Mort Zuckerman
October 19, 2016
The nightmare continues. I am revolted to hear someone brag about sexually assaulting a woman. I am especially revolted as a father of two daughters to hear it from a man who might be President, for that office uniquely depends on moral authority.
First Lady Michelle Obama said she had been “shaken . . . to my core in a way I couldn’t have predicted.” She did not name Donald Trump and didn’t have to. She just went to the heart of the matter: “This isn’t about politics. It’s about basic human decency.”
That’s the point, one which Trump seems incapable of grasping. In the second debate he denied ever acting on his “locker room talk.” It was this affirmation that provoked several women to end their years of silence and speak out about his coarse sexual aggression. In different ways, but with unsettling consistency, they independently said that he acted very much as he spoke in the “Access Hollywood” tour bus.
Trump has angrily denounced all the women as fabricators. His campaign team depicts the stories as political maneuvers timed to damage his campaign just weeks before national voting. But Trump did not leave it at that. He insulted and demeaned the women. He derided their physical appearances, saying of one accuser: “Believe me, she would not be my first choice.”
It cannot but deepen the impression that he has a psychological problem with women. He walked in on disrobing beauty pageant contestants; he told his female employees that they needed to lose weight; he would ask women he was dating to rate (on a scale of 1 to 10) those with whom he had been previously involved; he would even admire his own daughter’s figure: “She’s hot, right?”
The new allegations may be tested in a defamation suit he has said he will file. That is his right. If he really wants, he can have his day in court to prove that he is the victim of a smear campaign by the sinister forces that haunt his imagination. By that time he will be President of the United States. Or he won’t.
But if he is, he’d be without precedent. He would be a President who in many years apparently paid little if anything in federal income taxes. He would be a President rounding up 11 million people when not preoccupied with the trade wars, a recipe for recession rather than for new American jobs. He’d be busy ballooning the budget deficit with tax cuts for the wealthy.
Meanwhile, he would be getting rid of the new national health insurance program without offering an alternative to replace it for the millions who depend on it. He would be scuttling the financial reforms and consumer protections borne out of the Great Recession.
With help from a reactionary Republican House, he would shelve the Obama administration’s progress on the environment, vowing to walk away from the Paris climate agreement on global warming because, he says, climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.
He would overrule our military leaders and human rights laws by ordering waterboarding, a torture method in violation of international treaty.
And he’d be a President setting out to put Hillary Clinton in jail — like “tin-pot dictators in other parts of the world where when they win an election their first move is to imprison opponents.” That’s from Michael Chertoff, the former homeland security secretary and head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division in the George W. Bush administration.
The thousands cheering in places like Cincinnati and Ocala, Fla., are eager to sign a blank check for a great slogan without doing the budgetary arithmetic to test it. There has never been such touching faith nor is there likely to be such a burst of anger if the check bounces, as so many did during the collapse of Trump’s casinos. Either way, President or not, he’ll be in a courtroom, a defendant accused of scamming students who signed on for Trump University courses; of breaking rules for foundations; of stiffing contractors.
What kind of people are the Trumpkins unfazed by any of this? Their eagerness to forget and forgive every transgression is actually less easy to understand than the political calculations of the Republicans who ran away fast when the news broke of Trump’s “Access Hollywood” boasting. Those pols just want to keep their jobs. Now some of them crawl back. Including Mike Pence, alas: He scored well in the vice presidential debate, though he ducked every question on Trump’s credibility and now criticizes the media and Clinton for what he calls “a discussion of slander and lies.”
But more depressing than the cynicism of the officeholders, worse than the rally boosters with stars in their eyes but hatred in their hearts, are the moral contortions of political and intellectual thought leaders who defend what they deplore.
Trump’s whole campaign reflects cynical pandering to different political groups with his appeals to fear and hate as the only constant.
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