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GOP leaders all need to reject Trump candidacy after he promotes sexual assault
Donald Trump
Following the revelation by the Washington Post on Friday that Republican Donald Trump is exactly who we thought he was — a sexist, philandering scumbag — GOP leaders are finally calling on him to step aside as the party’s presidential candidate. It’s a little late for that.
Those same GOP leaders should have been working seriously to oust him months ago, and they don’t earn any political cover for disavowing him now. Trump obviously should have never landed their party’s nomination in the first place, but for years they’ve pandered to the worst elements of our society — the “basket of deplorables” tea partyers who have hijacked the GOP.
Trump has apologized for the 2005 video in which he says it’s OK to grab women “by their pussies” when you’re a star, but he is refusing to step aside with one month to go until the general election on Nov. 8. It rings a bit hollow for Republicans, mostly the ones in tough re-election campaigns, to call for Trump to call it quits. It did not take this video to reveal that Trump is a sexist bigot who brings out the worst in some Americans.
Trump’s first defense of his comments consisted of deflecting and trying to paint former President Bill Clinton with the same brush — an obvious and disgusting attempt at blaming Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton for her husband’s cheating ways. One can almost hear Trump accusing rape victims of dressing inappropriately or being out too late in bars.
No, Colorado congressional candidates like Mike Coffman don’t get to now say that they’ve opposed Trump all along, even as they call for him to step down at this late date. Coffman, a Republican in a key suburban Denver swing district who’s running against a strong female candidate, should have disavowed Trump months ago. He’s married to our Republican attorney general, Cynthia Coffman, and both should have flagged Trump’s behavior at the beginning.
They could have helped derail Trump in favor of a moderate before the Republican National Convention in July. Too late now. Your collective silence as Trump called women pigs and dogs and belittled a former Miss Universe for her weight contributed to his rise and set women in this country back decades.
The same is true of Republican U.S. Rep. Scott Tipton on the Western Slope, who is running against former Democratic state Sen. Gail Schwartz. Tipton has danced on the Trump issue for months, never endorsing him but also never condemning him.
It’s perhaps a bit of hyperbole, but that sort of silence was prevalent in Nazi Germany as Adolph Hitler rose to power. GOP leaders like House Speaker Paul Ryan, who you can tell is genuinely offended by Trump’s statements and has been all along, have far more political cover than congressmen like Coffman and Tipton who stayed quiet this whole time.
Clinton has been vilified this election cycle in large part because she’s a woman. Her email server issues, while a serious lapse in judgment, would have been quickly forgiven if she had a penis. Her predecessor Colin Powell did pretty much the same thing but is largely lauded for his tenure as Secretary of State.
And now Trump, who finally and definitively has been revealed as someone who thinks celebrity status entitles sexual assault, wants us to forgive his “locker-room” banter with George W. Bush cousin Billy Bush. Everyone in political office, Democrat or Republican, needs to condemn that type of mentality.
That would help me tremendously as I try to raise three boys to treat women the right way. Just as I argued Peyton Manning could have used his college football locker room behavior as a teaching moment for today’s athletes, I feel like this is an opportunity for American leaders to speak out against a growing culture of male entitlement that is leading to date rape drugging incidents and horrific episodes like the Brock Turner rape case at Stanford.
Misogyny is all the rage these days, and never has it been more pronounced than it is in the presidential election, where Trump symbolizes all that is wrong with white, American, male culture, and Clinton should symbolize how far women have come as leaders who can change our outmoded ways of thinking on so many vexing social issues.
It seems the deplorables are far more disparaging of women than African-Americans. While they merely accuse President Barack Obama of not being an American because of his skin color, they want Clinton jailed mostly because she’s a strong woman who’s stepped out of line.
Here’s a re-post of a blog I wrote about Trump’s woman problem all the way back in May, when current GOP leaders could have actually still derailed his hateful campaign of fear, discrimination, violence and bigotry. I had readers actually accuse me of being unfair to Trump at the time. How do you feel now?
Trump doesn’t have a woman problem as long as they look good and work for less
Supporters and even some detractors of Donald Trump say if elected president he’ll be better for the U.S. economy than Hillary Clinton, who’s too cozy with Wall Street bankers and a champion of the financial status quo. But Trump’s questionable business credentials aside, he’s clearly a misogynist who only values women for sex and because they work harder and cheaper than men.
As the nation’s first female president, Clinton will actually have a much more positive impact on the economy if she stands by previous statements expressing support for the equal pay movement. In 2015, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 38 percent of American women in heterosexual marriages earned more than their husbands in 2015.
Given that American women, who represent a majority of the electorate, earn 79 cents for every dollar that an American man makes for the same work, the income equality gap is a major economic drag. That’s especially true in areas of the country with a high cost of living like the Vail Valley, where multi-income households, unless you have a trust fund, are a fact of life.
A New York Times story over the weekend painstakingly detailed Trump’s borderline harassing and definitely degrading treatment of women over the years, including those who’ve worked directly for him or were contestants in his Miss USA beauty pageants.
While Trump took to Twitter to say “everyone is laughing at the New York Times”, the article really only scratched the surface of the reality TV star’s very public disdain for strong, intelligent women. Instead, he’s seriously considering Sarah Palin as his running mate.
What I found most disturbing in The Times piece was Trump’s insistence that he values women in his companies because they work harder than men. That’s an outright acknowledgement that they’re willing to put in more hours for less pay. Predictably, the super-slippery Trump has flip-flopped on pay inequality, but a campaign staffer sued him for it earlier this year.
I’ve only half-jokingly said to several women friends that Trump would actually be more liberal in the White House than Hillary on some issues, including her hawkish tendency to embroil the nation in armed quagmires like Iraq and Libya. But the looks I’ve received for even making such a suggestion in jest tell me that most sane women don’t think Trump is a laughing matter.
The mainstream Republican Party is slowly coming over to the Trump camp, with GOP party and elected officials telling us people don’t really care about Trump’s woman problem. Really? Or are we just talking about the uneducated angry white males who make up Trump’s primary base of support and respond well to his bigotry, sexism and fear-mongering?
North of the border – the one Trump is not threatening to wall off – the wife of recently elected liberal Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, is being skewered by conservatives for the having the temerity to suggest she could use a little more staff to help her perform her unofficial and official duties as the wife of a head of state.
Likely backers of Trudeau’s conservative predecessor Stephen Harper, her critics clearly feel the way Trump feels – that women are meant to look good in the background behind their strong and assertive alpha-male hubbies. But that’s simply not reality anymore and hasn’t been since Eisenhower was in the White House.
My own household, and the households of several good friends of ours, are in fact partnerships between spouses who share in raising children and making money, and increasingly wives are in the primary breadwinner role. Trump’s attitudes will cost us all money if he’s elected, and that’s something even conservatives can understand.
As Hillary Clinton said on Equal Pay Day in April, according to Time Magazine, “the stubborn wage gap is an issue that affects the ‘broader economy,’ noting that ‘last time I checked, there’s no discount for being a woman. Groceries don’t cost us less.’”
David O. Williams
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