fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Voting Vengefully

Choosing Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton to rub the Other's face in their arrogance
shutterstock_304701485

So, to absolutely no one’s surprise, two more women are out with credible accusations that Donald Trump sexually assaulted them (groping, etc.). The modus operandi he bragged about on the Billy Bush tape? That’s what he did with these two women, they say. To which Trump replied:

In a phone interview on Tuesday night, a highly agitated Mr. Trump denied every one of the women’s claims.

“None of this ever took place,” said Mr. Trump, who began shouting at the Times reporter who was questioning him. He said that The Times was making up the allegations to hurt him and that he would sue the news organization if it reported them.

“You are a disgusting human being,” he told the reporter as she questioned him about the women’s claims.

Asked whether he had ever done any of the kissing or groping that he had described on the recording, Mr. Trump was once again insistent: “I don’t do it. I don’t do it. It was locker room talk.”

Liar. More:

Ms. Leeds was 38 at the time and living in Connecticut. She had been seated in coach. But a flight attendant invited her to take an empty seat in first class, she said. That seat was beside Mr. Trump, who did not yet own a fleet of private aircraft, records show. He introduced himself and shook her hand. They exchanged pleasantries, and Mr. Trump asked her if she was married. She was divorced, and told him so.

Later, after their dinner trays were cleared, she said, Mr. Trump raised the armrest, moved toward her and began to grope her. Ms. Leeds said she recoiled. She quickly left the first-class cabin and returned to coach, she said.

“I was angry and shook up,” she recalled, as she sat on a couch in her New York City apartment on Tuesday.

She did not complain to the airline staff at the time, Ms. Leeds said, because such unwanted advances from men occurred throughout her time in business in the 1970s and early 1980s. “We accepted it for years,” she said of the conduct. “We were taught it was our fault.”

Read the whole thing. Or not. There will be new ones soon, no doubt.

Reading that sad last quote (“We accepted it for years. We were taught it was our fault”) really gets to me. I can well imagine that a lot of women — and not just Democratic women — will cast a vote against Trump in part as payback to all the men who have treated them that way in the past. Can’t say that I blame them. What pleasure it must be to see a jackass like Donald Trump get his comeuppance on a national stage, losing the presidency to a woman, in part because women he piggishly mistreated over the years came forward to rat him out. There’s something cosmically just in that.

(Though you know who I have no respect for? Feminists and other liberals who justified Bill Clinton acting this way because if they stood on principle, it might help the Republicans. They’re in the same boat as the conservatives today who condemned Bill Clinton but who today defend Trump, because if they stood on principle, it might help the Democrats.)

On the subject of vengeance voting, I want to commend to you this fantastic piece in Cracked sent in by a reader: “Six Reasons For Trump’s Rise That No One Talks About.” It’s long and profane in parts, but dead on target. Author David Wong grew up in Trump country (small-town Illinois), and explains Trump’s rise in terms of rural vs. urban. Excerpts:

As a kid, visiting Chicago was like, well, Katniss visiting the capital. Or like Zoey visiting the city of the future in this ridiculous book. “Their ways are strange.

And the whole goddamned world revolves around them.

Every TV show is about LA or New York, maybe with some Chicago or Baltimore thrown in. When they did make a show about us, we were jokes — either wide-eyed, naive fluffballs (Parks And Recreation, and before that, Newhart) or filthy murderous mutants (True Detective, and before that, Deliverance). You could feel the arrogance from hundreds of miles away.

“Nothing that happens outside the city matters!” they say at their cocktail parties, blissfully unaware of where their food is grown. Hey, remember when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Kind of weird that a big hurricane hundreds of miles across managed to snipe one specific city and avoid everything else. To watch the news (or the multiple movies and TV shows about it), you’d barely hear about how the storm utterly steamrolled rural Mississippi, killing 238 people and doing an astounding $125 billion in damage

But who cares about those people, right? What’s newsworthy about a bunch of toothless hillbillies crying over a flattened trailer? New Orleans is culturally important. It matters.

To those ignored, suffering people, Donald Trump is a brick chucked through the window of the elites. “Are you assholes listening now?

More:

The cities are always living in the future. I remember when our little town got our first Chinese restaurant and, 20 years later, its first fancy coffee shop. All of this stuff had turned up in movies (set in L.A., of course) decades earlier. I remember watching ’80s movies and mocking the “Valley Girl”stereotypes — young girls from, like, California who would, like, say, “like” in between every third word. Twenty years later, you can hear me doing the same in every Cracked podcast. The cancer started in L.A. and spread to the rest of America.

