In Defense of Trump

by Brant Watson

There is a lot of backlash against Donald J Trump in the wake of Pussygate. Defending the comments is an exercise in futility; the outrage against it makes this infeasible. When emotions run high the result is that people remain fixated on the forgone conclusion rather than evaluating things dispassionately. I assume that at least some of the people who read this, and it’s title, are going to just assume that because I am mounting a defense of Trump in some sense, that I support his actions, words, actions, and/or policies. To those of you who do make this assumption, quit being so short-sighted. Biases leach outward in all directions and no one person is immune. Not yourself, not me, so climb down off your high-horse and try at least to listen to what I have to say. As former president George H. W. Bush once so eloquently said: “You can’t take the high horse and claim the low road.” I think we can all learn something from this.

Trumps comments include, among other things, bragging about being able to commit sexual assault. Surrogates have defended his comments with variations on the theme of “This is locker-room talk”. Those prominent males on the right who are withdrawing support or condemning the remarks usually do so while noting that they have relationships with people with an actual Y chromosomes.

Jeb Bush: “As the grandfather of two precious girls, I find that no apology can excuse away Donald Trump’s reprehensible comments degrading women.”

Mitt Romney: “Hitting on married women? Condoning assault? Such vile degradations demean our wives and daughters and corrupt America’s face to the world.”

Mike Pence: “As a husband and father, I was offended by the words and actions described by Donald Trump in the 11-year-old video”

I’m not entirely sure what on earth makes people think that the right reason to be offended by Trumps comments hinges upon their relationships with women. If they somehow didn’t know any women would the comments suddenly cease to be insulting? Trumps comments are wrong because women are human beings (just like people with two X chromosomes), not objects. More importantly, why now? It’s not as if Trump is just now gaining a reputation for saying denigrating and objectifying things about women.

When I’m referring to backlash here, I’m not referring to the constant coverage by the media. The media knows Trump is good for their business; as scandal after scandal breaks, they’re able to keep their ratings up in a time where the television news medium is faltering. No, I’m referring to the backlash from mainstream Republicans. The reason they are bailing now has nothing to do (in most cases anyway) with their own convictions. Right now many of them are concerned about the down-ballot effect and what it could mean for the balance of power in congress. They are willing to throw Trump to the wolves if they think that being hitched to him is too dangerous for their own campaigns.

If Republicans who are bailing now actually had real convictions then they would have refused to support Trump about 100 scandals ago. We didn’t learn anything new about Trump in the latest leak. Lewd comments have been par for the course. He’s frequently said degrading things about women, he has directly advocated war crimes, and has been caught in lies frequently enough that if people were really offended by those things then they would have stopped supporting him long ago. Whether you actually think Trump the person is racist, it’s undeniable that many of the statements he’s said could easily be taken as or construed to be racist. Again, the Republicans for the most part stood by him. Most of the “outrage” on the right now is feigned, performed only as part of the political show out of fear of losing the female vote; It’s a play for votes and nothing more.

Trump is now railing against those same Republicans for being cowards, weak, and ineffectual and I think he’s on to something. The word I’d use is feckless; where were these “convictions” before? This latest scandal didn’t shatter some comfortable misconception that people had about him. The only real illusion is that there were ever any misconceptions at all.