Fifty-three percent of white women who voted in 2016 cast their ballots for a man whose career in public life should've been ended after he was caught bragging about sexually assaulting women.
So on the day after the "Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief" was inaugurated as president a half million women (and like-minded men) protested in Washington, D.C. and millions of others participated in similar demonstrations across the country in favor of women's rights.
These women and men refused to accept the farce that men like Mike Pence, Steven Miller, or Jeff Sessions and women like Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Hope Hicks remotely represent their beliefs and aspirations.
What followed the inauguration of the Trump/Pence regime, along with a Republican-controlled, male-dominated Congress was a series of misogynistic spectacles that were an affront to the majority of American women despite what fifty-three percent of their white sisters who voted had decided in 2016.
American women watched in horror as all-male Republican committees sat around tables making life and death decisions affecting women's health while attempting to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA). They saw all-male committees vote to defund Planned Parenthood thereby endangering the lives of millions of women.
They witnessed Trump use his executive authority to erase the mandate from the ACA requiring employers to provide contraceptive coverage; and the appointment of a Supreme Court Justice who has long opposed women's reproductive rights, along with a dozen other federal judges who were nominated primarily for their anti-abortion beliefs.
They've seen new restrictions on abortion rights passed in the House of Representatives and a Vice President who as governor of Indiana was responsible for some of the most draconian restrictions on women's reproductive rights in the country, and who is so puritanical and patriarchal he cannot even trust himself to dine alone with any woman other than his wife lest lustful thoughts stir in his heart.
They've seen Congress pass budgets and tax bills that victimize women and children, and anti-abortion women like Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Huckabee Sanders promoted to high-profile government positions where they illegitimately purport to speak in behalf of American women.
The right-wing Republican dominance of Washington, D.C. is so complete, so boldly confident, that as refracted through the lens of corporate media it can seem at times that American women had lost everything.
But then a tsunami of sexual assault and harassment charges against powerful men destroyed careers and for the first time since Trump came to power has put the misogynist juggernaut on the defensive. Women's agency in our society that seemed to be trammeled under the weight of Republican dominance reasserted itself with a vengeance.
Even Fox News had to jettison its political director Roger Ailes and its most well known bloviator, Bill O'Reilly, after numerous women had the courage to come forward with scurrilous accounts of sexual misconduct on the part of these "conservative" Republican men.
When other women came forward showing that men who identified themselves as liberals, such as the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and the journalist Mark Halperin, also were guilty of grotesque sexual misconduct with subordinates, the right-wing echo chamber (with Sean Hannity leading the way) couldn't help but gloat about how terrible these Democratic men behaved.
But the women who have come forward more recently with revelations about the Republican senate candidate in Alabama, Roy Moore, accusing him of being a serial harasser and pedophile, have put the GOP in crisis mode. The courageous women who’ve made public their past sexual exploitation by powerful men have shifted the culture away from the right-wing apologists for sexual crimes.
It looks like a national "Take Back the Night" movement coming in the form of an avalanche of women who can see they have nothing to lose in today's patriarchal political climate in making public the previously hidden assaults they've endured over the years.
Expect more women to come forward in the coming months accompanied by uncomfortable rhetorical contortions from apologists within the Republican Party because they don't punish sexual predators among their ranks — they elect them president.
The level of hypocrisy about sexual harassment and assault that the GOP has displayed since the release of the Trump Access Hollywood tape in October 2016 has reached a level that even Breitbart can no longer obfuscate (but continues to try).
American women have asserted their agency in a powerful way that cuts against all ideology and political orientation. Men from across the political spectrum have had their careers ruined by these revelations and right-wing mouthpieces like Fox News, Breitbart, Drudge, and talk radio are being exposed as the pathetic propagandists they are.
It's simply impossible for Republicans to pretend to be offended and outraged by the sexual misconduct of a Harvey Weinstein or a Louis C.K. while covering up and excusing the equally reprehensible actions of people like Bill O'Reilly and Roy Moore.