Remember: The king of the harassers is also the leader of the free worldby digby
I am glad to see many women feeling safe enough to come forward about lasting sexual harassment on the job. But I admit that while I would be thrilled to be wrong, I’m cynical about whether any lasting change will occur. And there is one overriding reason why I am pessimistic: President Donald Trump.
Anna North and Ezra Klein at Vox took on the task of looking at the two cases of Weinstein and Trump and asking why in the course of just 12 months one of them became a pariah and the other became president of the United States.
I urge you to read the beginning of the article — it’s a very thorough examination of the facts in both cases which are astonishingly similar. It concludes with this:
While an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted just after the Access Hollywoodtape’s release found Clinton with an 11-point lead over Trump, a Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted around the same time gave her just a 4-point lead. In that poll, almost 70 percent of respondents said Trump had probably made unwanted sexual advances on women. But 64 percent of respondents — and 84 percent of Republicans — said the tape would make no difference in how they voted.
“It’s not only the Republicans in Congress” who were willing to give Trump a pass, said Lawless. “It’s also the country. People think this behavior is unacceptable, but when push comes to shove, there are circumstances under which they’ll tolerate it because there are other things that matter more to them.”
Those things surely varied, to some degree, from voter to voter. Trump won 53 percent of white women and 61 percent of white women without college degrees. The latter group, as Tara Golshan reported for Vox, has been growing more conservative in recent years, and tends to have more conservative views on gender issues. In a Washington Post/ABC polllast year, about four in 10 women (and four in 10 men) said that Trump’s comments on the Access Hollywood tape were typical “locker room talk” — his excuse at the time.
Then there is the strange role elections play as validators of moral behavior in American politics. If then-FBI Director James Comey had never sent his infamous letter, and Hillary Clinton had held another 2 or 3 percentage points in the popular vote and decisively won the Electoral College, it is possible, perhaps even likely, that Trump would’ve been widely rejected in the aftermath as an abuser whose actions cost the Republican Party the election. But because he won — and with his win gained power over everything from the tax code to Supreme Court nominations to the nuclear armada — the incentive for the political system is to move on, and the tendency for the media is to suggest that the American people acted as Trump’s judge, and their verdict, such as it is, must be respected.
I’ll just interject here that regardless of his electoral college victory and the circumstances of his win, more than 63 million people in the country didn’t think his disgusting behavior was a deal breaker. Indeed, I would guess that for at least 50% of his voters it was a plus — his misogyny was central to his appeal in that election.
Anyway, she goes on to note that there has been an assumption that this issue would reignite the Trump scandal but it hasn’t happened. And it won’t.
Rebecca Traister has argued at the Cut that perhaps Weinstein could only be ousted when his power in Hollywood was already on the wane. The same could be said of Bill Cosby and Roger Ailes — allegations against them began to stick when they were old men, no longer at the peak of their careers. As the accusations against Bill O’Reilly piled up, he remained valuable to Fox News — this February, the network’s parent company signed a four-year contract paying him $25 million a year, despite a fresh $32 million sexual harassment settlement between O’Reilly and a legal analyst, according to the New York Times. But as Jeff Guo noted at Vox, O’Reilly’s ratings were dipping — and an advertiser boycott meant it may have made business sense for Fox to let him go.
Meanwhile, Trump is president of the United States. What’s more, the sheer number of accusations against him, concerning everything from sexual misconduct to obstruction of justice, may actually work in his favor. Allegations of sexual harassment and assault are “just part of this much, much broader set of reasons that people think he’s not equipped to be president,” Lawless said. That allows his administration to dismiss the harassment and assault accusations as “just one more thing that Democrats are throwing at the wall” — and that argument works on voters “who feel like no matter what this guy does, there’s a new investigation.”
“We’ve gotten to a point now where there are so many concerns about so many facets of his presidency that it’s hard for any of them to be damning,” Lawless said.
That doesn’t mean the Weinstein allegations will have no impact. They have focused public attention on gender dynamics, said Lawless, which could benefit Democrats in 2018. They’re likely to campaign not just on the sexual misconduct allegations against Trump but also on the Education Department’s rollback of Obama-era sexual assault guidelines and on the administration’s ban on transgender recruits in the military. “Democrats are going to make the case that we need a government and public policies to ensure that we have not only an equal playing field but one that is just,” Lawless said.
The Weinstein revelations and the ensuing conversation could make voters take allegations of sexual assault or harassment by political candidates more seriously in the future, said Res, Trump’s former employee. The next time such allegations come out, “it will be worse for the candidate than it was for Trump.”
But Trump himself likely wields too much authority now to pay for his abuses — too many other interests and politicians and factions would find themselves damaged if he were to fall.
This is, perhaps, the depressing lesson of the Weinstein and Trump stories. The allegations are similar. The evidence is similar. But power still protects, and while Weinstein had lost enough power to imperil his protection, Trump has only amassed more.
“Trump has a lifetime of doing things that would be found to be unacceptable and reprehensible in other people and would have led to their downfall,” said Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghostwriter on The Art of the Deal, “and he has consistently, since a very early age, been able to survive his own behavior.”
Let’s face it. There’s a lot of interest in this because the people involved are famous. I’m sure it will result in some changes, however temporary. But the election of that pig in the White House shows that when push comes to shove women’s rights and status in this society is simply not a primary issue for most people. Even many women. Until that changes, this sort of thing is going to continue.
Sexual harassment is a serious problem for working women everywhere not just in show business. My worst experiences didn’t happen when I worked Hollywood. And it takes on many different permutations, not just the sort of lurid assaults that characterize the Weinstein Trump behaviors.
The necessary cultural change will take a long time and this is a good start. But I’m afraid it’s going to be hard for me to see this as a major turning point as long as Donald “grab ’em by the pussy” Trump is the leader of the free world and maintains the support of the Republican party. Every time I see him on TV it’s a reminder that tens of millions of people voted for him less than a year ago knowing fully what he was.
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