“If Nixon’s resignation created the character culture in American politics, then Hart’s undoing marked the moment when political reporters ceased to care about almost anything else,” Matt Bai argued in a 2014 book on Hart. “By the 1990s, the cardinal objective of all political journalism had shifted from a focus on agendas to a focus on narrow notions of character, from illuminating worldviews to exposing falsehoods.”

Or so the story went.

But this narrative looks dubious these days. Friday morning, The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow published a long, detailed account of how Trump’s friend David Pecker, the head of the tabloid empire that includes The National Enquirer, killed the story of Trump’s affair with former Playboy model Karen McDougal by buying the rights. The Wall Street Journal previously reported on the Pecker’s move to suppress the story, but Farrow adds a great deal of detail, and obtained a contemporary written account by McDougal of her relationship with Trump, who was early in his marriage to his third wife, Melania.

And Farrow’s story comes the same week that Michael Cohen, Trump’s attorney, admitted he “facilitat[ed]” a payment to Stormy Daniels, a porn star who also alleged an affair with Trump, in exchange for her silence. Cohen had previously denied this; his vague statement did not really rule out Trump having been the source of the $130,000 payout, though it was clearly intended to give that impression. Friends of Daniels promptly told a celebrity news site that she felt this disclosure sprung her from her agreement to be silent.

There’s simply no plausible deniability that Trump is a serial philanderer—each of these stories has contemporaneous evidence and hush-money agreements, to say nothing of Trump’s history of infidelities. There’s also no reason to believe that the latest story will change much. In the old era, voters didn’t know about infidelity and what they didn’t know didn’t hurt them. In the interim, they knew, and it drove lots of politicians from office. And in the new era, voters know and they just don’t care.

If this is true, however, it didn’t start with Trump—he simply represents the apotheosis. Instead, it began with Clinton, who previously appeared to be the high-water mark of the middle period. Clinton was caught with his pants down (not quite literally, but close) having an affair with a White House intern. He lied about it, including to his closest friends and cabinet, but most consequentially to a grand jury. That led to Clinton’s impeachment in the House.

But a strange thing happened. Clinton wasn’t convicted by the Senate, and he didn’t resign. He didn’t show much shame at all. Oh sure, he apologized for lying, he bit his lower lip, the whole nine yards, but he more or less forged ahead. It worked. Voters knew—and it turned out they didn’t care. The highest approval rating of his presidency came around the time of his impeachment, and it stayed high, around 60 percent, for the rest of his term.