Far be it from me to say “I told you so,” but the media’s spring offensive against President Donald Trump, based on his alleged sexual misbehavior as predicted in these pages four months ago (see “Putting down the Big Dog” in The New Criterion of January 2018) was launched within days of the 100th anniversary of the Germans’ Kaiserschlacht offensive in France which almost turned the tide of the First World War in their favor. Leading the charge on this occasion was one Stephanie “Stormy Daniels” Clifford, porn star, who told Anderson Cooper of 60 Minutes of a long-ago sexual encounter—it could hardly be said to rise to the dignity of an “affair”—with Mr. Trump and a subsequent payment to her of a considerable sum of money to keep silent about it. That agreement she no longer considered binding on the grounds that the President hadn’t signed it.

I apologize to my readers for bringing up such an unsavory subject, formerly thought to be beneath the dignity of the respectable media. There was a time within living memory when “the gentlemen of the press” would at least have asked themselves what would be the effect on the man’s wife and children before giving public credence to the allegations of such an obvious publicity-seeker. But the press, like just about everybody else these days (including at least the executive and legislative branches of the government), is fresh out of gentlemen, as its paying customers can hardly fail to have