Further confirmation that The Very Stable Genius is devoid of character, not that it's going to matter to most post-Americans, particularly the MAGA crowd

There's no credible answer to the question Susan Wright poses twice in her latest Resurgent post other than that Donald Trump had extramarital sex with Stormy Daniels in 2006 - mere months after his third wife had given birth to their son - and almost assuredly concurrently with his ongoing affair with Karen McDougal (started at the same gold tournament at which he had the sex with Daniels).

And why did Rudy Giuliani want to put himself in the position he's now in by joining the VSG's legal team? Did he not see that he'd wind up acknowledging what he did on Hannity's show last night?

While appearing on Fox News’ Sean Hannity show on Wednesday night, Giuliani offered up that Trump had reimbursed the $130,000 paid by his longtime attorney/fixer, Michael Cohen to porn star, Stormy Daniels, through a series of payments.

This contradicts Trump’s claim from a month ago that he had no idea about the payoff.

“The president repaid it,’’ Giuliani told Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity.

Trump “didn’t know about the specifics of it, as far as I know. But he did know the general arrangement, that Michael would take care of things like this, like I take care of things like this with my clients,” Giuliani said. “I don’t burden them with every single thing that comes along. These are busy people.’’

But if there was no affair, why was she being paid, at all?

Giuliani later told the Washington Post that Trump’s repayments may have ended in 2017, or possibly even 2018.

“The president was always going to make sure he got it back, and enough money to pay the taxes,” Giuliani said. “There probably were other things of a personal nature that Michael took care of for which the president would have always trusted him as his lawyer . . . and that was paid back out of the rest of the money, and Michael earned a fee out of it.”

This is where you have to really suspend your disbelief for a moment, to just revel in the wonder of it all.

“It all” being how Giuliani will manage to not be fired by day’s end.

According to Giuliani, Trump only learned details of the Daniels payoff over the last couple of weeks, after the raid on Michael Cohen’s office and home by federal agents. Meanwhile, he’s been reimbursing Cohen for – something – for months.

Wouldn’t he have at least an elementary knowledge of what he’s paying that kind of money for? And again, why was Stormy Daniels getting paid, to begin with?

“I don’t know if he distinguished it from other things Cohen might have done for him during the campaign,” Giuliani said, adding, “He trusted Michael, and Michael trusted him.”

That’s a lousy, disjointed, irresponsible way to do business. And I don't trust anybody enough to just give them $130,000 and not ask why.

No wonder the guy has so many bankruptcies under his belt. 

The irony of it all is that post-Americans generally, and certainly the VSG's slavish devotees,  are so inured to moral turpitude that it wouldn't have mattered politically if this stuff had come out circa 2015 - 16:

The funny thing is, had Cohen not paid her, and had Daniels told her story, nothing would have come of it. We’ve seen that. Nearly 20 women stepped forward and voters blew it all off.

Look, none of this diminishes my being pleased with the following:

How many Republican presidential candidates over the years complained about the ban on drilling for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, known as ANWR? Trump signed legislation to begin the process of repealing the ban. Trump successfully appointed more federal appellate judges than any first-year president in history. Trump lowered the corporate tax rate, once the highest statutory rate in the industrialized world. Trump, as promised, eliminated or delayed numerous job-killing regulations. He approved the construction of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines.

The stock market has repeatedly reached all-time highs, and for the first time in years, polls show that Americans believe young peoples' lives will be better than their parents'. An April 2018 Gallup poll found 61 percent believe today's youth "will have a better life than their parents did," the highest mark since 2010. 

Excellent stuff, of course.

But two things about it:

1. Those achievements happened because actual conservatives pushed for them and convinced the VSG that he'd look like a "winner" if he supported them, and 
2. We'd therefore have achieved most if not all of them had we elected an actual conservative.

I realize that everything is a tradeoff in this fallen world. And I realize that the lowering of the bar got started with Bill Clinton (actually, John Kennedy, but, to his credit, he had a regard for presenting a dignified bearing in public, and understood that public awareness of what a cad he was would have undermined his policy-level ambitions). 

But Republicans, whose party was ostensibly the repository of the upholding of traditional values, went with this guy. 

Politically speaking, there is no high ground from which to mount a campaign to reverse this.

On the broader ideological level, Ben Shapiro's take is spot-on:

Culturally, this marks yet another odd moment for the conservative right that cannot stand cognitive dissonance. It’s one thing to say you like Trump’s policy and say that he is a rotten scoundrel with regard to women – that’s honest. It’s another thing to deny that he’s a rotten scoundrel with women by imitating the worst arguments of the Left circa 1998: “Everyone lies about sex! It’s just his personal life!” In that realm, the soul-suck of the conservative movement continues apace.

Yup.