The May 31, 2024 episode of Washington Week With the Atlantic raised the question: Why were Republicans so obsessed with Bill Clinton’s adulterous affair with Monica Lewinsky but are furiously supporting Donald Trump’s tryst with Stormy Daniels?   

Moderator Jeffrey Goldberg opened with: “Donald Trump isn’t a convicted felon yet. Sorry to be pedantic here, but he technically acquires that status only at sentencing come July 11th. 

“But a New York jury has spoken, finding him guilty of engaging in a financial scheme to keep the porn star, Stormy Daniels, quiet about their sexual encounter, one that occurred shortly after Trump’s wife gave birth to their son.

“Trump, in addition to this guilty verdict, was recently found liable for sexual abuse in a civil case. In total, more than 25 women have accused him of sexual assault and sexual harassment. 

Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels

“The reaction of the Republican Party leaders to the verdict was to rally around Trump. Evangelical leaders, including Franklin Graham, also doubled down on their support. Graham, writing on X, said, ‘What we saw today has never happened before, and I think for the majority of Americans, it raises questions about whether our legal system can be trusted….’

“[In] the 1990s…. when Bill Clinton was president and Republicans were outraged and many other people were legitimately outraged that the president of the United States was having sexual relations with a White House intern. Explain to us, if you can, the different dynamics here, the party of family values.”

McKay Coppins, staff writer at the Atlantic: “Well, Donald Trump has fundamentally changed the way the Republican party, the conservative movement, think about morality and public leadership.

“Something that I always think about when issues like this come up is that before Donald Trump came on the scene, I can’t remember, it was 2013, 2014, if you surveyed Republican voters and asked them how important is public — it is personal morality in an elected leader to you.

“Something like two-thirds of them would say it’s very important, that I would rather have somebody of high moral character than somebody with policies I agree with.

“A couple years into the Trump presidency, that had flipped and it was only a third of voters said that that was the case, if you were a Republican.

McKay Coppins

“And it just shows kind of the sea change in evangelical ethics and social conservative ethics. I think a lot of conservatives now, because of negative partisanship and polarization….they want to, you know, line up with their team right?

“They want to be with their guy, and then they kind of create a moral architecture around being able to do that. 

“But, you know, [he] cheated on his wife with a porn star, and then….is now been convicted of committing fraud to cover it up.

“[It’s] almost a cliché to say if a Democrat had done that, we know what we would be hearing from social conservatives and evangelicals, but they want Donald Trump to be elected.

“And so they are pivoting away from the specifics of the case and the underlying facts of the case to [say] this is a rigged system, this is a legal persecution, Donald Trump is a victim, and we need to back him because they’re going to come after us next.”

There is unquestionably a great deal of truth in the foregoing. But there is also a great deal of truth in a statement that was not made:

Republicans’ professed outrage at Bill Clinton’s infidelities and their furious defense of those by Donald Trump actually share a common link.

In 1981, President Ronald Reagan, once the poster boy for Republican values, best described the current mindset of the Republican party. Ironically enough, at the time, he was assailing the leaders of the Soviet Union:

“The only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat.”

Ronald Reagan

In January, 1998, when the public learned of President Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, Republicans gushed moral outrage.

They portrayed Lewinsky—who had had a seven-year extramarital affair with her former high school drama instructor and flashed her thong at Clinton, signaling her readiness for an affair—as a Vestal Virgin, and Clinton as Grigori Rasputin incarnate.

By 1992, Republicans had come to regard the White House as theirs by Divine Right. Anyone who ran against them automatically became—for them—a traitor. And anyone who won against them became—for them—an usurper. 

Thus, Clinton’s true “crime” had been defeating, first, President George H.W. Bush, in 1992, and then Kansas Senator Bob Dole, in 1996. 

Fast-forward to the May 30 conviction of Donald Trump on 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal a sexual tryst with porn “star” Stormy Daniels.

Suddenly, Republicans aim their cries of moral outrage not at Trump but at Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, at President Joseph Biden, at the criminal justice system itself.

The reason: They see Trump as their best chance for not simply reclaiming the White House but for establishing a permanent Right-wing dictatorship.