Stormy Waters

Scandal piles on scandal for United States President Donald Trump

- Paul Thomas

On the face of it, the sex scandal swirling around President Donald Trump is a distraction – or light relief – from the far more serious allegations of collusion with Russian meddling in the presidential election and obstruction of the subsequent investigation. However, there’s a view that the fallout from Trump’s low-rent adultery poses a greater threat to his presidency than special counsel Robert Mueller’s embattled probe.

This is partly informed by doubts that Mueller will deliver the goods. For months, the conventional wisdom has been that he must be sitting on material explosive enough to blow Trump out of the White House. There was an element of wishful thinking behind this assumption, which the scrupulous discretion of Mueller’s team encouraged: they’re being so careful because they know where this is going.

That confidence evaporated somewhat after the New York Times published a list of four dozen questions that Mueller wants to ask Trump in the event the President consents to be interviewed. There were no bombshells, nothing to indicate Mueller has found a smoking gun. One’s instinct was that Trump would simply respond with a particularly florid counterblast of faux indignation, mendacity and whataboutism and challenge Mueller to find meaty morsels amongst the verbal spaghetti.