Populist Leadership And Playmates: An Odd Couple

Is the sky the limit for populist leaders? Can they get away with basically anything?

This is food for thought, as once again the U.S. President Donald Trump is facing a scandal. But he is not really facing it as nothing "sticks". According to this surfacing story by the New Yorker, Trump had yet another affair after his marriage to the contemporary First Lady Melania Trump.

Hugh Hefner, Playboy’s publisher, threw a pool party in the "honor" of Trump while Trump was filming an episode of the reality-television show “The Apprentice” at the Playboy Mansion. Naturally, dozens of Playmates were among the attendees of this 2006 party. Among them was Karen McDougal, once named "Playmate of the Year".

According to McDougal's account (and the New Yorker's reporting by Ronan Farrow), Trump “immediately took a liking to [to her], kept talking to [her]". So much so that the Playmate promotions executive said to McDougal: "Wow, he was all over you — I think you could be his next wife.”

One little detail: Trump had already gotten married some two years earlier; his son, Barron, was only a few months old. Nevertheless, Trump and McDougal began an affair, and McDougal documented the relationship like high school sweethearts do: in handwritten notes. Eight pages were provided to the New Yorker by John Crawford, a friend of McDougal’s.

Details of the relationship are spilling out from between the lines of the New Yorker story. But the real question is how come Trump himself was able to address the Conservative Political Action Conference almost simultaneously as the story came out. And did so completely unscathed.

McDougal's "coming out of the closet" was hardly the first one. Barely a few weeks ago the "Stormy Daniels affair" had erupted as this "adult movie star" claimed to have an affair with Trump in the mid-2000s.

Trump's private life is his own. But the really interesting part is how populist leaders are able get away with anything and everything — so far.