It's not just the 200th birthday of Frederick Douglass, "someone who has done a terrific job that is being recognized by more and more people." Today is also Valentine's Day, the festival of love that everyone loves to say they hate. To celebrate, we've examined the romance between the president and First Lady. But what about the one between the president and the porn star to whom he allegedly paid $130,000 in hush money to cover up an affair they had shortly after his wife gave birth to his child?

Yes, Stormy Daniels is back in the news thanks to Donald Trump's longtime lawyer, the certified brain genius known as Michael Cohen. The Trump Organization attorney and associate of the 2016 Trump campaign was last seen getting himself neck deep in the Russia probe thanks to his work with Felix Sater, a Russian-born operator with alleged connections to the mob and Russian oligarchs, on a deal to bring a Trump property to Moscow. At one point, Cohen was emailing the Kremlin's generic press account (think: press@kremlin.ru) asking Vladimir Putin lieutenant Dmitry Peskov for help closing the deal.

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Anyway, Cohen got on the horn with The New York Times this week and let them know that Trump had nothing to do with the $130,000 payment made to the porn star with whom Trump allegedly had an affair.

Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, said on Tuesday that he had paid $130,000 out of his own pocket to a pornographic-film actress who had once claimed to have had an affair with Mr. Trump. In the most detailed explanation of the 2016 payment made to the actress, Stephanie Clifford, Mr. Cohen, who worked as a counsel to the Trump Organization for more than a decade, said he was not reimbursed for the payment.

“Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly,” Mr. Cohen said in a statement to The New York Times. “The payment to Ms. Clifford was lawful, and was not a campaign contribution or a campaign expenditure by anyone.”

Yes, because lawyers regularly make payments out of their own pockets on their clients' behalf without their knowledge, and with no expectation of being reimbursed. This is obviously absurd, if only because, as the Times reminds us, the official Trumpworld line is that the affair never happened at all:

Mr. Cohen has previously said that Mr. Trump has denied an affair with Ms. Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels. She has said the affair took place soon after Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania, gave birth to the couple’s son, Barron.

So what, pray tell, did Cohen pay Daniels $130,000 for? SAT prep? Did they co-produce a movie? The admission that there was a payoff is essentially an admission there was an affair. That is further a de facto admission that Trump and his allies may have lied when they said the affair never happened. But as usual, we had to dig through every layer of mendacity—thanks to great work from The Wall Street Journal and now the Times—before we got here.

It seems insufficient at this point to turn to that old reliable question: What if Obama did this? Pundits now love to draw on the Tan Suit Fiasco as an illustration of the changing standards for presidential scandals, and that's fine. But it doesn't quite do things justice. If Barack Obama had had an affair, Republicans would likely have tried to impeach him. If it had been with a porn star, they might have tried to arrest him. And if he'd paid her $130,000 in hush money, they may well have burned down the White House.

We know this because when Bill Clinton, the last Democrat who dared enter the White House, had an affair with an intern, Republicans treated it like the next Watergate. There are legitimate questions about the accusations made against Clinton by multiple women, and about the power dynamic in play between him and Monica Lewinsky—particularly in light of the #MeToo movement. But conservatives weren't truly concerned with any of that at the time: They were determined to impeach Clinton for something.

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They settled on obstruction of justice on the pretense that Clinton lied to the American people about the Lewinsky affair—which he did. But wait, what was that passage before?

That is further a de facto admission that Trump and his allies may have lied when they said the affair never happened.

So Trump may have lied to the American people about an affair he had? No prizes will be awarded for guessing whether this development will garner similar outrage among conservatives. After all, Evangelical leaders have already offered Trump a sex "mulligan," which must come from the Book of Hypokrites. We can expect to hear that Trump's romp doesn't matter because it took place before he took office. Never mind that the hush money payoff took place less than a month before the 2016 election because Daniels was reportedly poised to share her story publicly.

It is truly amazing to watch the Stormy Daniels controversy fade into the all-encompassing scandalous fog of this administration when Obama used to catch shit for insufficiently salutatory salutes. It's almost like the norms around political behavior have been drastically eroded because shame is no longer an effective tool for enforcing acceptable behavior in our society.

Update (1:48 p.m.): And now the AP is reporting that Daniels and her team believe Cohen violated the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) they reached when Cohen made it known he made the payment. Gina Rodriguez, Daniels' manager, says she will now talk about her alleged affair with Trump publicly. Another 3D-chess maneuver from Team Trump—the rest of us are just playing checkers.



Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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