Sex and the singular pol

When the histories of this warped campaign are constructed, when a lasting inventory of its every last ignominy is done, Donald Trump’s guarantee that all of his appendages measured up to greatness will be front, center and protuberant, evidence of the election’s vulgar endowment.

But there’s a more specific reason to dwell on that pants-dropping moment during a jaw-dropping debate. It broke with decades of political history, challenging the belief that one of the greatest threats to a presidential future was a profligate past.

John F. Kennedy admitted nothing. Bill Clinton denied everything.

From Gary Hart through Newt Gingrich, politicians raced to stay a step ahead of sexual scandal.

Or they were relished for their apparent immunity to it. Four years ago, the GOP chose a nominee who wore special religious undergarments.

Now they’re about to anoint one who, metaphorically speaking, wears a thong. Yes, I know, he promises fidelity to his third and current wife, the former model Melania, 46. But given his own age, 69, that’s less a triumph of conscience than a surrender to biology. The motor surely doesn’t roar or even purr the way it used to.

And he doesn’t disown or try to atone for any of his past. Trump orbited like a horny planet around the snickering sun of the Howard Stern show, whose light and heat he couldn’t resist. And he braided proclamations of sexual potency with boasts of entrepreneurial prowess so tightly that they’re inseparable.

His carnal conquests are the cornerstone of his can-do braggadocio. (I have always seized the best and the most, and this country deserves no less. I score, and so should you.) His slogan might as well be Get America Laid Again.

Of the many paradigms that his candidacy has exploded and pieties it has torched, few stand out like the pantomime of erotic sobriety that other politicians were routinely asked to perform, the garb of traditional, conventional morality that they were required to don.

It would be tempting to consider this a kind of sex-positive progress — the twilight of excessive prudishness and the dawn of grown-up honesty — were it not for a few galling details and nagging questions.

For obvious starters, a woman would never get away with anything in the remote vicinity of this. Neither, in a political context, would a black man.

In fact a Democratic version of Trump is hard to imagine: He would play too neatly into caricatures of Democrats as godless assassins of family values. The party’s leaders and voters would be too defensive to go down a road as unabashedly randy as Trump’s. That Republicans are the ones traveling it is as inevitable as it is hypocritical. It’s a Nixon-in-China dynamic, but with less Communism and more cleavage.

And Trump, crucially, isn’t just any libertine. He’s a throwback to an era and ethic of big suits, paneled boardrooms, thick billfolds and buxom arm candy. In the context of the pansexual, gender-fluid, Molly-popping millennials who make conservatives shudder, he’s a musky whiff of nostalgia, a stubborn ember of patriarchy, a vintage stripe of sybarite. He’s promiscuity steeped in chauvinism and misogyny: more old-fashioned, and more comforting.

Or maybe he’s just definitive proof that moral posturing from a politician whose history sends a different message is the new normal, so familiar at this point that it’s greeted with a knowing shrug.

The politician’s prior conduct is irrelevant if his present vows are in line with his target audience’s demands, and Trump dutifully obliged Republican primary voters with a socially conservative makeover. He was negative on abortion, grudging on gay marriage, gaga for Antonin Scalia. That was reassurance enough for them to focus on the America-first, anti-immigrant, anti-establishment crux of his pitch and core of his appeal.

But his sexual exploits are the heart, soul and loins of his brand. And the rule-breaking shock of that was reflected in Ted Cruz’s incredulous rant as Indiana voters headed to the polls.

“Donald Trump is a serial philanderer,” Cruz reminded the world, his voice orotund with outrage. “He is proud of being a serial philanderer.”

Cruz beseeched Americans to think about what that would mean if Trump managed to go all the way. “The president of the United States talks about how great it is to commit adultery, how proud he is, describes his battles with venereal disease as his own personal Vietnam,” he said.

Truly. Trump once told Stern that his effort to avoid sexually transmitted diseases was his personal Vietnam, an analogy that I’d urge the veterans whom Trump praises so loudly and courts so ardently to reflect on. It’s a good glimpse into his inability to treat even the horrors and sacrifices of war with gravity or dignity.

Jimmy Carter must be flabbergasted. Americans nearly fainted when he told Playboy magazine back in 1976 that he’d “looked on a lot of women with lust” and “committed adultery in my heart many times.”

Bill Clinton must be aghast. Some of the same Republicans who are now embracing Trump turned his whole political career into a game of cad-and-mouse.

And a gallery of other politicians must be flummoxed. Some of them had enormous gifts. Some had excellent ideas. But because they couldn’t sell a background of sufficient purity, they watched lesser leaders with cleaner slates rise in their stead.

Now Trump rises, with a dirty slate and some absurd ideas, and probably not because voters have truly abandoned their sexually censorious ways. No, a disruption-hungry group of them has decided to equate his hypersexed chatter with politically incorrect bluntness. And his burlesque of virility suits an epoch of insecurity. He’s running on pheromones.

This story was originally published May 10, 2016 at 5:36 PM with the headline "Sex and the singular pol."