A fair triage of Donald Trump’s victims would put Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal near the bottom of the pack. I get how unseemly it is for the president’s high powered legal team to bully a porn star (Daniels), and a former Playboy Playmate (McDougal), into silence. What I don’t get is why any woman who consented to have sex with this bloated, orange-tinted misogynist would want to share that indiscretion with the world.
I don’t mean to be overly judgmental here. We have all led imperfect lives and experienced moments of vile, disgusting behavior. But, as a rule, we don’t confess our sins on “Sixty Minutes”, as Daniels will supposedly do Sunday night. The closest anyone came to that was 26 years ago when Bill and Hillary Clinton used the CBS venue to reaffirm their marital bond in the wake of reports that Bill had been unfaithful. That was when Hillary famously said, “I’m not sitting here like some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I’m sitting here because I love him and I respect him.”
Oh my. Those were simpler, more innocent times, even as the country’s moral axis was shifting from a paradigm in which marital infidelity – once acknowledged or proven – was a bar to holding high office. The bar has not merely been lowered, it’s been buried in a swamp of moral depravity. We now have a president who was elected after boasting on tape about forcibly kissing women or grabbing them by their genitals, prompting more than a dozen women to credibly accuse him of doing just that.
If there is any real news in the Daniels and McDougal stories, it rests with the fact that their alleged Trumpian sexual contact was consensual, and therefore a clear break in his behavior pattern. Other than that, there is, sadly, nothing new or even shocking about the notion that Donald Trump chose to bed other women while his wife, Melania, was recovering from giving birth to their son. This is a man congenitally incapable of maintaining anything other than a transactional relationship with another human being. The notion of a deeply textured, soulful connection, or even a trusting, caring friendship, is totally foreign to the Donald. This is true across the spectrum of his relationships: wives, staff, cabinet members, congressional leaders and foreign dignitaries. He lives in a quid-pro-quo world where loyalty is a one-way street.
The only mystery offered by the Daniels and McDougal sideshows is why the president’s lawyers are exerting so much energy to keep two women from talking about their bedroom romps with Trump. This is a guy who used to impersonate his own assistant in order to pass tips to reporters about the women with whom he was supposedly sleeping. This is a guy who has publicly fantasized about dating his daughter, a guy who brought presidential debates to a new low by raising the subject of his penis size. Unless Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal turn out to be Russian agents, the news value in all of this is negligible.
If “Sixty Minutes” wants to crack a real mystery, how about this one: where is the #metoo reckoning for all those women who say Trump sexually abused them? When does #timesup kick in for POTUS? What about Jessica Leeds, who says the Donald groped her on an airplane? Or Kristin Anderson or Jill Harth, both of whom describe similar instances of Trump grabbing their vaginas, just like he bragged about doing on the Access Hollywood tape? Or any of a long list of other women who came forth with similar claims, all backed by credible evidence.
In the post-Weinstein world, powerful men have fallen like bowling pins to similar, or even lesser, accusations. These guys have headed for seclusion, leaving behind public statements that sound like they came from the same damage control template: “I am profoundly sorry to know that I have caused (insert woman’s name here) so much pain. Although I have a different recollection of events, I deeply respect her for coming forward.”
Trump took a different approach. He called all of his accusers liars. He said they were “sick” women seeking fame or money. In a couple of cases, he told cheering campaign rallies that they weren’t attractive enough for him to touch. “You look at her,” he told one crowd, “You tell me what you think. I don’t think so.”
As the #metoo movement gained steam, reporters frequently pushed White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders to address the president’s accusers. She recites the same sterile stanza and moves on: “. . .this took place long before he was elected to be president, and the people of this country had a decisive election, supported President Trump, and we feel like these allegations have been answered through that process.” Who would have thought that Electoral College math would one day be used to deliver a lifetime clemency for sexual assault?
What’s going on here? None of the other gropers, grabbers and harassers got off the hook with an it-happened-a-long-time-ago defense. “House of Cards” President Francis Underwood might have gotten away with pushing his mistress in front of a speeding Metro train, but the real life actor who portrayed him, Kevin Spacey, was immediately fired from the Netflix series based on accusations that he sexually harassed and abused young men and boys as long as three decades ago. He hasn’t been publicly heard from since.
Donald Trump likes to think that he was elected by what he calls the “forgotten people”, hard-working middle class folks ignored by the powerful elites, or so the spin goes. Well, there are a number of forgotten women out there wondering just how it is that the #metoo movement appears to have left them behind, simply because their transgressor won a presidential election. But this is about a lot more than just those individual accusers. As long as it remains normal and okay for an accused sexual predator to hold the highest office in the land, #metoo remains more of an aspiration than a destination in reach. #timesup will become real only when it pulls in #trumptoo.