Well, the perception back then was that those city folks were all turning atheist, abandoning church for their bisexual sex parties. That, we were told, was literally a sign of the Apocalypse. Not just due to the spiritual consequences (which were dire), but the devastation that would come to the culture. I couldn’t imagine any rebuttal. In that place, at that time, the church was everything. Don’t take my word for it — listen to the experts:

via Gallup

Church was where you made friends, met girls, networked for jobs, got social support. The poor could get food and clothes there, couples could get advice on their marriages, addicts could try to get clean. But now we’re seeing a startling decline in Christianity among the general population, the godless disease having spread alongside Valley Girl talk. So according to Fox News, what’s the result of those decadent, atheist, amoral snobs in the cities having turned their noses up at God?

Chaos.

The fabric has broken down, they say, just as predicted. And what rural Americans see on the news today is a sneak peek at their tomorrow.

The savages are coming.

Blacks riot, Muslims set bombs, gays spread AIDS, Mexican cartels behead children, atheists tear down Christmas trees. Meanwhile, those liberal Lena Dunhams in their $5,000-a-month apartments sip wine and say, “But those white Christians are the real problem!” Terror victims scream in the street next to their own severed limbs, and the response from the elites is to cry about how men should be allowed to use women’s restrooms and how it’s cruel to keep chickens in cages.

Madness. Their heads are so far up their a**es that they can’t tell up from down. Basic, obvious truths that have gone unquestioned for thousands of years now get laughed at and shouted down — the fact that hard work is better than dependence on government, that children do better with both parents in the picture, that peace is better than rioting, that a strict moral code is better than blithe hedonism, that humans tend to value things they’ve earned more than what they get for free, that not getting exploded by a bomb is better than getting exploded by a bomb.

Or as they say out in the country, “Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.”

The foundation upon which America was undeniably built — family, faith, and hard work — had been deemed unfashionable and small-minded. Those snooty elites up in their ivory tower laughed as they kicked away that foundation, and then wrote 10,000-word thinkpieces blaming the builders for the ensuing collapse.

One more:

The rural folk with the Trump signs in their yards say their way of life is dying, and you smirk and say what they really mean is that blacks and gays are finally getting equal rights and they hate it. But I’m telling you, they say their way of life is dying because their way of life is dying. It’s not their imagination. No movie about the future portrays it as being full of traditional families, hunters, and coal mines. Well, except for Hunger Games, and that was depicted as an apocalypse.

So yes, they vote for the guy promising to put things back the way they were, the guy who’d be a wake-up call to the blue islands. They voted for the brick through the window.

It was a vote of desperation.

Read the whole thing. Trust me on this. Wong says if he hadn’t moved away, he’s certain he would be voting for Trump.

I totally get what Wong is saying here. What’s weird is I get it as much as I get why a female voter would take so much pleasure voting for Hillary to throw a brick through the window of Trump Tower (“Trump Tower” being a symbol for powerful men who get away with sexually harassing women). I get hating the Other so much that you would vote for someone you don’t have any confidence in, just because you want Them to hurt like you do.

This is a crappy election. But you knew that already.

UPDATE: Now a magazine journalist says he did it to her in 2005, when she was covering him for People

Then, in December 2005, around the time Trump had his now infamous conversation with Billy Bush, I traveled to Mar-a-Lago to interview the couple for a First Wedding Anniversary feature story.

Our photo team shot the Trumps on the lush grounds of their Florida estate, and I interviewed them about how happy their first year of marriage had been. When we took a break for the then very-pregnant Melania to go upstairs and change wardrobe for more photos, Donald wanted to show me around the mansion. There was one “tremendous” room in particular, he said, that I just had to see.

We walked into that room alone, and Trump shut the door behind us. I turned around, and within seconds, he was pushing me against the wall, and forcing his tongue down my throat.

Now, I’m a tall, strapping girl who grew up wrestling two giant brothers. I even once sparred with Mike Tyson. It takes a lot to push me. But Trump is much bigger—a looming figure—and he was fast, taking me by surprise, and throwing me off balance. I was stunned. And I was grateful when Trump’s longtime butler burst into the room a minute later, as I tried to unpin myself.

The butler informed us that Melania would be down momentarily, and it was time to resume the interview.

Advertisement

Comments

Want to join the conversation?

Subscribe for as little as $5/mo to start commenting on Rod’s blog.

Join Now