Earlier this year, in Donald Trump’s hush money trial, adult film star Stormy Daniels told jurors how she met Trump, 60, when she was 27 and his wife had just given birth to their son. spoke. dinner. She spotted Daniels wearing satin pajamas, and in an encounter that included very “brief” sex, the businessman told Daniels that she reminded him of his daughter Ivanka.
I’m not dragging this out again to put off your dinner. I bring this up to remind you that all these sordid details made headlines and spawned jokes on late-night talk shows, yet they did nothing to impress President Trump’s voters. It’s for a reason. His supporters, including evangelical Christians, didn’t care at all. Nor was he concerned about President Trump’s relationship with Mark Robinson. Mark Robinson, a disgraced Republican candidate running to be North Carolina’s next governor, was once active on a pornographic forum called Nude Africa, where he allegedly bragged about being a “pervert.” .
The 2024 US election could have been filled with revelations ranging from the mildly obscene to the downright disturbing. It’s not just Trump. Star New York magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi had a personal relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while running for president, and incumbent Congressman Matt Gaetz has been accused of human trafficking and sexual activity with a minor. There are also recent reports that he is under investigation for allegedly paying for. But despite the many ridiculous and often unpleasant details, political sex scandals no longer seem to sting very much.
“America has lost its shame muscle,” said Dr. Alison Dagness, a professor of political science at Shippensburg University. She argues that the details of these scandals mostly remain rumors and fade from public memory because politicians are not ashamed to retire from public life. “Some politicians realize that if you don’t apologize for something, no one can use it against you again. For shameless people, it’s a very effective way to get through life. is.”
It wasn’t always like this. Sex scandals can be used to sway an election or destroy a candidate. In 1987, Gary Hart was considered the Democratic presidential candidate until reports of his “womanizing” and extramarital affairs derailed his campaign. In 2008, North Carolina senator and Democratic star John Edwards was on his way to the presidency until he was arrested for allegedly covering up an affair that produced a child. His career collapsed and he disappeared from public life.
In 2014, The Washington Post analyzed 38 sex scandals dating back to 1974 and found that, “Only 39% of office holders won reelection after being accused of sexual harassment, infidelity, prostitution, etc.; It was revealed that he chose to resign or lose the election. Bill Clinton may have survived his affair with Monica Lewinsky in the 1990s (if you can call the most powerful person in the world preying on an intern an “infidelity”), but… It appears that America’s tolerance for wrongdoing has become a little less tolerant. “Since President Bill Clinton took office, the survival rate (of sex scandals) has declined precipitously. Of the 15 scandals since 2000, fewer officeholders who faced personal scandals were reelected. “Only three people (20%) said that,” the Post said. He added: “It is unclear why a once-ignored personal scandal has become an even bigger problem today.”
It is clear that things have changed again since then. This is partly due to the fact that trust in the American media has fallen to historic lows in recent years, a phenomenon linked to increasing polarization. “People don’t trust institutions or media sources that don’t align with them ideologically,” said Jay Van Bavel, a professor of neuroscience at New York University and an expert on the partisan brain. Many Trump supporters simply don’t believe Trump’s accusers, nor do they believe the media coverage of his actions.
Van Bavel says that even if people believe the allegations about a politician, “they are willing to forgive bad behavior and continue to vote for that person or party member because they don’t want the other party to take power.” A 2020 study he worked on with 14 other prominent researchers examined survey data since the 1970s and found for the first time that disdain for the other party is greater than love for one’s own party. Voting behavior now fundamentally depends on who you dislike the most.
Of course, President Trump is well aware of this. In 2016, the former president joked that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and not lose any voters.
But Trump is a special case. America’s moral standards may have loosened, but there are still lines that most politicians cannot cross.
Some of these lines were dictated by the cultural moment. Take, for example, Democratic Sen. Al Franken, who resigned in 2017 amid allegations of sexual misconduct. That was the beginning of #MeToo, and Franken probably would have survived the charges if it weren’t for the fact that he was a Democrat, said Jody, a political science professor at Hobart and William Smith College. Dean suggests. But “Democratic voters seem to be looking for purity.” And because “Franken had a sense of shame,” he resigned.
Confusing sex with taxpayer money makes scandals even harder to overcome. “If it’s a personal issue, Americans are more likely to leave it alone,” Dagnes said. “But if there’s some kind of official corruption involved, they’re less likely to do that.” Dagness said a New York Times investigation found that the woman with whom he had an affair with his fiancée’s daughter He’s referring to the recent incident of Anthony D’Esposito, a Republican who had a man on his pay scale.
“I expect D’Esposito to take a big hit in the polls,” Dagnes said. “This is not just a case of, ‘My fiancé and I were going through a really tough time,’ but a case of, ‘I’m going to be very brave and put my mistress and my fiancée’s daughter on the pay roll.'” America of taxpayers. That leaves voters feeling cheated.”
Gender also plays a role in how sex scandals are perceived, with women routinely being held to far higher standards than men. For example, Mr. Dagnes said that the right is trying hard to fabricate a scandal out of the fact that Kamala Harris, who was single at the time, had an affair with San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who was also single at the time. Pointed out. , 1990s. For some reason they think this makes her a “slut”. For example, many products are sold with the phrase “Joe and the Hoe Gotta Go.”
This does not mean that women, especially attractive young white women, are always held to higher standards than men. Nuzzi was put on administrative leave by New York Magazine following reports of his previously undisclosed relationship with RFK Jr., but was given an astonishing amount of punishment for apparent professional misconduct. I also received it. “Reporters have all sorts of compromising relationships with their sources,” Semaphore’s Ben Smith shrugged. “The most compromising thing of all, and the most common one, is the reporter’s loyalty to the person providing the information. That’s the real coin in this realm. Sex is hardly valued. .”
That being said, Nuzzi is being dragged into the quagmire by this incident more than RFK Jr., who is better known for his “wild impulses” and what he called “the demon of desire.” That’s for sure. Previous reports about Mr. Kennedy’s private life suggested that he detailed extramarital affairs with 37 women in a 2001 diary. Of course, that didn’t stop him from running for president. But so was the allegation that he once assaulted a babysitter, to which he responded: “I’m not a church boy.” Kennedy also didn’t let brainworms or dead bears get in the way of his political ambitions.
The fact that sex scandals are attracting less attention from voters seems to be related to the wider acceptance of outrageous political behavior. “Politicians can now say publicly that they support nuking Gaza (as Sen. Lindsey Graham and Rep. Greg Murphy have suggested),” Dean said. “Politicians are openly bloodthirsty and commit genocide. That’s an acceptable statement now. We live in a time where genocide is not a big scandal and climate change is not a big scandal. We may truly be beyond the point where individual actions attract the same amount of tension as they once did. We are witnessing a complete collapse of our sense of right and wrong. .”
