Donald Trump is a very credibly accused sexual molester. We somehow forget that. Not all of us, but our media and our wider culture. And in case anyone doubts the word of more than a dozen women, he bragged about it on audio tape. Bragged about it:
Trump: "Yeah that's her with the gold. I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful... I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything."
Bush: "Whatever you want."
Trump: "Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."
These are not the words of a healthy adult. These are the words of a sexual predator. An abuser. A man 63 million Americans voted to make president. And we should not forget it. Not for one moment. And we should not allow the media to forget it. Not for one moment.
The Republican Party and every Republican senator and every Republican member of the House of Representatives owns Donald Trump. They own a man who brags about abusing women. Brags. They support him, they support his agenda, they violate long-established political norms, they support his subservience to a foreign despot, and they feign disgust at his abusive behavior toward women while doing exactly nothing. Their concerns and shaking of heads mean nothing. They own him.
It's no coincidence that Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court. It's not just Kavanaugh's extreme political ideology, and it's not just his expansive view on executive power that seems to validate Trump's authoritarian aspirations. Kavanaugh is emblematic of an entire partriarchal culture of privilege, unaccountability, marginalization, and abuse of demographic minorities, and structural and ideological misogyny. And the Republican Party supports him just as they support the man who appointed him. This is the Republican Party.
At least nineteen women have accused Donald Trump of sexual abuse. Nineteen. Were he the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, he would have been fired. The #MeToo movement was partially inspired by Trump, but diffuse, decentralized, unorganized, and always profoundly personal, it has united millions of people of all genders finally to hold accountable even powerful, famous, wealthy, and seemingly culturally iconic men. Such men do now have to think twice about their behavior, even if the twisted inspiration for that behavior still lies latent in many of them. But now they can choke on it. If they act on it, they likely will be destroyed. And it enrages them.
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