Can Trump survive a Stormy sex scandal? Just ask Bill Clinton

Hurricane Stormy swept through Lower Manhattan this week, the kind of once-in-a-generation freak event that now seems to happen in US politics every couple of days. Crazy has become America’s permanent weather system. So while at one level it feels astounding that a former porn star, Stormy Daniels, is testifying against a former president, Donald Trump, on another it feels run-of-the-mill.

Presidential politics went tabloid in the early 1990s, when a muckraking supermarket trash sheet published allegations that the then governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, had an extramarital affair with a cabaret singer, Gennifer Flowers – a revelation that looked like it would scupper his hopes of reaching the White House.

“What could possibly go wrong?” Donald Trump and former porn actress Stormy Daniels. Credit: Illustration: Marija Ercegovac

An irony of the first criminal trial against a sitting or former US president is that it centres on what a supermarket tabloid did not publish, and the $130,000 hush money payment that Trump allegedly paid Stormy Daniels to make the story go away. When the adult film star took the stand to testify this week, the court proceedings sounded how that article might have read.

The story of their alleged 2006 tryst in a hotel suite in Lake Tahoe began with that classic narrative device, a sliding-doors moment. “Eff no,” was the then 27-year-old actress’s reaction when one of Trump’s aides invited her to dine with the billionaire host of The Apprentice. Her publicist, however, urged her to go, with the now immortal line: “What could possibly go wrong?”

Soon Trump was greeting her at the door of his suite dressed in silk pyjamas, and engaging in pre-pillow talk that was surprisingly policy-centric. Evidently, he wanted to learn more about employment practices in the porn industry, including health insurance and residuals (which are the financial compensations paid to actors when their work is re-run over and over on cable and streaming devices, a topic which seems especially germane now given how this story is dominating the news cycle).

Revelations of Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky did not prove politically terminal.Credit: The New York Times

Daniels’ testimony was packed with embarrassing details. “You remind me of my daughter,” the reality TV star, Trump, reportedly said, adding to the compendium of cringeworthy quotes about Ivanka Trump (which already includes his divulgence on The View in 2006 – the same year he met Daniels – that “if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her”). She also told of how, with a rolled up magazine, she swatted Trump “on the butt”. “Honeybunch” Trump called her when they spoke afterwards on the phone. “Horseface” is how he describes her now.

As she hurriedly described their prophylactic-free sex, she veered towards the pornographic. “There were some things that should have been left unsaid,” said Judge Juan Merchan, after Trump’s legal team called for a mistrial based on her remarks about consent and condom use which they claimed were prejudicial. These were parental guidance proceedings.

All this brought flashbacks of a famed press conference Gennifer Flowers held in 1992, in the weeks running up to the all-important New Hampshire primary, in which she was asked by a plant from the Howard Stern radio show masquerading as a journalist: “Did Governor Clinton use a condom?” In assessing the political fallout from the explosive trial testimony, it is worth recalling what happened next. The Flowers story did not finish Clinton. In the New Hampshire primary he achieved a creditable second place and memorably crowned himself “the comeback kid”.

Likewise during the Clinton presidency, the revelations of his affair with Monica Lewinsky did not prove politically terminal. When Republicans in Congress impeached him, Democrats accused them of mounting an over-zealous witch-hunt. Among Democratic voters, Clinton’s approval ratings soared to 92 per cent.

Clinton accustomed the American people to political scandal. Just as crucially, he reframed the fundamental question at the heart of each controversy in a way that emphasised the partisan over the personal. Not “who do you believe?” but rather “whose side are you on?”

A legacy of the Clinton years was that it made it easier for Donald Trump to become president in 2016, and harder for his wife, Hillary. Indeed, when the Access Hollywood tape emerged, in which Trump boasted of grabbing women by their genitalia, he claimed that he had heard Bill Clinton say worse things on the golf course.

I am not suggesting that Trump will suffer no collateral damage from Stormy Daniels’ testimony. Many wavering voters are fed up with chaos. Polling suggests a guilty verdict would damage his electoral chances. However, a presidential candidate who remained politically viable after inciting an insurrection on January 6 can obviously withstand an embarrassing day or two in court. His supporters view this trial through a partisan lens. As Trump seeks to become “the comeback kid” of 2024, for them is it not a question of who do you believe but rather whose side are you on?

Nick Bryant, a former BBC Washington, is the author of the forthcoming book, The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict With Itself.