Leave to Rachel Maddow to break what may turn out to be the most lurid, if not the most game changing story of the election season. I’m referring to the possible revelation coming in the next two weeks that one of the candidates may have employed the services of the D.C. Madam.
It makes sense that the D.C. Madam’s lawyer would choose to bring this story to Maddow instead of a more traditional media outlet like The New York Times, especially as her work and reporting on the Flint water poisoning had such a major effect.
Ruling out Kasish and Sanders because I just don’t see either of them cheating on their wives, that leaves the most plausible candidates for paying for sex with a call girl as Trump or Cruz. (I doubt it’s Bill Clinton because I don’t see him as dealing with an intermediary to procure sex partners.)
Assume the list comes out and is what the lawyer for the now deceased DC Madam claims it is, I’d say there’s a 50% chance it’s either Trump or Cruz.
Here’s why I think it would be one or the other, and what the ramifications for each would be.
I can easily see Trump paying for sex with a no-strings-attached glamorous sex object. (One could say that he’s essentially paid for sex with his wives.)
If he’s the one on the list, I think he could simply say he was paying for a glamorous “escort” to accompany him to events on the DC party circuit. Many if not most of his fans wouldn’t buy that, but then they wouldn’t care. As a sop to the evangelicals, he could deny he even knew the DC Madam was even a madam. Many of his white male supporters would envy him and wish that they too could afford to hire a prostitute that looked like a movie star.
Some of his female supporters would see him having sex with a prostitute, assuming he was married at the time, as being preferable to his having sex with a “another woman”.
Now to Cruz, who I really hope is the guilty party because this would make him the biggest hypocrite who ever ran for president. It’s already been alleged by The National Enquirer that Cruz had affairs. Whether that’s true or not, or whether the affairs were really paid for sex with prostitutes, I can see him as being one of those at once sexually repressed and at once equally sexually obsessed hyper-religious men who pays for sex outside of marriage.
Not that I like Kasich, but it would derail the Cruz candidacy and open the door to Kasich in the next primaries.
The only thing I’d like to see better than Cruz having purchased the services of a female prostitute is if he paid for sex with a male prostitute.
Another version of this essay appeared on my blog, What I think and what do I think about it?