This is me with my daughter circa age 5 months. We were out brunching with her daddy as I wasn’t yet back to work full time. We were enjoying these peaceful moments of early parenting before our kid was really mobile or vocal and was generally chill and excited to be out and watching the happenings in public.
As a new mom, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I loved motherhood. I am an anxious person by nature, so before she arrived, I was certain I would be quite lousy at this. I was blessed with a very happy inquisitive child who made my early momming look so easy. My own mother was famously quoted as saying to my sister, “Who would have thought Ellen would be such a good mom?” And as poorly as it sounded when it came out of her mouth, I knew exactly what she meant because it was a sentiment I shared.
As much as I enjoyed early motherhood, I no longer knew my body. After spending 9 months as an occupied territory and the first 6 months postpartum as almost her sole food source, pretty much everything in my body hurt, exercise time was hard to find, and I was experiencing huge hormonal swings in my moods that I remember left me sobbing after an episode of Law and Order feeling sorry for a police officer who kidnapped a child because his wife couldn’t carry one. In short, I was a terrible wife. It wasn’t my fault because it wasn’t my focus. Early motherhood was all consuming, as it should be, and my relationship with my husband was, well, changed.
He never faltered. He let me treat him distantly. He let me snap at him from the stresses of extreme sleep deprivation. He held me when I cried. He cleaned my home, maintained our yard and car, shopped for and cooked our dinners. He was what he had been for the decade before her arrival, my constant.
On January 12, 2018, The Wall Street Journal broke the story that the president had purchased the silence of an adult film star with whom he had an affair in July 2006. The payment occurred in October 2016 to buy her silence before the now fateful election in November. If true, this affair would have happened when his youngest son Baron was merely 4 months old. The president stepped out on his wife for a fling with a porn star at a time when his new wife (they were married in 2005) was experiencing probably very similar body insecurity and hormonal swings as I was. Unfortunately, Melania didn’t have a quilt of a decades worth of memories with her husband to keep her warm as she built her relationship with her new child.
And yet, this story completely flew under the radar. It wasn’t even the most shocking news story of the week. It was a week where we learned of the “shithole countries” and when Oprah was floated as a potential candidate in 2020. People heard shithole on NPR for the first time and were certain they were experiencing the apocalypse. It was a week when some senators claimed they just heard shithouse which gave them plausible deniability to call other senators liars. It was a week where a false missile alarm in Hawaii sent natives and vacationers alike into 30 minutes of decidedly unrelaxed island living which revealed the administration has no plan for such a scenario.
So the president buying the silence of a porn star with campaign funds for an affair that happened while his wife was nurturing his newly born son wasn’t even a blip on the radar. Furthermore, white evangelicals are just giving him a pass, because of course they are. The son of Billy Graham takes to the air waves and says the president is a changed man from the man in 2006 or the man before the election with simply no supporting evidence in the public record. He said the president has a “concern for Christian values.” I guess it shouldn’t surprise me to see how far the evangelicals have gone in defense of the indefensible. The evangelicals lament the emptiness of pews each Sunday. But who would want to go share a seat with someone who can defend behavior like that listening to sermons from a man who would basically condone the bad behavior of the president from their pulpit? How far this group has sunken to advance their social conservative agenda dispensing of the need for a moral compass and family values in the leader who can deliver it to them. Baby Baron was 4 months old at the time. How can you as a Christian fully embrace a man who walks out on his wife in her most vulnerable early motherhood months for a fling with another woman who enriches herself by the depravity you claim to deplore?
Ironically, the nonpartisan watchdog group Common Cause, the same people who secured jail time for John Edwards after it came to light that he had used campaign funds to buy the silence of a woman with whom he had had an affair in the run up to his bid for the presidency, has filed another complaint with the Department of Justice and the Federal Election Commission this time against Donald Trump. The complaint alleges that the amount of money $130,000 vastly exceeds the minimum amount any individual can contribute to a campaign ($2,700) and the source of the money has not been revealed. By current law, any person contributing more than $200 to a campaign must be identified.
How far we have come as a country that this bombshell story didn’t even make a blip on the news radar. It seems every single day there is some detail of this administration more sordid than the last, some corruption in the heads of the federal agencies more inconceivable than the previous, some new racist or bigoted policy intended to increase the margins separating already marginalized populations. If you are news hound like me, at this point, you are practically numb. Nothing makes any sense and you pray for the day it will all end, but you know the scar tissue is there. You don’t know how this country you love will emerge from this period and realize the potential you thought it had in it. The stature of the nation you love has fallen so far on the world stage that you wonder what if any impact it will have in the largest issues that plague our planet like geopolitical instability in the middle east and the warming global climate. In fact, you are certain in this administration, they mean more harm to both than good.
Congressional leadership has shirked their responsibility to check the excesses of the executive branch because it means they craft and pass historically unpopular policies like sweeping changes to the tax code in almost total isolation. It means they can further their ultimate legislative agenda of dismantling the social safety net that protects millions of the most vulnerable Americans to give more money to the already ludicrously rich ones. They seem unconcerned about the regular scandal that engulfs the White House. They seem blind to the corruption, deaf to the excesses, complicit in their steady resolve to deny all of it. How far we have come in eroding the prestige of the office and our nation’s global influence. How far will we have to go whenever this crooked road ends?
#electionshaveconsequences