Trump’s white women supporters discarding him now is hypocrisy
The list of women being groped, sexually assaulted and subjected to many levels of gross sexual impropriety by the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is updating at a rate faster than the speed of light. Interestingly, it is a list of just white women.
The fresh blizzard of accusations and allegations blowing off Trump’s orange mop of a lid means that one of the core vote banks of the Grand Old Party – the conservative white women – is shrinking by the minute, and most probably will not be picking Trump when they get out to vote in November this year.
The New York Times has reported that two women have come forward with accusations of sexual assault against Donald Trump. People Magazine reporter Natasha Stoynoff said Trump forcibly kissed her on the mouth before a joint interview with his wife Melania in 2005. Mandy McGillivray, a 36-year-old woman accused Trump of grabbing her buttocks 13 years back. Jessica Leeds, now 73, recounted a three-decade-old plane ride when she had the unfortunate occasion of sitting next to Trump who grabbed her breasts and felt up her skirt.
There are many, many more, and newspapers and websites are scrambling to get more such accounts from women assaulted, sexually objected, insulted, humiliated, mentally tortured and discriminated against by Donald Trump’s relentless misogyny that has supposedly shamed even the hardened politicos like Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Trump and the Trump campaign have sunk to their lowest. Or have they? Is it remotely astonishing that "mainstream America" has finally come to terms with the possibility of Trump being the most unsuitable presidential candidate ever only when the bastion of conservative politics – the white woman’s body – is under attack?
Hardly.
This leaving the Trump camp by the droves, now led by women who have finally decided that they couldn’t elect a known sexual predator to the topmost post of the US government, and let him occupy the White House for the next four years, is symptomatic of exactly why it has indeed come to this.
It’s because before the October 6 published report-cum-video by noted journalist David Fahrenthold at the Washington Post, wherein the now infamous line - "Grab them by the pu**y" – is heard clearly, Trump was seen as one more politically conservative, privileged, obscenely rich and pathologically racist Republican, who though a loose cannon, was such a showman that he could, perhaps, sail through the choppy waters of the 2016 US presidential election.
(Warning: Video contains graphic language. Viewer discretion is advised.)
Trump’s dismissal of the "rape bragging" as mere "locker-room talk" casually exchanged among "alpha males" is really nothing out of ordinary, even though the current First Lady of the United States of America, Michelle Obama, said in her passionate speech on Thursday, October 13, that Trump’s flaunting of sexual violation was an affront to decent men everywhere.
What the FLOTUS deliberately omitted was however something she had hinted at several times before. That the White House itself was a grim reminder that slave labour, and the black slave woman’s unpaid, unaccounted for sexual labour, was the little mentioned and oft-forgotten violence at the core of American imagination.
It’s telling that Donald Trump’s misogyny breached that stomach-churning final frontier only when it penetrated the hallowed body of the conservative white American woman - many of whom are anti-abortion, would have voted for the wall to keep "rapist Mexicans" out, would not blink to call all black men as possible rapist-murderers, are avowedly anti-gun control legislation, think Barack Obama may be a Muslim religious fundamentalist, would have screamed at the mere mention of an Arabic word heard at a shopping mall or a plane, are decidedly anti-gay marriage.
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| Michelle Obama said in her passionate speech that Trump’s flaunting of sexual violation was an affront to decent men everywhere. (Photo: Reuters) |
That Donald Trump could dismiss his sexual assault bragging as locker-room talk among alpha males, even though most of his fellow alpha males within the GOP circuit of tight fellowship of money and power are now disowning all that he stands for as anti-American and anti-Republican party, is precisely because the rites of passage that see the evolution of the white American super-rich are built on many such shared and obscene privileges.
Indeed, it is little different from former UK prime minister David Cameron’s "PigGate" scandal, which rather than the act of "sexual deviance" itself, was more about how Bullingdon Club and Piers Gaveston society of the elite Eton school kept/keep their members glued together in a shared pact of secret obscenities, so that the early chapters of their common biographies control what gets written later, when the school brats become top bosses handling corporations and government ministries.
What Donald Trump has done is that he has demolished the fourth wall of that keeps those private privileges of the GOP members from being exposed, and paraded like a fool all the unabashed, taken for granted entitlements before America’s delusional sections in the media and general populace.
Trump’s blaze of revelations, which have at last riled up the conservative white woman, and her conservative white husband who pretends to stand up for the wife despite denying her rights to her own body, has also caused a crack within the white nuclear family, and its steeply moral values that should ideally have been buried with the 20th century.
Trump’s reality television-generated worldview of America being a giant casino where he owns the chips and controls the inflow and outflow of cash, without having to pay the taxes, is at last backfiring because in that casino, women aren’t "wives", "daughters", or "sisters", which is what is allowed for in conservative imagination, but mere showgirls, a "piece of ass", whom "he’d date, can you believe it?"
Trump, who had earlier said that "putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing", who wants to jail his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and tweeted "if Hillary Clinton cannot satisfy her husband, can she satisfy America?", who called a former Miss Universe "Miss Piggy" because she was putting on an indiscernible amount of weight, hasn’t exactly "shocked" the Republicans.
He has made them shit-scared.
Because among the GOP grandstanders are those who opposed gay marriage legalisation in America, which would be one of Obama’s abiding legacy. Among these repulsed and reviling Republicans are those who do not want women to get equal pay for equal work. Among them are so many who turn a blind eye to the rampant police shootings and atrocities on black men of America, dismiss Ferguson and Baton Rouge and Charlotte and Tulsa as occupational hazards and errors, not malignant racism at its hideous worst.
But Trump’s giant public service – and it is indeed so – is to expose white supremacism for what it is: a spinning wheel of lies, spewing racist, misogynist myths in service of public careers of cultish men.
He did so by weaponising and channelising white trash America, the rudderless rage of the shortchanged working class whites, who misdirect their economic misapprehensions not against those responsible for the woes – the tax-evading, policy-tweaking luxury-class white Americans, the top one per cent – but the immigrants, the non-whites, the single women, the gays, the liberal arts people, and many others who cannot and will not bolster the white nuclear family, the kernel of Republican idea of America.
Abandoning the Trump ship now when it’s sinking in its own cesspool is just refusing to own up to the fact that it’s the Republican’s years of economic, cultural and political hypocrisy that is finally come back as a Frankenstein’s monster – Donald Trump.