So this is what Donald Trump means by “Make America Great Again.” Bring back the “Mad Men” days.
As I’ve been working to keep up with the unusual number of alleged sexual predators that the president-elect, himself an adjudicated sexual assaulter, has chosen for his Cabinet, I also celebrated my younger daughter’s birthday last week. Which got me to thinking about both of my daughters in the context of the news.
They’re grown-ups now. When they were younger, I’d warned them that as they went out into the world, some man in a position of authority might think himself entitled to grab them by their genitals. I told them not to blame themselves. And to bring the risk home, literally, I told my daughters about my first such encounter — yes, there was more than one — as a young woman not long out of college and holding my first journalism job.
I was assigned by my male editor to take the visiting publisher out to dinner. It ended badly, in my car, as I tried to drop him off at his hotel. The drunken father of four finally relented when I threatened to scream for the parking attendant not far away. For years I never told anyone, including my mom. At the time, that man held my professional fate in his hands; I held tens of thousands of dollars in college debt.
But my overriding sentiment was this: Why didn’t someone warn me?
Seven years ago, with the birth of the #MeToo movement, my private parental action essentially went viral as women spread the word nationwide. Appropriately, that was early in the first term of Trump, a man accused of sexual assault by more than two dozen women and caught on tape bragging about his routine licentiousness.
But the movement also went bust during his presidency, with his help. I date the beginning of the end to the Senate’s contentious confirmation in October 2018 of Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh, who narrowly prevailed despite credible accusations that he’d assaulted three women as a teenager in high school and at Yale College.
Kavanaugh denied the allegations and, thanks to Trump and the Senate’s Republican majority, he was lionized on the right as a victim of a movement run amok. His accusers were the ones shamed, as I once figured I would be if I accused my boss of assault. Trump mocked Kavanaugh’s chief accuser at MAGA rallies, and turned on its head the sort of maternal warning I’d given my daughters: Mothers, he said, should tell their sons to beware of young women making up stories of sexual attacks.
“It’s a very scary time for young men in America, when you can be guilty of something that you may not be guilty of,” Trump told a Mississippi rally during that October six years ago. As for Kavanaugh, the then-president said, “A man’s life is in tatters.” A fan hoisted a manufactured Trump campaign sign: “Women for Trump.”
In 2023, with Trump defeated but running for office again, came the jury finding that he was liable for what the judge described as a rape of writer E. Jean Carroll. Despite that and so much more, he was reelected last month, and with the support of a majority of white women.
So now, as Trump crafts a Cabinet again, he’s explicitly rejecting the establishment types he turned to in his first term and opting for billionaire hangers-on, MAGA loyalists and … alleged sexual predators.
It’s a measure of Trump’s sense of entitlement and impunity, and his knee-jerk dismissal of allegations of sexual misconduct, that several of his earliest choices — former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz for attorney general, Fox host Pete Hegseth for Defense secretary and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services secretary — would be the subjects of multiple accusations of predatory sexual behavior. Even one of the few women Trump has recruited, Education secretary-designate Linda McMahon, has been accused in a lawsuit of ignoring complaints that a ringside announcer for her company, World Wrestling Entertainment, sexually abused children for years.
Forget FBI background checks. Trump and his vetters should have known with simple Google searches — maybe they did know — about the alleged transgressions by those prospective nominees. “So what?” seems to be the thinking.
Yes, the execrable Gaetz has been dumped from contention. Yet his fall owed at least as much to his reputation among fellow Republicans as an all-around jerk as it did to concerns about federal and congressional investigations of his alleged sex-trafficking of a minor, among other sexual wrongs. Kennedy’s crank ideas about vaccines and medical science ought to be enough to sink his nomination — they haven’t — but there are also the reports of philandering during all three of his marriages, the diary of sexual conquests his second wife found before her suicide and the claims of a former family nanny that he molested her.
Hegseth is fighting to save his nomination, but only because Senate Republicans’ majority is so narrow. He reportedly mismanaged two conservative veterans organizations and was forced out of both, drank heavily and philandered, but he’s reformed, he claims. And that seems good enough for most Republicans — following Trump’s lead, of course. Yet as of the week’s end, Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, a combat veteran, sexual assault survivor and possibly the decisive Republican vote on the Senate Armed Services Committee, was uncommitted and clearly troubled by Hegseth’s history.
As Ernst well knows, the military is roughly 20% female — Hegseth has said he doesn’t believe women should even serve in combat — and top brass are bedeviled by incidents of sexual harassment. To put him atop the Pentagon hierarchy would send a terrible signal to the armed forces, especially women.
Trump would know that if only the Don Draper of our times and his circle of Mad Men gave a damn about such things.
@jackiekcalmes
