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
Todd Krainin
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. Speaker Paul Ryan has already disinvited him from a Wisconsin rally, saying he was "sickened" by the comments. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Preibus has denounced his comments as "indefensible." Sens. Mike Lee, Mike Crapo, and Jeff Flake, and Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah have disendorsed him. Rep. Barbara Comstock is demanding that he withdraw from the race and the list of similar calls from elected Republicans is growing.
Amazingly, this was not even the first story in the past week about Trump's demeaning treatment of women. The AP reported on October 3 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. The New York Times' Nicholas Kristoff is reminding people of allegations made by a female contractor in 1997 that Trump tried to assault in his daughter's Mar-a-Lago bedroom. Why is the audio tape different? 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.
This is all terrible stuff. And so is Trump's response to the "Central Park Five"—the men who had, as teen-age boys, been wrongly convicted in the 1989 Central Park jogger rape case. In fact the response by Trump and the non-response by his fellow Republicans to his statements about that case demonstrate something rotten in today's GOP, if not the country at large.
As Scott Shackford wrote yesterday, 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?
Trump evinced 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 that conducted in the absence of their parents and legal representation, and that DNA evidence decisively linked another man to the rape. Last week, years after New York offered to pay them restitution—$1 million for each year that they collectively spent in prison, for a total of $40 million—Trump actually said that the settlement was outrageous and "a disgrace." Previously, he'd taken to the airwaves and declared that the payment was "the heist of the century."
And what did Ryan, Lee, Priebus, Chaffetz, Comstock, and the rest of the Republican establishment do after these monstrous statements? Nothing. They maintained 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, come to 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 or their constituencies (in 2012, Mitt Romney earned just 5 percent of black votes). They don't have strong friendships or relationships with blacks and therefore don't have to defend their failure to confront Trump on that score.
Apart from Republican outreach to blacks to compensate for this lack of natural interaction, there is no obvious solution to this problem. The Black Lives Matter movement is trying to offset the relatively small numbers of African Americans through loudness and stridency, a strategy that undermines its cause as much as it advances it. Expecting a movement to perfectly calibrate its strategy for maximum persuasion is too much to ask for.
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 innocent victims of injustice. That's the real travesty of the Trump candidacy.
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