Donald Trump, cursed with a sociopathic narcissist's inability to think even five minutes past whatever bluster he thinks will impress people in the moment, let loose with an especially pathetic bit of bravado last week on a golf course in Ireland. When asked by a reporter about the ongoing civil case in New York City regarding a rape accusation leveled by journalist E. Jean Carroll, Trump implausibly insisted he's not afraid to show his face in court. "I have to go back for a woman that made a false accusation about me," he raved. "I'm going to go back, and I'm going to confront this."
As usual, Trump was lying. The judge gave him until Sunday afternoon to agree to testify, and he ignored the deadline. Trump's lawyer, Joe Tacopino, expressed frustration to the judge about his lying client, saying, "I know you understand what I am dealing with."
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Steve Benen at MSNBC wrote, "This isn't likely to help the former president's defense," because it means "jurors won't hear directly from the defendant." Instead, they will only watch excerpts from Trump's deposition, many of which were also released to the public last week. But in watching those clips, it's easy to see why Trump's lawyers reportedly told him not to testify. Trump does a piss-poor job at denying the accusations against him. Instead, he comes across as furious at having his "right" to manhandle women questioned. He can't even keep up the pretense that he believes rape is bad. He would liekly be even more repulsive on the stand.
Well, repulsive to normal people, anyway. It's important to understand that his mix of aggrieved entitlement and misogyny, which alienates most people, is exactly why the GOP base loves him and will re-nominate him for the presidency next year.
It's clear from the context of his remarks that he simply did not think most rapes count as rape because the victim had somehow been "asking" for it.
When a tape was leaked in 2016 revealing that Trump bragged about his repeated sexual assaults to "Access Hollywood" host Billy Bush, Trump dismissed the "grab them by the pussy" rhetoric as "locker room talk." But during the deposition, he sat for last fall, he kept inadvertently revealing that he really does think that he should have license to sexually assault. He argued that "over the last million years" sexual assault has been the spoils of the privileged, "unfortunately or fortunately." It's gross on paper, but watching his body language, one definitely gets the sense of a man who feels the right to assault is being snatched away by #MeToo feminism.
In large part because of his insatiable need to present as a Lothario, Trump also keeps pretending that various alleged victims aren't hot enough to earn his violent attention.
Carroll's lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, replayed these clips Monday during closing arguments and underscored what they mean. "He actually used the word 'fortunately' describing sexual assault," she told the jury. "He thinks stars like him can get away with it." She also noted how important it is for Trump to argue "she wasn't attractive enough to sexually assault."
Much has been made of the fact that Tacopino called no witnesses and offered little in the way of a defense. I suspect, however, that he's banking that out of the 6 men on a 9-person jury, at least a couple will see it Trump's way: That Trump is entitled to grab whatever pussy he wants. Because, as Trump said, that's how it's supposedly been for a "million" years.
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Monday morning, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough called out "evangelicals," suggesting they are hypocrites who ignore Trump's sexual predations because they are so hungry for power. In this, he echoed the common Beltway wisdom that there's some conflict between the "family values" of the Christian right and Trump's ill-concealed sense of sexual entitlement over women's bodies.
In reality, however, there's no conflict here and never has been. Trump and the Christian right are in fierce agreement on the belief that women have no right to bodily autonomy, that women's bodies belong under male control, and that the only person at fault in most sexual assault situations is the victim for "tempting" her assailant. Trump's language suggesting that sexual assault was fine for a "million years" has plenty of echoes within the religious right, which has long argued that women's second-class status must be maintained out of tradition.
We saw these connections, as well, in the Senate confirmation hearing of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was stood up by the GOP because of his opposition to abortion rights and who rallied the GOP troops with his "how dare she" response to credible allegations of sexual assault by Christine Blasey Ford. It's not that they disbelieve Ford, so much as they don't think she had a right to say anything about it.
The Christian right and Trump's shared contempt for women's autonomy is most evident in the war on reproductive rights. It's not just that the religious right doesn't want women to have any meaningful say in when and if they give birth. It's all tied into Trump's view of rape as something women have no right to complain about.
Rape exceptions to abortion bans offend feminists because they are both useless in practice and assume that forced childbirth is a reasonable punishment for having consensual sex. But the reason that Republicans are passing abortion bans without them is for a bleak reason: They don't want to allow that a woman's opinion should have any bearing on what happens to her body.
Most of them have gotten a little more clever in how they talk about this than former congressman Todd Akin, who lost a Missouri Senate race in 2012 after talking about how "legitimate rape" victims supposedly don't need abortion access. The media discourse got caught up in his biological ignorance, as he argued that female bodies automatically suppress ovulation after a rape, which no. What is more important is the moral implication of what he was implying. It's clear from the context of his remarks that he simply did not think most rapes count as rape because the victim had somehow been "asking" for it.
Akin was plugged into a long and ugly discourse that argues that a woman has foresaken her right to say no if she is alone with a man, flirts with a man, or even if she walks alone unescorted. It's built around the assumption that women have no autonomy worth respecting, and so the only way for a woman to "earn" her safety is to always be in the possession of a man who will guard against other men raping his property.
The jury hearing Carroll's lawsuit is expected to start deliberations today. It's been a remarkable trial because the defense didn't really commit to their supposed argument that the assault never happened. Instead, they were presented with a defendant who couldn't hide his sense of entitlement to the bodies of whatever women he deemed attractive enough to assault. The real question is not whether they believe a pathological liar like Trump when he denies this happened. What will likely determine this trial's outcome is whether any jurors are sympathetic to the MAGA Republican view that women didn't have a right to say no in the first place, and have no right to complain about it now.
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