Of Course Trump’s Name Is On The List - The Smarmy Sexual Affairs Of The Nation's Capital

Of course Donald Trump's name is on the Jeffrey Epstein list as well as a hundred others of the Washington establishment; and of course that is why the President will never release it. There is nothing new or surprising about the sexual affairs of state, the basic perk of office, the sine qua non of political life.  Why would one get into politics if there were not some reward?

 

The list of philanderers, adulterers, cheats, and cads is endless, from the high-end JFK who bedded starlets and spies, to the low-end LBJ who used the Secret Service to pimp for him, an easy job because the busy President simply wanted sex, any sex, as often as an African man for whom, to paraphrase the old Italian adage, 'Una giornata senza sesso è come una giornata senza sole'. 

Former Governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, enjoyed weekend trysts with call girls in the honeymoon suite of the Mayflower.  When outed and asked why, he said he said as a busy man doing the nation's business, he had no time for love. He was dunned out of office for his indiscretions, but insisted that he had done no wrong. 

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, an important French politician in line for the presidency, outed for having orgiastic sex with prostitutes at all night Paris parties. 'How was I to know they were prostitutes?', he replied. 'All women look the same with their clothes off'. The glorious chutzpah of the man!

Every President in US history with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter who admitted that he lusted after women but never acted on his desires has had affairs.  Even the jowly, humorless Richard Nixon had his cinq a septs and joined the Roosevelts, Taft, and old, pinched, sour Calvin Coolidge in infidelity. 

'Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac', said Henry Kissinger, an elixir for the men who have it and for the women who want it.  Former French Presidents Sarkozy and Mitterrand were not shy about their affairs.  Sarkozy's lover had a bedchamber in the Elysees Palace, and Mitterrand's mistress and illegitimate daughter stood grieving by his grave along with his wife and children.

American politicians have tried to hide their peccadilloes - Senator John Edwards tapped a close aide to claim paternity of his bastard child, the Governor of North Carolina who went on a fugue to Buenos Aires to join his Argentine lover, said he had been hiking the Appalachian Trail.  Newt Gingrich left his wife to die of cancer in a Washington hospital while he cavorted with his paramour.  

Televangelists like Jimmy Swaggart bawled on prime time television, begging for forgiveness for his sexual wanderings, and promising to return to the righteous, holy path of Jesus; and no sooner did the wailing and rending of garments pass, then he was found in flagrante delicto with an Arkansas chippie.  Incorrigible, reprehensible for a man of God perhaps, but no man can resist the enticements of a beautiful young woman. 

Tolstoy's character Konstantin Levin in Anna Karenina considers God's supreme irony for having created man as an intelligent, insightful, creative being; and then after granting him a few mere decades of life, consigns him for all eternity in the cold, hard ground of the steppes. 

The irony is not lost on older men who have sexual desire till their last, dying breath; but are given the same few decades to satisfy it.  Love with a younger woman is epiphanic.  As the Coleman Silk character in Phillip Roth's The Human Stain says about his love affair with a woman thirty years his junior, 'Granted, she's not my first love. Granted, she's not my great love. But she is sure as hell my last love. Doesn't that count for something?”

 

So sexual meandering is Washington's perfect storm - men of power, older men, in the heady atmosphere of privilege and renown cannot possibly resist blandishment and seduction.  Men like Donald Trump who as a young real estate mogul enjoyed every last bit of the New York sexual free-for-all, partying like a trooper, loving sequins, tinsel, and faux diamonds, squiring the city's most desirable women and loving its libertine, anything-goes life, never thought much about consequences.  Rich men didn't have to. 

There have been high-class call girl rings in Washington since the beginning.  While Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton managed their own sexual affairs - beautiful mulatto slave women were there for the having - it wasn't long before the business of selling sexual favors became a growing concern. 

The famous Madame X whose sexual empire was a Fortune 500-worthy enterprise, ran a successful high-end bordello for Washington's power brokers, and her lists which were made public were exhaustive.  Politicians went scurrying for cover during the scandal, but America forgives easily, and with heartfelt apologies, they were forgiven, pardoned, and welcomed back. 

Now, God only knows what awful things Jeffery Epstein and his wife arranged for their friends - allegations of child sexual abuse, pornography, sexual slavery, and worse have been alleged and some proven; and Epstein was likely murdered in prison to keep his mouth shut; but things sexual, like all things, occur on a bell curve.  There are minor peccadilloes at one asymptote, horrific happenings at the other, with most indiscretions falling under the big curve - nothing exceptional, weekends in theShenandoah, 'working late' rendezvous, lazy indiscretions at best.  

 

Because Epstein and Ghislaine were found guilty of the worst sexual doings imaginable, and many of Washington's in-crowd were likely implicated, his list was of great interest.  Especially in Puritan, censorious, sexually bottled-up America there are lines that cannot be crossed.  A blind eye might be turned when it comes to Washington's sexual dalliances, but not this. 

Of course whatever happened behind closed doors at the Epsteins' is nothing compared to the pedophilia and child sexual abuse by Catholic priests - thousands of them, destroying all bonds of trust and honor, brutalized young boys throughout the United States.  Epstein could not have imagined such miserable, unforgiveable behavior. 

History is nothing more than a series of repetitive, predictable cycles; and so the Nation's Capital will go back to its old libertine ways. It will take more than Jeffrey Epstein to close down the houses of Madame X or the after-hours parties on Bimini. Just because of some bad apples, no reason to put on chastity belts. 

Although sexual indiscretion, infidelity, and wandering are as American as apple pie, there is something disgusting about all this. Not only has Congress shown itself to be a base, venal, gross institution, capable of little in the nation's interest and everything in re-election; but its smarmy, bottom-feeding, disgusting sexual behavior begs for censure.  Taken as a whole, a body, an institution of governance, it gives democracy a bad name. T'row da bums out!

Many non-Catholics ask believers why, after all the horrible revelations of sexual deviance and abuse, they still are faithful to the Church.  Priests are men, they say, as corruptible and contemptible as any; but the Church remains above it all, still divinely inspired, with the foundational logic of Athanasius, Augustine, and Aquinas, and the humanity and selflessness of the saints. 

'Democracy is the worst system of governance on earth', Winston Churchill once said, 'except for all the others', and so we have to put up with it.  It takes the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world to rein in the worst excesses of its representatives, but after all, they are only men.