Some of my fellow feminist journalists saw a paradoxical benefit in Trump’s untrammeled misogyny. The flimsy mask of presidential civility Trump could muster has now slipped; we are back to a woman bleeding from her whatever. “Trump’s persistent attacks on women affirm what feminists have been saying all along: that sexism is still pervasive at all levels of American society,” wrote The Post’s Alyssa Rosenberg.
.. I can’t fault Hillary Clinton’s campaign for its failed strategy of trying to hang Trump by his own words, with commercials juxtaposing his nastiness with children and young women.
.. Trump’s sexist recidivism — our nation’s collective, surreal Groundhog Day — shows the diminishing returns of outrage culture as an end in itself. That there would be no consequences, that he never really needed to apologize, has been Trump’s clearest insight, one he learned and perfected long before he got into politics.
.. Learned helplessness, a term psychologists use to describe mute acquiescence in the face of repeated trauma, is what abusers thrive on.
.. hinging political mobilization on someone being offensive has now been perfected by conservative media, which decries political correctness
Hannity: ‘Tonight, I Know There’s a Kumbaya Moment for the Country — I’m Not Buying It’
“[E]verything we have shown you — it’s less than one-tenth of one-one-thousandth million percent of the divisive, hateful rhetoric that is no the left in America,” Hannity said. “We can spend an entire week just playing tapes, just showing example after example. The problem we’re now facing is no one on the left has the courage, or very few, or the fortitude to speak out and stop the hatred. And that’s because Democrats use this kind of vile rhetoric every single election.”
.. “Every election, Republicans are what — they are racist, they’re sexist, they’re misogynistic,” he continued. “Let’s see, they want dirty air and water. They want to throw granny off the cliff. And that’s just part of their political playbook — Islamophobic, xenophobic, homophobic — it never ends. The left objectifies Republicans, especially conservatives into something we are not. And they know the truth, but yet they contribute to this atmosphere where Republicans, we’re not even human. If you are conservative like me, God-awful. How do you even speak on television or radio? Now tonight, I know there is a Kumbaya moment for the country. I’m not buying it.
Get Ready for the Pillorying of Pence
If Trump leaves office prematurely for any reason, President Pence will immediately be denounced as far worse. In fact, it would happen before he even took office. In fact it’s already happening. That this is true is testament to the fundamentally unprincipled nature of the Left.
.. I have long concurred with many of the points the Left makes about Trump, and some of those points are becoming more salient by the day. He really does seem frighteningly erratic, unprepared, sloppy. It’s hard to believe he would provide reassuring leadership in the event of a foreign-policy crisis. And it’s possible he committed obstruction of justice with respect to James Comey’s investigation of Michael Flynn.
.. His promotion would make progressives reach for the old playbook: Attack as a dangerous theocrat who hates women, minorities, and gays.
.. Opposition to abortion, or even opposition to government funds being directed to the nation’s leading abortion provider, will be recast as posing a supreme danger to “women’s health.”
.. But Pence will be called even more abnormal because he deflects questions about evolution as beyond his pay grade.
.. the ludicrous attempt to tie the secular, non-moralizing Trump to the neo-Puritan misogynist dystopia imagined in the new TV series The Handmaid’s Tale will be recharged
.. Pence will be labeled an extremist for being part of the American Christian majority.
Donald Trump is modeling his life after Charles Foster Kane
Trump acquits himself pretty well on Kane and its lessons — although I would not characterize Kane’s fall as “modest” — and his commentary about the film is probably the first actually interesting thing I have ever heard him say. But I watched all the way to the end and he shoots himself in the foot in the most Trumpian & misogynistic way — it’s actually perfect.