Trump’s Epstein Scandal Turns Another Beltway Cliche on Its Head

Trump lost a civil suit brought by E. Jean Carroll after Trump denied sexually abusing her. The sexual abuse got Carroll a $5 million award and the defamatory denial got her $83 million. Nevertheless, I think we can all agree that committing sexual abuse is worse than telling a lie to cover it up. Another civil judgment against Trump, on which Trump owes in excess of $500 million, involved civil fraud in his business dealings, but in that instance the cover-up and the crime were the same.

The exception that proves the rule is Trump’s criminal conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records concerning his hush money payment to the porn actress Stormy Daniels. That was, I must admit, a classic example of CUWTC. Falsifying business records is worse (from a legal standpoint, anyway) than cheating on your wife, which isn’t a crime at all. And a hush-money payoff one month before a federal election that isn’t recorded as a campaign expenditure violates federal law—just ask Michael Cohen—though the feds never indicted Trump for that. So yes, in this instance the cover-up was worse than the alleged tawdry behavior it was meant to hide—so much worse that it made Trump a felon. On January 10 the judge in the case issued Trump an “unconditional discharge,” meaning the felony conviction sticks but the felon pays no fine and does no jail time. Now Trump is a president and a felon.

But as cover-ups go, even this one was pretty amateurish, and during the trial, very few of the damning facts were in dispute. Also, Trump didn’t succeed entirely in hiding his alleged affairs—The Wall Street Journal reported on one with the Playboy model Karen McDougal four days before Election Day, in a story that also mentioned Daniels. Trump denied he had affairs with either woman, but even his supporters didn’t believe him; in a 2018 poll, twice as many Trump voters said he had an affair with Daniels (29 percent) as said he didn’t (15 percent), with the rest declining to say (56 percent). They didn’t care: A 64 percent majority of Trump voters said the matter didn’t change their opinion of Trump one way or the other. Even Democrats didn’t care all that much. Indeed, almost one-third of all Hillary Clinton voters agreed that it didn’t change their (very low) opinion of Trump.