Pussy Whipped Trump

It is too early to tell if the “pussy” tape revelations will finally be the unraveling of Donald Trump. But they have already gotten Trump to do something he never does: Apologize. It might have been a half-hearted apology, but it is more than what he’s ever offered.

This is not because he is truly remorseful, of course. The man is incapable of that. It is because he knows that without it, there is no redemption, no way forward. Sen. Paul Ryan has already disinvited him from a Wisconsin rally, saying he was “sickened” by the comments. RNC chair Reince Preibus has denounced his comments as “indefensible.” Sen. Mike Lee and Rep. Jason Chaffetz have disendorsed him. And Rep. Barbara Comstock is demanding that he withdraw from the race.

This was not the first story about Trump’s demeaning treatment of women. AP reported earlier in the week that he habitually talked to the male contestants on the Apprentice of “fucking” their female counterparts, often in the presence of the women in question. And then there were the allegations by a female contractor whom he tried to assault in his daughter’s Mar-a-Lago bedroom. But all of those stories were based on hearsay, he-said-she-said, anonymous sources. In this case it was Trump being Trump caught on tape, bragging about groping and semi-molesting women.

But incriminating as this is, it is far less so than what Trump has openly avowed for the Central Park Five – the men who had, as teen-age boys, been wrongly convicted in the 1989 “Central Park jogger” rape case. As Scott Shackford wrote last week, at the time, Trump ran full-page ads in the Daily News demanding the death penalty for these kids.

But after they were finally exonerated, what was Trump’s reaction? Contrition that he had demanded the execution of innocent kids? Shock that the system had convicted the wrong guys? Relief that justice was finally done?

None of that. He stubbornly insisted that the men were still guilty because they had “confessed.” Never mind that the confessions were coerced after hours and hours of interrogation, conducted in the absence of their parents, and DNA evidence decisively linked another man to the rape.

And last week after New York offered to pay them restitution — one million dollars for each year that they collectively spent in prison for a total of $40 million – Trump actually wrote an op-ed in the Daily News noting that the settlement was “a disgrace.” He took to the airwaves and declared that the payment was “the heist of the century.” He called these guys “millionaire rapists.”

But what did Ryan, Lee, Priebus, Chafftez, Comstock and the rest of the Republican establishment do after these monstrous statements? Maintain a stoic silence.

Why? Because sexual politics is far a bigger force in this country than racial politics. Women, after all, constitute half of the population, and blacks, the most perennially disadvantaged minority in America, merely 12 percent. This obviously affects the electoral calculation of the major parties. But it affects more than that.

All the Republicans condemning Trump over the “pussy” tape have noted that turning the other way would have made it hard for them to look their sisters, wives, moms, and daughters in the eye. If they have no similar compunctions about Trump’s terrifying Central Park Five comments, it’s because blacks are simply not a big part of their daily existence. They don’t have strong friendships or relationships with blacks and therefore don’t have to defend their failure to confront Trump.

Apart from aggressive Republican out reach to blacks to compensate for this lack of natural interaction, there is no obvious solution to this problem. BlackLivesMatter movement is trying to offset the numerical imbalance through loudness and stridency. But that undermines its cause as much as it advances it, yet expecting it to perfectly calibrate its demands and tactics is too much rationality to expect from a movement.

Be that as it may, there is something really, really fucked up about a political system that imposes a bigger price for coarse and crude remarks rather than the open advocacy of injustice — against the victims of injustice. That’s the real travesty of the Trump candidacy.