Almost everyone in the country has accepted that the "baby Christian" president had an affair with a porn star while his new wife was home caring for their infant son—but not the president.
This has put the president's defenders in a difficult position. They have to begin any discussion of the situation by stipulating that President Trump is lying about immoral behavior and a potentially illegal effort to cover it up lest they be dismissed as fools, and yet they then have to defend his continual lying about it.
This cognitive dissonance has been hard on them. And, as a result, they've been forced to say some very, very stupid things.
Here are seven of the dumbest things we've heard from the mouths of Republicans defending Trump from the allegations.
There was no affair!
Few Republicans say they believe this. A poll conducted after Daniels' bombshell interview with 60 Minutes found that 9 percent of Americans still believed the President's account, that he did not have an affair. (About 2% of Americans believe the world is flat.)
But among the deniers is Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who has been forced to deny the affair almost every day during her press briefing.
"Did the president approve of the payment?" reporters ask.
"Look, the president has addressed these directly and made it very well clear that none of these allegations are true," Sanders said, her voice quivering, on March 7.
This has become Sanders' own "largest crowd" moment—except it keeps happening, over and over again.
Donald Trump isn't a hypocrite because everyone knows he's a creep!
This is the position of people like Yahoo's Matt Bai and of former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan.
Bai told Meet The Press that Trump is not guilty of hypocrisy in his sex scandal because he is, essentially, a hound. And Noonan completely agreed.
"We have spent the last three decades as an industry saying we don't care about your hypocrisy, we care about your hypocrisy," he said. "You're always telling is how moral you are and then we catch you being immoral."
"Trump never put himself forward as morally exemplary," Noonan said. "Those who liked him never had the illusion that he was, in his personal life, an exemplary person."
It's perhaps worth remembering that Trump continues to lie about this particular affair. He has not come clean and owned it, like Bai and Noonan said. He is still engaged in lying and hypocrisy.
God picked Trump!
Very few Evangelical Christians talked about how Obama was ordained as the nation's leader and deserving of total loyalty and support. And yet, God has now picked a president—a dirtbaggy one, according to Christian author Stephen Strang, the author of God and Donald Trump.
“God has always used imperfect people, from King David to the Apostle Paul. So we believe that God has raised up this unlikely person who is championing Christian values in a way no other president has,” he said. “Most people—and certainly most Christians—would consider a one-night stand different, especially as a private person."
ACTUALLY, Stormy Daniels is bad for Democrats!
This Hail Mary is the position of people like National Review columnist Ronald Brownstein, who insists that Trump having an affair with a porn star who his personal lawyer later illegally paid to cover up the affair is actually bad for Democrats.
In, "Why Stormy Daniels Poses a Problem for Democrats," Brownstein argues that a situation in which Republicans are worried that the president's personal lawyer is going to "flip" and spill two decades of dirt is a problem for liberals.
"The intense media attention on Trump’s personal deficiencies might not actually move many more voters than they already have, and the economic message pushed by Democrats—one that’s rooted, in part, in the tax bill—is having a hard time breaking through," he writes.
His argument basically boils down to Republicans in the suburbs being outraged but racially resentful working class whites not caring about Stormy Daniels and valuing the $1.50 "tax cut" that bought them new CostCo memberships.
No one cares!
This is the position of people like conservative pundit Tomi Lahren, who maintains that other more important things are going on. She said the media should be covering "wall prototypes" instead of an apparent plot to violate campaign finance laws to silence an accuser.
"Americans don't have time for that," Lahren told TMZ. "I'm so tired of hearing about this.... they're covering this now, what, because their Russia story is falling apart?"
I don't even care enough to think about it!
This is the position of outgoing Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who won't talk about the Daniels affair.
“I haven’t put a second of thought into this. It’s just not on my radar screen,” Ryan said.
She's a slut!
This is the actual position of some of Trump's actual real-life friends, such as conservative radio host Michael Savage who was invited to travel to France on an official state visit with Trump.
"Irrespective of whether [Michael] Cohen paid off some low-life slut who may have slept with the president—that is not a crime by the way, as you'll hear from my defense attorney," savage said of the apparent illegal campaign contribution. "It's not a crime to pay anyone hush money, I don't know if you know that. There was no crime here."
Mike Lindell of My Pillow with Trump/Screenshot[/caption]