Gennifer Flowers, Donald Trump and the Making of the Sex-Scandal Culture
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Version 0 of 1. On Saturday, Donald Trump once again used his Twitter feed to kick up a news microcycle when he tweeted that if Mark Cuban, a prominent Hillary Clinton supporter and occasional Trump nemesis, was going to attend the debate, “perhaps I will put Gennifer Flowers right alongside of him!” Trump’s campaign was quick to clarify that he was just making a point, but by merely mentioning the idea, Trump managed to reopen a chapter of ancient Clinton history that has played a mercifully small role in an otherwise sordid election cycle. Back in 1992, even the press seemed embarrassed by its excessive interest in the subject of Flowers, who sold The Star tabloid the story of her affair with Bill Clinton. (He denied it at the time, then later confirmed, under oath, that they had had sex.) When the story first broke, much of the reporting was meta-coverage, the press wringing its hands over a relatively new tabloidization of the news. It’s interesting in a time-capsule sense, reflecting a media that was more impressed with itself than it is today and, in its frequent references to “bimbos,” more sexist. Jeffrey Frank, writing in The Washington Post shortly after the Flowers story emerged, bemoaned the “Bimbonic Plague” of scandals. He questioned the motives of women like Flowers and Jessica Hahn, who accused the televangelist Jim Bakker of sexually assaulting her, for exploiting themselves in the media — Hahn posed for Playboy — while defending themselves from the very charge that they were bimbos. (“So let’s start with the fact that I am not a bimbo,” Hahn told Playboy.) Frank tried to answer the question of how it was that journalism had come to such a crisis point. “Is The National Enquirer ready to take its place beside the National Review in our national debates?” he asked. Casting about for historical precedent, he brought up another big tabloid story that he argued had propelled the infidelities of the powerful into more respectable journalistic quarters: Donald Trump’s extramarital affair with Marla Maples, who famously sparred with Trump’s first wife, Ivana, on the ski slopes of Aspen, Colo. In 1990, The New York Post sold 40,000 additional copies with a front-page story about Maples and Trump, in which an unnamed friend of Maples’s says she proclaimed Trump (in what became the famous headline) “the best sex I ever had.” Diane Sawyer also interviewed Maples on “Prime Time Live,” and Maples fervently denied ever saying such a thing; she could not imagine, she told Sawyer, what kind of so-called friend could plant the story and live with it. In that story, and in so many others, Trump reaped a kind of glory from even the most tawdry of headlines, while the women in his life, so much collateral damage, inevitably suffered for them. Trump has always been more of an enabler than a victim of the kind of tabloidized media frenzy that his Flowers tweet, however briefly, stirred — he understands that the rumor mill is what you make of it. In 1992, he told a columnist for The Boston Globe that Flowers “is not a good woman.” Apparently the good kind of woman tells The Post (through unnamed surrogates) that her married boyfriend provided the best sex she has ever had; she does not tape phone conversations between them, as Flowers did with Clinton, in an effort to prove herself someone of worth. This presidential election cycle, for all its crassness, has been spared the drama of some new revelation of consensual, extramarital sex. If Trump’s history paved the way for moralistic media coverage of those kinds of affairs, he seems now to be neutralizing these stories as a force. His infidelity is such old news it hardly seems of interest even to religious conservatives. That is mostly likely because of his origins in the public eye as a celebrity, not as a politician; he has been held to a different moral standard, which is to say pretty much none at all. What trips up straying politicians, most often, is their perceived need to embody some symbolic moral rectitude. It is the cover-ups, as much as the infidelities, that do them in, creating either vengeful jilted exes or unseemly money trails. Going forward, other celebrities may well follow Trump’s lead and jump into politics (the water is warm, Kanye). And they will probably continue, paradoxically, to have the moral advantage over traditional politicians, because no one expects them to contort themselves into images of virtue. Or maybe celebrities who enter the political ring will change forever what we actually expect of traditional politicians. It is safe to say that following the possibility of a President Trump, that bar has most likely been lowered for good. |