Donald Trump is an extreme moral degenerate, surrounded by similarly degenerate enablers. These are people who lie about everything as a matter of course – and yet most of the media seem incapable of coming to terms with the current political and social situation. Trump routinely treats women like pieces of meat, then pays them off to shut them up. Lawyers like Cohen and Davidson are co-conspirators in his predations, fattening their own bank accounts with their cut of the hush money that is raised, one way or another, to keep Trump’s compulsive whoring from full public view. Men like Elliott Broidy enrich themselves by trading in brazen quid pro quos, selling their access to politicians, to women, and to who knows what else to clients who are eager to join such men in an increasingly open corruption of public life. In this world, high-end sex workers operate in a deeply exploitative shadow economy, and keep their silence via a kind of informal code of omerta, along with the incentives provided by the occasional hush money deal. The Bechard-Broidy affair is not some tawdry Hollywood on the Potomac tale of who was sleeping with who. It is a story about the almost literally unbelievable sleaziness of Donald Trump’s world: a world in which the word of the president and those closest to him should be treated as worth less than nothing, by anyone who tries to uncover what is actually going on inside the most powerful political office in the world.