Tired of Donald Trump surviving each new outrage? Blame Bill Clinton

Time was when even a stray puff on a spliff could disqualify an American politician from becoming president. This explained Bill Clinton’s admission during the 1992 campaign that he had smoked rather than inhaled, a confession-not-confession, so quintessentially Clintonian, that helped keep him in the race.

Back then, the road to the White House was littered with the political corpses of candidates engulfed by scandal. Some were guilty of extramarital affairs, and had been impaled on their own penises. Even minor transgressions could be career-ending, since the behavioural bar was more like a delicately calibrated tripwire.

Back during the1988 campaign, Saturday Night Live had parodied the country’s pious streak with a skit featuring a Democratic presidential aspirant – the former Arizona governor, Bruce Babbitt – who shamefacedly admitted to going through the express checkout at the local supermarket with 14 items in his basket rather than the requisite 10.

In the age of Donald Trump, not even 91 criminal charges – which, remember, is 91 more than his predecessors combined – puts him out of the presidential running. On the contrary. Trump’s grand slam of criminal indictments in New York, Miami, Washington DC and now Atlanta – and all in the same calendar year – has solidified his lead in the Republican primary race. What explains the change?

That Clinton campaign in 1992 is a fitting place to start, because the then governor of Arkansas managed to weather a super-storm of scandal before the first primary contest in New Hampshire. His candidacy was imperilled not just by allegations of drug use during his student days at Oxford but of dodging the Vietnam draft while so many of his peers had been conscripted. There were also revelations from the Little Rock cocktail lounge singer Gennifer Flowers, a longtime paramour, who spoke of her affair with the smooth-talking southerner known in those days as “Slick Willie”.

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Ordinarily, just one of those scandals should have forced Clinton from the race. But as his campaign was imploding, he developed a survival manual which enabled him to become “the Comeback Kid”.

First, he portrayed himself as the target of a “Republican attack machine”. Second, he vowed to “fight like hell” and not to grant his opponents an easy victory. Third, he tried to shift attention away from his own problems to those of the voters of New Hampshire, nurturing a sense of shared victimhood in the process. Clinton protested that he was being singled out precisely because he was the candidate who most felt their pain. A year later, he was president.

All of this now finds an echo amid this flurry of indictments. Trump’s equivalent of the “Republican attack machine” are the Democratic prosecutors and Biden Justice Department which has handed down the indictments. “Fight like hell” are the exact words Trump used on January 6, 2021, as he urged his moshpit of MAGA diehards to march on the US Capitol. Trump has also used the charges against him as a bonding mechanism with his base.