‘The US lost its shame muscle’: why sex no longer scandalizes in politics

Earlier this year, at Donald Trump's hush-money trial, adult film star Stormy Daniels told jurors how at age 27, she met a 60-year-old Trump, whose wife had only recently given birth to their son, for what she thought was dinner. She arrived to find him in satin pyjamas and, during an encounter that included very "brief" sex, the business magnate told Daniels that she reminded him of his daughter, Ivanka.

I'm not dragging all this up again to put you off your dinner. I'm bringing it up to remind you that, while all these sordid details made headlines and generated jokes on late-night talkshows, they didn't move the needle with Trump's voters at all. His base, which includes evangelical Christians, simply didn't care. Nor were they bothered about Trump's association with Mark Robinson, the disgraced Republican candidate running to be North Carolina's next governor who was allegedly once active on a porn forum called Nude Africa where he boasted about being a "perv".

The 2024 US elections may have provided a constant stream of revelations ranging from the mildly salacious to the downright disturbing. It's not just Trump: there's the recent reports of New York magazine star reporter Olivia Nuzzi having a personal relationship with Robert F Kennedy Jr during his presidential run and sitting representative Matt Gaetz being investigated for human trafficking and paying for sex with minors. Yet despite the many lurid and often unpleasant details, political sex scandals just don't seem to have much bite anymore.

"We have lost our shame muscle in the United States," says Dr Alison Dagnes, professor of the political science department at Shippensburg University. She argues that because politicians aren't shamed into retiring from public life, details of these scandals remain mostly rumors and fade from the public memory. "Certain politicians are realizing that if you don't apologize for something, then nobody can use it against you again. For those who are shameless, that is a very effective way to get through life."

It hasn't always been like this. Being embroiled in a sex scandal used to swing an election or destroy a candidate. In 1987, Gary Hart was the presumed Democratic presidential candidate - until reports of "womanizing" and being caught in an affair derailed his campaign. In 2008, North Carolina senator John Edwards, a star in the Democratic party, was on a path to the presidency until he was caught covering up an extramarital affair that resulted in a child. His career imploded and he vanished from public life.

Clearly, things have changed again since then. Partly this is due to the fact that America's trust in media has fallen to historic lows in recent years - a phenomenon that is linked to growing polarization. Jay Van Bavel, a professor of neural science at New York University and an expert in "the partisan brain", notes that "people don't trust institutions and media sources that aren't aligned with them ideologically". Many of Trump's supporters simply don't believe his accusers, and don't believe the media sources reporting on his actions.

Even if people do believe allegations about a politician, says Van Bavel, "they're willing to excuse bad behaviour and continue voting for a person or party member because they don't want the other party to take power". A 2020 study that he worked on, alongside 14 other prominent researchers, looked at survey data since the 1970s and found that, for the first time, contempt for the other political party is greater than affection for one's own. Voting behaviour is now essentially driven by who you hate the most.