The Billy Bush clip released on Friday was extremely crude and boastful, almost disgusting for the seeker of the presidency of the U.S., even though it was eleven years old. It was not as distasteful as the antics of a number of presidents, including JFK telling an intern to fellate his chief of staff and watching it in the White House swimming pool, and asking her to lie down in his official car so she would be invisible to the British prime minister (Harold MacMillan); Bill Clinton receiving oral sex in the oval office while ostensibly conducting government business on the telephone, or much of the routine conversation of Lyndon Johnson. Thomas Jefferson, who famously held the equality of all men to be “self-evident” was so pleasured by his slave Sally Hemings, that she bore him seven children. Van Buren’s vice president, Colonel Richard Mentor Johnson, lived with an octoroon slave woman as congressman and senator a five-minute walk from the slave market in Washington for 25 years. Presidents Grover Cleveland and Warren Harding sired children out of wedlock; the extra-marital, pre-presidential affairs of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower almost broke up their marriages, which would have disqualified them for the presidency, (and FDR revived the relationship in his third term). Teddy Kennedy was considered a serious candidate for president even after he drunkenly drove his car into a pond, drowning a female assistant, and left the scene of the accident. The Trump video from eleven years ago was tawdry and contemptible, as he has acknowledged, but has nothing to do with being president.
The solid phalanx of the anti-Trump media clangorously ululated and screamed that he was a brutish monster too deformed for a zoo but too uncivilized to be loose in society. The crescendo was earth-shaking and the commentariat ranged from almost incoherent moral damnation to unctuous head-shaking, as if contemplating the most shocking electoral disqualification since Vice President Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804. The point was not what Trump said, since such parlance, unfortunately, is routinely uttered by scores of millions of people, including a sizeable number of women; but the confirmation it was deemed to provide of his feral coarseness and temperamental and intellectual unsuitability to being president. All heterosexual men have a sexual interest in women, which is generally reciprocated. It isn’t the “objectification of women,” it’s sex, and if Megyn Kelly thinks she would hold her present position if she were a snaggle-toothed horse-godmother who weighed 297 pounds, she’s mad.
The Clintons notoriously do anything to win, and are still smarting under Obama’s stealing their party out from under them eight years ago by persuading the ex officio delegates that even though Mrs. Clinton won the primaries, Obama should be nominated to break the de facto ban on electing a non-white president. Their glee at this tape revelation was unseemly and premature. Like Richard Nixon so outraged at the likely theft from him of the 1960 election by the Kennedys that he became too tolerant of “dirty tricks” when his time came round again, Mrs. Clinton in the Sunday debate pressed the issue of the Bush-Trump video. No one in the history of these presidential debates was facing the pressures that were on Donald Trump on Sunday night; the Republican Party chairman, Reince Priebus, the speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, 2008 presidential candidate John McCain, all fled on foot from the nominee into the tall grass. Even the Wall Street Journal waffled badly. Trump’s vice presidential candidate, Mike Pence, was non-committal, like Gerry Ford after the (innocuous) “smoking gun” of 1974. Trump was being widely urged to withdraw, and his campaign was imploding. Trump apologized for his remarks, said he was ashamed and embarrassed by them, and then counter-attacked against the moral shortcomings of the Clinton family, contrasting his words of eleven years before with Bill Clinton’s deeds as president. Round one was a draw, but round two was the opening, by Mrs. Clinton’s imprudent aggressiveness about other ethical matters, to enable Trump to roll out the Hillary Clinton legal vulnerabilities.
