So here is where we are at, in July of 2019 in the United States of America. On Saturday the "president" of the United States' private, for-profit business is hosting a golf tournament in which the selling premise is golf with a stripper.
Don't worry: There will not be nudity at the tournament. It will be a tasteful affair where, if you are an early enrollee, you prepurchase whichever of the exotic danders from the hosting strip club, Shadow Cabaret, you prefer as your golf caddy for the day. The rest of the dancers will be sold in an "auction" the night before the tournament. Everybody goes golfing for the day and comes back to a celebratory party at the strip club, and it all benefits a children's charity, so technically Donald Trump can say he's hosting a charity event for children, and if you don't like auctioning off nude dancers to help children, then what kind of monster are you?
This is an old game at this point, but it's impossible to dodge. Let us pretend, for a moment, that, let's say, President Jimmy Carter owned a private club discovered to be hosting stripper golf caddy services. Let us imagine President Bill Clinton, during his first years in office, had a side business that dabbled in the occasional stripper auction. Let your mind wander over the response President Barack Obama, the subject of frothing outrage for the school he attended when he was but 6 years old, was as president making a few extra dollars pairing wealthy golfers with the nude dancers of their choosing.
The Republican Party would, to use the scientific term for these things, have gone apeshit. Sen. Lindsey Graham would literally die. He would literally keel over and die from the scandal of it all. Ol' Newt Gingrich would climb to the top of the Capitol dome and cling there, screeching, until staff dislodged him with a broom handle. All of the Republicans who had written extremely self-regarding books on morality and family values and What Is Wrong With These Kids Today would go on television crying so many Very Sincere tears that it could refill the Ogallala Aquifer with enough left over to supply Marco Rubio with a few bottles to spare, with all of them saying, How will we explain this to the children? and Sen. Mitch McConnell, who is to legislation what Jeffrey Epstein is to money management, would be very, very certain that this was not just an impeachable offense, but a threat to the very foundations of the republic.
The trick of modern Republicanism has always been to declare that everything non-Republicans did was either immoral or an outright crime, while everything Republicans themselves did was both moral and clearly allowed by the finer nuances of law. And Donald Trump botched that, for them, by being so all-embracingly skeevy and crooked that they cannot do it without looking like clowns. This has not dissuaded them, of course: If all it takes to fill the courts with a few more far-right saboteurs of democracy is a honk of the nose, then honking it shall be.
But if we ever escape from this moment, then we, and by we I primarily mean the ridiculous, asinine press that narrates these things, had better damn well remember never to take any Republican Party handwringing on any subject as anything more than the bald lying that it is. Honk your noses, jackasses. Honk away.