A few election cycles ago, many in our country decided that one of their main criteria for electing their president, leader of the free world and someone with their nuclear codes at their fingertips, was whether or not they would want to sit and have a beer with that person. The winner of that grand hypothetical match up was George W. Bush. Take a moment and try that mental test with the current candidates. Maybe you would prefer to have a beer with Trump rather than Clinton, but would you feel comfortable letting your daughter have a beer with him?
When the country was reeling from the tape and claims of his assault of women by his own account, out came a drove of women who claim unspeakable acts were perpetrated on them by Donald Trump without their consent: sexual assault, without any doubt. What will it take for some of his would-be voters to abandon him in large numbers with their conscience intact? Why is he still in the running and enjoying poll numbers that confound our moral understanding? As the old saying goes, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, walks like a duck, etc. Right Donald? (Quack quack). Because if logic is our sentinel, we must believe some of these women. The coincidences are just too close for comfort to discount the stories as mere hearsay, embellished fictionalized accounts, or tall tales concocted so the women could parade their humiliation at the hands (as it were) of this vile person through the magnifying spectacle of the 24 hour media.
The slew of allegations that have come out since the second debate should surprise no one; Donald Trump has spoken his mind on several occasions on mainstream media. He has been announcing himself to the world in snippets, and showing his true colors for decades: some of us and his supporters just haven’t been listening. He has made plenty of off color remarks, including crude and demeaning comments about women, on national media that should have been the foreshadowing of things to come. It’s just unfortunate that he has made it this far before all this dirty laundry came out and sullied the whole process of our presidential process as if it wasn’t already sullied enough.
While some of his supporters’ pathetic attempt to brush it off as some sort of ‘locker room banter,’ the actual content of the conversation was much more sinister and repugnant than they would have you believe. In my experience some men do talk about women in ways that they wouldn’t under normal circumstances (mixed company), but the last time I heard anything even remotely as disturbing as this was when I was at a frat party and the person in question was an inebriated 20 years old sophomore — not a 59-year-old aging roué bragging about his unwanted sexual advances while setting a despicable example to his younger cohorts.
The cult-like followers and the surrogates who are still by his side are intellectually and morally bankrupt: I know they are paid to do Donald Trump’s bidding, but really, how low you have to be to defend the indefensible just so you can bring home some putrid bacon, and make excuses for a man who has been found to be acting out reprehensibly – exactly how he described himself in those recordings? What is worse is that a lot of these surrogates are women who quite likely know from their own experiences what the women making accusations are talking about, and know what they have been through or why they didn’t come out with their story when the incidents first took place. Trump’s emphatic and categorical denial upon Anderson Cooper’s question – as Ms. Leeds expressed in her interview – may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Despite some erosion in his poll numbers, Donald Trump continues to have a rather alarming level of support even after all that has transpired, and that is quite telling (he enjoys a healthy support among men). The fact that a lot of voters are even considering voting for this sham of an entertainer, who is more a self-selling, self-serving, serial assaulting impostor, says something about the electorate. When several women came forward accusing Bill Cosby, some of his staunch fans were not convinced, but the number of women was just too large to deem it fabrication. This time too, as in the case of Cosby, with all the women who are speaking out, it cannot be dismissed or excused.
We have a folk parable in India I heard growing up. The story goes that a jackal accidentally fell into a vat of color, and in the process ended up coloring his tail bright blue. When he swaggered back into the forest with his newly transformed looks, some of the animals, not recognizing him, started to treat the jackal with deference, and as a result he garnered quite a following. During a gathering with his followers, an old neighbor happened to pass by. As he made his way through the crowd, he recognized the jackal despite his colored tail, and cried out his name. Well, these women are finally calling out the jackal, and who he really is, and all the tail-dyeing in the world by his surrogates in not going to hide his true ilk.