Why do Bible-bashing Republicans love sinful Trump? Because he won’t do a Nixon

You may not have noticed, but US House Speaker Mike Johnson appeared in court on Donald Trump’s behalf in New York City the other day. Johnson is an avowed evangelical Christian with performative obsessions about sex: he once revealed, unappetizingly, that he and his son share an app on their phones that warns the other if one is using the device to watch porn.

But that didn’t stop Johnson from expressing his support for a man who we all know had an adulterous tryst with a porn star and was tried specifically accused of covering up money payments to her before the 2016 election.

Not long ago, when scandals broke, cautious politicians slowly distanced themselves from their peers caught in an unwanted spotlight. In recent years, it seems that the right in the United States has turned all this on its head. What gives?

The answer is a key philosophical precept of the goon squad mentality that has grown up around Donald Trump. He was advised by a New York lawyer named Roy Cohn. Cohn is a notorious figure in American political history. He was an aide to Senator Joe McCarthy, the demagogue who used a storm of lies and smears to catalyze the famous anti-communist blacklists of the 1950s, which ruined the lives of so many Americans.