Before the 2016 election, Donald Trump’s legal team and his allies in the press went to extraordinary efforts to suppress stories linking the candidate to porn stars, yet it turns out that their diligence was unnecessary since Trump’s affinity for the world of smut has turned out to have a negligible political effect.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal revealed that in October 2016, Trump lawyer Michael Cohen arranged for $130,000 to be paid to porn actress Stephanie Clifford (who goes under the stage name Stormy Daniels) to keep quiet about an extramarital affair she had with Trump in 2006, a year into his marriage to Melania. On Tuesday, CNN reported that Fox News reporter Diana Falzone had filed a story that same October which provided most of the details in the Journal report, including confirmation of the sexual relationship between Clifford and Trump as well as emails about the non-disclosure settlement she reached with Trump’s lawyers. Falzone’s story was spiked by her superiors. This resembles a similar case from 2016, when the National Enquirer, whose owner David Pecker is a Trump supporter, paid a Playboy model $150,000 for rights to a story about an affair with Trump—and never published it.

In trying to muzzle these stories, Cohen, Fox News, and the National Enquirer were all acting on the assumption that Trump would take a political hit for tawdry sex scandals, especially if they involves a porn actress or Playboy model. Yet there is no reason to think this assumption is true. As the details of these stories eventually became public, they provoked only widespread indifference. “In any other administration, evidence that the president paid hush money to the star of ‘Good Will Humping’ during the election would be a scandal,” New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg noted. “In this one it has, so far, elicited a collective shrug.”

The silence on the left is easily explained by scandal overload. There are so many reasons to be outraged by Trump that an extramarital affair with a porn actress seems trivial, even within the realm of his sexual behavior; the allegation that Trump assaulted porn actress Jennifer Drake in 2006, for instance, is much more serious.

But the silence on the right is more perplexing. Trump is, in the words of National Review’s Kevin Williamson, “the porn president.” Or, as Times columnist Ross Douthat called Trump in 2016, “a Playboy for president.” Both sobriquets carry the ring of truth. Trump, a longtime friend of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, has lived the libertine lifestyle celebrated in pornography. But Williamson and Douthat’s angst doesn’t seem to be widely shared among their fellow defenders of traditional values.