It’s time for the president to resign! In the words of one newspaper editorial board, the guy “should resign because his repeated, reckless deceits have dishonored his presidency beyond repair…He should resign because that is his best hope to preserve shards of sympathy and respect from the verdict of history, to which he has devoted so much self-absorbed worry. He should resign because that is the best hope for sorely needed national catharsis. He should resign because it is the honorable thing.”
So said my old paper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, in 1998, when it called on Bill Clinton to quit.
More than 100 newspapers wrote similar editorials that September. All because Clinton had canoodled with Monica Lewinsky.
I’m not minimizing Clinton’s behavior – it was wrong, tawdry, and exploitative – but if we honestly compare what he did to the serial crimes and immoralities committed by the evil lummox currently in power, Bill’s abuses look like jaywalking. Especially now, with Donald Trump in full panic mode, scrambling to squelch the truth about his intimate ties to his dead pedophile pal.
But it’s too late for a coverup. Jeffrey Epstein said in an email that Trump “knew all about the girls.” Epstein said in another email, referring to Trump, that one of his girls “spent hours at my house with him.” Epstein said in yet another email that Trump is “evil beyond belief” – which isn’t news, of course, but it’s quite the descriptive, coming from a serial sex trafficker.
Measured against Trump’s moral depravity and dearth of character, Clinton was Mother Teresa. And when you include his latest sick con – shattering the independence of the Justice Department, turning it into his personal defense firm, ordering his lackeys to target only Democrats in Epstein’s world – my big question for the mainstream media feels arguably more urgent:
Why aren’t the editorial writers demanding Trump’s resignation?
Granted, I’ll concede that media editorials have less weight than a kitten on cotton, that they likely sway a grand total of nobody. But in a time of national emergency, it betrays the core journalistic mission to fall silent.
But the reasons for the editorial silence are sadly obvious. The electorate is so polarized, and the Trump-MAGA movement has stoked so much animus toward the mainstream media, that calls for Trump’s resignation would be met with incandescent fury and denounced (without due consideration of the facts) as biased poison spewed by “enemies of the people.” And most newspapers, mindful of their fragile circulation numbers, don’t want to risk alienating any remaining readers.
Plus, too many Americans have become desensitized to scandal. Looking back 51 years, it’s hard to believe that Richard Nixon was compelled to quit, having lost the support of key congressional Republicans, just because of one “smoking gun” remark on a White House tape, his command the CIA should tell the FBI to stop investigating the Watergate break-in. Trump does worse than that by noon on any given day. The public’s general reaction is benumbed exhaustion. Can an outraged editorial hope to engage those people?
On a New Yorker podcast the other day, veteran investigative reporter Michael Isikoff (who exposed Clinton-Lewinsky) said it well: “Political scandals are almost passe now. Trump has broken all the rules of American politics, of norms, of behavior…We’re a totally divided country, so polarized, that convincing the other half that something is legitimately a scandal, about the people they support, is almost impossible.”
I still think editorial writers are abdicating their responsibility, but there’s no point in pining for a bygone era. Fortunately, there is still enough robust reporting on the Epstein story to sate those of us who are not benumbed. And now we have Trump pulling a 180, suddenly claiming that he supports full release of the Justice Department’s Epstein files – because it’s clear that House Republicans are jumping on board the transparency bandwagon, and the last thing Trump wants, later this week, are headlines that describe the House vote as a major defeat for him. So he’s scrambling/panicking to pretend he’s leading the parade.
But, to quote one report, “The bomb is ticking. And all he can do is await the detonation, just like everybody else. The President of the United States has lost control of events. He has lost control of the clock. The day of reckoning has arrived, despite all the best efforts of the White House spin machine.”
Oops, I wrote that.
About Bill Clinton’s sex scandal.
One day before The Philadelphia Inquirer called for his resignation.
Ah, the quaint good ole days.
Copyright 2025 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]