The extramarital sex lives of our presidents

Jeffrey St. Clair 

+ In the statement of facts used to justify Trump’s indictment, the prosecutors have resurrected the story of the Trump Tower doorman, who was paid $30,000 by AMI (the parent company of the National Inquirer) to stay silent about his allegation that Trump had an affair an affair with a former housekeeper.  He didn’t stay quiet very long, though. In 2018 Dino Sajudin issued a statement saying: “I can confirm that while working at Trump World Tower I was instructed not to criticize President Trump’s former housekeeper due to a prior relationship she had with President Trump “which produced a child.”

+ There’s some karma here. For years rightwing media has pushed the story that Bill Clinton has a “black love child” named Danney Williams, the biological issue of an alleged affair with a Little Rock prostitute named Bobbie Ann Williams.

+ In thinking about the extramarital sex lives of our presidents–Jefferson, Harding, FDR, Eisenhower, JFK, George HW Bush, Clinton, Trump–they all share a passionless, abrasive, rapine quality. None of these men were Romantics. They didn’t have “relationships” with women. They used them, sometimes brutally, and moved on. One of JFK’s longtime mistresses, Mimi Beardsley, a White House intern who the president cornered in Jackie’s powder room for the first of many rushed sexual encounters, said he never once in two years kissed her on the lips.

+ Warren Harding paid his mistress Carrie Phillips–a German spy who attempted to blackmail Harding into opposing US entry into World War I–$5000 a month to keep their 15-year-long affair secret.

+ One of the problems with the Trump presidency is that he apparently had a lot of sex before being elected (even if he had to pay for it eventually) and none afterwards. Not the optimal scenario for someone with the supreme command over 4,000 nuclear warheads.