As Brett Kavanaugh continues to deny his way to the Supreme Court, we are witnessing the nauseating effects of Trumpian Justice, a bizarre jurisprudential model in which the vigor of denial obliterates any search for the truth.
There’s an amazing passage in Bob Woodward’s just-released book that perfectly captures the Republican game plan to beat back sexual misconduct accusations against the judge. The author recounts a conversation in which Trump offered advice to a friend who had acknowledged some “bad behavior toward women.” According to Woodward (Page 175), the president told his buddy never to show weakness.
“You’ve got to deny, deny, deny and push back on these women,” Trump is quoted as saying. “If you admit to anything and any culpability, then you’re dead. You didn’t come out guns blazing and just challenge them. You showed weakness. You’ve got to be strong. You’ve got to be aggressive. You’ve got to push back hard. You’ve got to deny everything that’s said about you. Never admit.”
This is the closest thing Trump has to a moral code. At least 16 women accused him of sexual misconduct. He called each one of them a liar. Then he was elected president. Denial worked well for him, and he has been championing it ever since. He was the only major Republican leader to stand by Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore in the face of credible accusations that Moore molested young teenagers years ago. “He totally denies it,” said Trump in his endorsement of Moore. “You have to listen to him.” Even after former aide Rob Porter resigned over domestic abuse allegations from two ex-wives, the president stood by his man. “He said very strongly that he’s innocent,” Trump told reporters. “. . .you have to remember that.”
The Donald even carried his denial creed into foreign policy. Remember the Helsinki summit? Discarding his own intelligence agencies’ compelling evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election, the president stood with the Kremlin, saying: “President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.” He’ll take a good strong denial over facts any day, particularly if it advances his interests.
Right now, Brett Kavanaugh could not have a better denial mentor than Donald Trump. In pursuing his personal manifest destiny of a lifetime Supreme Court seat, the judge has stuck steadfastly to the Trumpian script. Responding to allegations of an attempted rape in high school and an incident a year later when he allegedly flashed his penis in front of a fellow Yale student, Kavanaugh used phrases like, “completely false allegation”, “this never happened”, and “a smear, plain and simple”.
No wishy-washy, plain vanilla denials for this guy. No, these were Trump-trademarked denials, filled with righteous indignation of steroidal strength. The judge didn’t merely deny the allegations, he “categorically and unequivocally” denied them. So strong were the denials that news organizations exhausted a thesaurus of adverbs expressing strength. Fox News had Kavanaugh “vigorously” denying the claims. In USA Today, he “forcefully” denied them. He “strongly pushed back” on NPR, “fiercely denied” the accusations in The Hill, and “strenuously” denied them in The Daily Beast.
Leave it to conservative Republicans to throw cold water on this culture-changing #MeToo moment. In their desperate rush to stack the court before the midterms, they have brought a year’s worth of momentum to a grinding halt. Prior to this sorry episode, we seemed to be on our way to changing the protocol for sexual misconduct claims. The accusers were to be taken seriously, respected and listened to. Thorough investigations were to be conducted. And any unwanted sexual contact was absolutely wrong.
For virtually every man so accused during the reckoning, there were thorough investigations that lasted weeks, if not months (examples: Leslie Moonves, Charlie Rose, Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, Matt Lauer, Jeffrey Tambor). Many of the men accused of inappropriate behavior issued apologetic responses and went out of their way to respect their accusers, a huge cultural shift in tone from days gone by (examples: Lauer, former New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier, Geraldo Rivera, James Franco and Richard Dreyfuss). Compare, for example, Kavanaugh’s fortified denials to Charlie Rose’s response to multiple sexual misconduct allegations: “It is essential these women know I hear them and that I deeply apologize for my inappropriate behavior.”
It is now throw-back September – in an election year – and the retro-Republicans of the United States Senate appear hell-bent on ignoring sexual misconduct claims against Kavanaugh while bullying and disparaging the women who made them. It’s altogether proper to thoroughly investigate sexual impropriety accusations against a celebrity chef before letting him back into the kitchen, but if we’re talking about a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court, don’t waste time looking at the facts, just measure the guy for his robe and get him on the bench before the base heads to the polls.
Unless at least two Republican senators decide to put process above politics, Brett Kavanaugh will soon take his place on the bench of the nation’s highest court. There will be no FBI investigation into the accusations against him. Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell will take their victory laps. It will be left to the rest of us to sort through the ashes of this disaster. We must find a way to make sure that our values of gender equality, fairness and decency are never again torched in the public square, and that even the strongest of denials never trump an honest search for the truth. The first step in that journey begins on election day.