Sex, hush money and an alleged poisoning: Before Trump and Stormy Daniels, a wild presidency

The Republican presidential candidate’s affair could be exposed before the election, so the other woman’s silence was bought. Another woman wrote a tell-all book about her love life with the same married man. Long before Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels, there was President Warren G. Harding, whose sexual dalliances made history.

In 1920, the Republicans nominated Harding, a senator from Ohio, to run against Democratic Gov. James Cox, also of Ohio, and his running mate Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Only then did GOP leaders learn their handsome, white-mane standard-bearer had some kinky skeletons in his closet. One was a long-running affair with Carrie Fulton Phillips, the wife of the head of a department store in Marion, Ohio, where Harding was a newspaper publisher.

The affair had cooled, and now Phillips threatened to release some steamy love letters, unless she was paid. In one letter, Harding wrote his lover that he longed to see her so much “I feel that there will never be any relief until I take a long, deep, wild draught on your lips and then bury my face on your pillowing breasts.”

That was one of the milder letters.