Tuesday's historic arrest and criminal indictment of Donald Trump should serve as a reminder to voters everywhere the extent to which the Republican Party has had to hold its collective nose to withstand the stench of Trump's personal conduct. The twice-impeached ex-president has always been a person of bottom-scraping moral standards, and the fact that a payoff to a porn star serves as the focal point of his indictment underscores the dramatic compromises made by the GOP in order to defend him.

Trump certainly wasn't the one who introduced sleaze to the White House. He can thank the likes of Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy, both Democrats, for leading the way with tawdry extramarital affairs. But neither came close to matching the magnitude of Trump's very public marital infidelity, sexism, racism, business cheating and lying.

With Trump as the party's standard bearer, Republicans have had to sweep aside bedrock platform pillars such as personal responsibility, family values, integrity and financial responsibility. The party cannot simultaneously defend those values and Trump, so instead of dumping him, Republicans have dumped those pillars.

His party and prominent supporters — including Missourians like Sens. Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt, Gov. Mike Parson and Rep. Ann Wagner — deserve to be reminded of the man to whom they've sold their political souls.

The sordid details of his alleged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels is only one example of Trump's abhorrent conduct. He cheated on his first wife and mother of his oldest children to cultivate an affair with the woman who became his second wife. Then he cheated on her as he courted Slovenian model Melania Knavs. As Melania was recovering from the birth of the couple's son, Barron, Donald Trump began a relationship with Daniels, the porn star, who says the two had sex. He denies it. Trump now is criminally charged with covering up a $130,000 payoff to Daniels to buy her silence.

In an audio recording, Trump described sexual abuses of women he believed famous men were entitled to do. On radio, he bragged about barging in on the dressing room of naked Miss Universe contestants so he could ogle them. He alluded in a radio interview to being sexually attracted to his own daughter. Trump has a documented history of racial discrimination as a landlord. He refused to pay his debts. He mismanaged his businesses to the point of bankruptcy.

Ex-president or not, Trump is reaping the legal consequences of choices he made. Most Americans, including 23% of Republicans, believe the indictment should disqualify Trump from future office, according to a new Quinnipiac poll.

Trump has remained unapologetic and uncompromising about his past conduct. It's the party and folks like Hawley, Schmitt, Parson and Wagner who have compromised in order to accommodate him — sleaze and all.

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