What you’re seeing here is rank hypocrisy,” said John Fea, an evangelical Christian who teaches history at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, Pa. “These are evangelicals who have decided that the way to win the culture is now uncoupled from character. Their goal is the same as it was 30 years ago, to restore America to its Christian roots, but the political playbook has changed.
.. No, the decision to stick with Moore is not just a power play — rather, it’s an evolving view of human nature, said Robert Jeffress, pastor of the 13,000-member Dallas First Baptist Church and perhaps the most prominent evangelical supporter of President Trump.
“For evangelical Christians, morality doesn’t change,” Jeffress said. “But over the last 40 years, Americans have become more aware of the flaws of individuals. Remember how shocked Christians like Billy Graham were when they heard Nixon’s tapes — his foul language, his racist remarks. We’re more aware now because of media scrutiny that our leaders are flawed and morality cannot be the only measure.”
Jeffress argued that Christians have come to see that although morality remains important in choosing candidates, “leadership, experience, morality and faith are all important, and the rank of those changes according to circumstances.”
.. In supporting Trump, Jeffress decided that although the president “may not be a perfect Christian, he is a good leader.” About 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump last year, exit polls showed.
.. Land still believes in a line he attributes to Harry Truman, about how if a man lies to his wife, he’ll lie to me and the American people. “In an ideal world, you wouldn’t want anybody working for you who’d broken his marriage vows,” Land said. “But I understand that would disqualify a number of our presidents.”
.. Context matters, Land said. Trump was “my last choice among the Republican presidential candidates” in last year’s primaries, largely because of character questions, Land said. In the end, he voted for Trump over Hillary Clinton and agreed to serve on a Trump advisory board because “I had to choose between a lesser evil and a greater evil. Mrs. Clinton called abortion sacrosanct, so I already knew what I needed to know.”
.. Other evangelical leaders have shifted their rhetoric through the years. Ralph Reed, the longtime head of the Christian Coalition, said in 1998 that Bill Clinton’s White House affair with Monica Lewinsky rendered him unfit to serve. “We will not rest until we have leaders of good moral character,” he said at the time.
In 2016, however, Reed, who did not respond to a request for comment, said after the release of videotape showing Trump boasting of grabbing women by their genitals that a recording “of a private conversation with a TV talk show host ranks pretty low on [evangelicals’] hierarchy of their concerns.”
.. “A watershed moment was 1980,” he said. “Evangelical Christians chose between a born-again Baptist Sunday school teacher and a twice-married Hollywood actor who had signed the most liberal abortion bill and whose wife practiced astrology. And evangelicals chose Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter.”
How Donald Trump Taught Conservatives to Defend Roy Moore
In early 2016, at a campaign rally in Iowa, Donald Trump famously said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Much of the rest of Trump’s campaign, and his subsequent Presidency, has seemed like a test of that declaration.
- He talked on tape about sexually assaulting women and won the general election.
- He fired the F.B.I. director, who was investigating him and his campaign for potentially criminal conduct, and Republicans yawned.
- He has used Twitter to escalate a standoff with a renegade nuclear state, and his supporters have defended it as a brilliant strategy.
.. a sign that the partisan rationalization of even the most abhorrent behavior is not exclusive to Trumpism
.. Moore conceded that he knew two of the women who told the Post that he had sought relationships with them when they were teen-agers, but he denied knowing the woman who said that he had abused her when she was fourteen.
.. The Covington County G.O.P. chairman, William Blocker, was blunter, telling Daniel Dale, of the Toronto Star, “There is NO option to support Doug Jones, the Democratic nominee. When you do that, you are supporting the entire Democrat party.”
.. from 2011 to 2016, the percentage of white evangelical Protestants who believe that “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life” shot up, from thirty to seventy-two per cent.
.. Evangelicals went from being the least forgiving religious group to being the most forgiving religious group. “What happened in the interim?” Edsall asks. “The answer is obvious: the advent of Donald Trump.”
To justify their support of Trump, evangelicals apparently reassessed the importance they place on a politician’s personal morality.
.. In other words: Americans identify with a party the way they do with a sports team or tribe. Often, one’s hatred of an opposing tribe—what political scientists call “negative partisanship”—is enough to overcome any doubts about one’s own.
Bobby Sticks It to Trump
our Russia-besotted president does share some traits with Dostoyevsky’s spiraling protagonist, Rodion Raskolnikov.
.. Both men are naifs who arrive and think they have the right to transgress. Both are endlessly fascinating psychological studies: self-regarding, with Napoleon-style grandiosity, and self-incriminating. Both are consumed with chaotic, feverish thoughts as they are pursued by a relentless, suspicious lawman.
.. We are in for an epic clash between two septuagenarians who both came from wealthy New York families and attended Ivy League schools but couldn’t be more different — the flamboyant flimflam man and the buttoned-down, buttoned-up boy scout.
.. One has been called America’s straightest arrow. One disdains self-promotion and avoids the press. One married his sweetheart from school days. One was a decorated Marine in Vietnam. One counts patience, humility and honesty as the virtues he lives by and likes to say “You’re only as good as your word.”
.. Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio says the president has been lying reflexively since he was a kid bragging about home runs he didn’t hit. He gets warped satisfaction from making up stuff, like those calls from the head of the Boy Scouts and the president of Mexico that the White House just admitted never happened.
Back when he was a Page Six playboy, Trump even invented two P.R. guys to play on the phone with reporters, so he could boast about himself three times as much, including fictitious claims of dating Carla Bruni and being hit on by Madonna.
He is never deterred by the fact that he can be easily caught. But considering he survived the “Access Hollywood” video, it’s no wonder he has a distorted sense of what is an existential threat.
A White House adviser told me recently about how scary Mueller’s dream team is, and how Jared Kushner should be nervous. Every time Mueller adds a legal celebrity to his crew, the music gets cued for an “Ocean’s Eleven” or “Dirty Dozen” array of talent.
- One lawyer helped destroy the New York City mafia;
- another helped bring down Nixon;
- another tackled Enron;
- others are experts on foreign bribery and witness-flipping.
As GQ’s Jay Willis wrote, “If these people were coming for you over a parking ticket, you’d be thinking about liquidating your life savings.”
.. Trump does not yet seem to fathom that Mueller is empowered in a way no one else is to look at all sorts of things. This isn’t some tiff over a casino, where Trump can publicly berate opposing counsel and draw him into a public spat. Mueller won’t take the bait.