Steve Benen’s mention of a report that President Trump may have slept with a porn star leaves me flat:
… the Wall Street Journal reports this afternoon on a curious alleged payment during the 2016 campaign season.
A lawyer for President Donald Trump arranged a $130,000 payment to a former adult-film star a month before the 2016 election as part of an agreement that precluded her from publicly discussing an alleged sexual encounter with Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with the matter.
Michael Cohen, who spent nearly a decade as a top attorney at the Trump Organization, arranged payment to the woman, Stephanie Clifford, in October 2016 after her lawyer negotiated the nondisclosure agreement with Mr. Cohen, these people said.
Ms. Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels, has privately alleged the encounter with Mr. Trump took place after they met at a July 2006 celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, these people said. Mr. Trump married Melania Trump in 2005.
The reporting has been met with several specific kinds of denials.
And … so what? We know his base doesn’t care if he sleeps around. They’re so deeply in his thrall that they’ll excuse most anything he does that isn’t obvious betrayal of the United States. Sexual hijinks? That may even be seen as a positive, because, for them, leadership means breaking the rules.
So don’t expect anything out of this story.
In a different fantasy, Trump apologist Marc Thiessen has published a column in WaPo that describes Trump’s public meeting concerning immigration as a complete success that has destroyed Trump’s critics and let’s him get on his way to success. No, I’m not kidding:
This week, two incredible events unfolded before our eyes: American television viewers were invited into the White House Cabinet Room, where for nearly an hour they watched as President Trump effectively led a bipartisan meeting in which he and congressional Democrats made real progress on immigration reform.
And it snowed in the Sahara Desert.
The reason for the Saharan snow was a rare blast of arctic air sweeping across Algeria. The reason for the rare public display of presidential leadership was the release of a new book by New York media gossip columnist Michael Wolff that portrays Trump as mentally unfit to be president. Wolff describes Trump as being like a child who “could not really converse . . . not in the sense of sharing information, or of a balanced back-and-forth conversation.” In just 55 minutes, Trump completely discredited Wolff’s thesis.
This would be the same meeting where other observers noted that Trump managed to get so far afield that his GOP minions had to drag him back to their position. I saw a part of that meeting, and Trump sounded excited, confused, passive-aggressive, and made promises that I wouldn’t trust in the least.
I don’t know what Thiessen thinks he saw, but then I recall when Sarah Palin burst on the national scene and how most of the conservative punditry committed a coordinated swoon at her feet. They should have been ashamed. She came across as a lunatic. After the election, she abruptly quit her job as Governor of Alaska, so discrediting herself – and the swooners.
And I’m quite sure she still has supporters, completely confused as to how to evaluate politicians in a sane manner. Just like Marc.
