CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The U.S. at 250: Presidential Indulgences

Photograph Source: Ranch9613 – CC0 1.0

July 4, 2026, will be the 250th anniversary of the U.S. of America.

It will likely be a day of great celebration, a great shopping extravaganza day! Everything from soapsuds to high-end SUVs is marked down to lure in shoppers and move products off the store shelves. However, the biggest sale that takes place on the 4th will be the selling of the president.

In the 237 years that the U.S. has had a president, all 47 of them have been men and, like most American men, they have had sex lives.

For nearly two-and-a-half centuries, Americans have watched with much glee as media stories and word-of-mouth rumors recounted the sordid tales of how one or another of our commanders-in-chief succumbed to their wilder temptations.  On July 4th, a clean-up squad of PR hacks, academics and media pundits will be enrolled to whitewash the public record of America’s great leaders.

Thomas Jefferson remains America’s most compelling president and his reported sexuality mirrors this passion.  In his youth, he attempted to seduce his best friend’s wife, Betsy Walker, and after his wife Martha died, he apparently had an affair in Paris with Mrs. Maria Cosway. However, it was his relationship with Sally Hemings, the African-American slave who was his wife’s half-sister (the daughter of Martha’s father) and with whom he had six children, that made him. America’s most scandalous sex scandal-plagued president.

On Presidents’ Day 2026, Trump championed what he called America’s “Golden Age,” a period of falling inflation, record-low crime rates, strong financial markets and secure borders, insisting that the country was “bigger, better and stronger than ever before.”

He proclaimed this while his second term is faltering.  Trump’s efforts in support of Israel’s war with Iran are floundering; his immigrant-deportation plan has turned into a nightmare; his tariffs were ruled unconstitutional; and his economic agenda is failing as inflation rises.

But “Teflon Don” established a new standard of the presidential sexual persona, one that pushes the boundaries of the acceptable.  Over the last couple of decades, Trump morphed from an upmarket hedonist to a repentant moralist and, as president, relaunched the culture wars.  His positions on a host of sex-related issues became more regressive, targeting those considered threats to traditional puritanical values, including women seeking an abortion as well as gay and transgender people.  His abuse of E. Jean Carroll led to a court judgment ordering him to pay her $83.3 million and nearly twenty women have brought sex-abuse charges against him.  Trump’s story of extramarital sex, let alone sexual abuse, is but one of many that define the American presidency.

The sex scandal associated with Ronald Reagan is more complicated. As the champion of the conservative ascension to federal power, Reagan came under hardline Christian scrutiny because he was the only divorced person to be president. He married Jane Wyman in January 1940, her third husband; she filed........

© CounterPunch