President Donald Trump is a man of low moral character. We know, “this just in.” Having led a very public life, nearly every American knows that Trump cheated on his first wife with his second and that he has generally been a philandering playboy. So in that sense it gets little more than a shrug when we hear that he had other affairs while married a third time. That was true of Stormy Daniels, and it’s true of Karen McDougal, who told CNN Thursday of her consensual 10-month affair with Trump from 2006 to 2007, before he was president. If you want those details, CNN will be running them hourly for weeks. Or stay tuned this weekend for the CBS “60 Minutes” exposé on Daniels. We’re interested in bigger fish.

The Leftmedia’s 24/7 churn with these women and their stories is, first and foremost, a #MeToo-era effort to undermine Trump’s successful policy agenda and to anger female voters ahead of the 2018 and 2020 elections. It might work. And we all know how vigorously leftist feminists worked to oust Bill Clinton for his despicable treatment of women. Oh, that’s right, they stood by their man.

On that note, let’s get one thing straight. There’s a huge difference between consensual affairs between peers and an affair with a young subordinate or flat-out rape. None of it is acceptable in any sense, but Clinton’s behavior was clearly far worse.

But Trump is president now, not Clinton. It’s 2018, not 1998. So conservatives and Christians must deal honestly and forthrightly with the fact that a dishonest and immoral man is the Republican Party’s standard-bearer.

In 2016, a record 14 million people voted for Trump in the GOP primaries, apparently deciding that character didn’t matter nearly as much as whatever their issue(s) happened to be. More than 16 million people — also a record — voted against Trump in those same primaries. Their votes, however, were divided among 16 other candidates, thus leaving Trump victorious. In the 2016 general election, just shy of 63 million Americans accounting for a winning 304 electoral votes chose Trump because they concluded he was preferable to the only alternative, Hillary Clinton. Trump won despite his own gross character flaws — but also because of support for his agenda and opposition to Clinton’s. For millions of conservatives, his impact on the judiciary alone was worth the vote, and his defense of religious liberty was desperately needed.

Still, what many of Trump’s voters failed to realize, and what some Trump defenders are still refusing to acknowledge, is that a man’s private morality does affect his ability to govern. At a bare minimum, the bad press is a distraction; at worst, it reveals a deep untrustworthiness that plays out in policy and personnel decisions. Moreover, all the hush money and other legal wrangling over flings with porn stars could seriously jeopardize the president.

With Trump, chaos is part of his agenda, so perhaps this all serves his purposes somehow. But what does that say of our great nation, or the office whose precedent was set by a man of great character, George Washington? Unless he loses in 2020, the problem with Trump’s character flaws and boorish style may not ultimately exact a toll on him. The price will, however, certainly be paid by the GOP and the nation in the years to come.