Sarah Palin dismissed the Stormy Daniels saga on Thursday as a giant distraction, telling an audience of super PAC donors that sexual affairs between consenting adults have little bearing on leaders’ fitness for office.
The former Alaska Governor and onetime Republican vice-presidential nominee described the daily drumbeat of the all-consuming Donald Trump sex scandal as a ploy by the president’s ‘unhinged’ opponents to tie him up in knots so he can’t be successful.
Conservatives have traditionally been the moral finger-waggers of American politics, most famously raking former President Bill Clinton over the coals for a series of Lothario episodes including Oval Office liaisons with then-White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
Sarah Palin dismissed the Stormy Daniels saga entire on Thursday, suggesting during a super PAC fundraiser at President Donald Trump’s Washington, D.C. hotel that presidential affairs are no big deal
Daniels, a pornographic film star, says she bedded the president in 2006 and 2007, a claim Trump denies
Palin, a former vice presidential nominee, hinted that Bill Clinton’s conquest of White House intern Monica Lewinsky was worse than Trump’s affair with Daniels because the latter case involved consenting adults who were on equal footing
Palin seemed to concede during a speech at Trump’s hotel near the White House that porn star Stormy Daniels’ claim to have bedded the president in 2006 and 2007 may be true.
But the scandal’s power, she said, stems from the fact that for out-of-power Democrats, Trump’s political base is ‘their existential threat.’
‘Their tactic is to divide us,’ she said, ‘and to divide, they distract.’
‘The real threat isn’t if a private citizen, you know, messed around, had an affair or whatever with a consenting grown-up years and years ago,’ Palin declared as about 250 fans whooped and clapped without acknowledging the irony hanging in the air.
‘You know, we’ve had men in office – literally in the office! – do much worse,’ she added, in an unmistakable jab at Clinton.
Trump, shown Thursday night during a rally in Indiana, has found the Daniels saga a massive distraction – which, Palin says, is why Democrats are eager to keep the scandal burning
Daniels is embroiled in a legal battle to free herself from a nondisclosure agreement she signed in 2016 but has already violated repeatedly
Clinton was impeached for lying under oath in Grand Jury testimony about his affair with Lewinsky, some of which was conducted in rooms adjacent to the Oval Office
The Lewinsky story captured Americans’ attention in the late 1990s as the Clinton presidency hung by a thread
Palin, whose commentary on sexual mores appeared to be a departure from her written notes, quickly shifted gears to insist that she wasn’t condoning extramarital wanderings.
‘I don’t excuse any of that,’ she said. ‘I’m just saying – repeating what some neanderthals still say: “Oh, boys will be boys”.’
‘Oh yeah? Boys will be boys, and that’s why they shouldn’t run the world.’
Palin said Democrats’ tactic The tactic, friends, is to wear you down with these distractions and scandal after scandal, and compound it all, hoping you just give up and wave the white flag of surrender and say it’s just too much.