A Trumpist feature, not a bug
It is no secret by now that patriarchy will not go quietly, as Digby noted on Tuesday, calling it “the oldest organizing principle in human history.”
There are some very deep forces at work in our changing world, many of which refuse to change. Vigorously. People I’ve called rump royalists never bought into the Declaration’s flowery prose about people being “created equal.” It’s surprising that more don’t do spit-takes at its very mention. They would just as soon see the return of feudalism if they could craft a more consumer-friendly version consistent with global consumer capitalism. (They’re working on it.) Misogyny, promimently on display in Trump 2.0 cabinet picks, is one facet of that patriarchal organizing principle.
Consistent with both is the elevation to the cabinet of what Greg Sargent dubs “a Murderer’s Row of Billionaires.” By one count, there are eight among Trump’s picks so far. Sargent discusses the takeover of the White House by the ultra-wealthy with Noah Bookbinder, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
It’s not as if some wealthy leaders have not been good stewards worthy of the public’s trust, Bookbinder begins, “But the idea that you would have a government where such a high proportion of the top ranks are filled by the wealthiest people in American society is not something we’ve seen in modern times.”
Not since the Gilded Age have we seen the level of corruption and kleptocracy in government that Trumpism brings to Washington. Ethical standards that Trump pushed aside in his first administration Trump is torching heading into his second:
Bookbinder: One thing that we saw again and again in the first Trump administration were people coming into cabinet positions or deputy positions, and immediately making decisions that benefited former clients, former companies, companies to which they had ties. Now, you see a little bit of that in every administration—as you said, the revolving door is a really unfortunate D.C. tradition. But it was taken up a notch in Donald Trump’s administration to what seems to be happening here, which is you increase the number of billionaires and investors and people who potentially stand to profit.
Trump in his first term found areas of govenance controlled more by tradition than by law and exploited them for profit, Bookbinder notes. He at least attempted the pretense of adhering to ethical rules. (At least financial ones, I’d interject.)
Bookbinder: It now looks like he’s got no particular interest in doing that. I’m hopeful that he’ll see the light in the next month or two and divest from his companies and commit to ethics, but we certainly haven’t seen anything to date that gives us a lot of confidence. When you have a president who has chipped away at ethical safeguards coming in without any stated regard for those safeguards and surrounding himself by very, very wealthy people who stand to benefit from their government posts unless they adhere to the strictest ethical standards, there’s a lot of cause for concern here.
Coming after the Jeffrey Epstein conviction for child prostitution and a civil judgment against Trump for sexual assault, many Trump 2.0 picks come with their own history of misogyny and sexual misconduct. Just a coincidence, no doubt.
“Donald Trump is most likely not trying to intentionally assemble a Cabinet chock-full of people accused either of sexual assault or of enabling it, but if he were, he’d be killing it,” writes Adam Serwer in The Atlantic. Sewer provides a rundown of Trump picks you can read there or just catch on the evening news.
What’s notable is how prominently sex crimes feature in the imaginations of Republican politicians. Sex crimes committed by “whichever group they want to demonize,” that is. When it’s a Republican, well, “I don’t care,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham in dismissing sexual misconduct allegations against Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nomineee for secretary of defense, and Matt Gaetz, Trump’s first nominee for attorney general.
Sophie Gilbert adds (also in The Atlantic) that she harbored little hope about seeing attitudes change among emotionally stunted men:
I simply wished for voters to reject the idea, pushed so fervently by those on Trump’s side, that women should be subservient incubators, passively raising the next generation of men who disdain them. This wish did not pan out. “Your body, my choice. Forever,” the white-supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes, who has dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, posted on X on Election Night. “Women threatening sex strikes like LMAO as if you have a say,” the right-wing troll Jon Miller wrote on the same site.
The misogynist backlash is here:
The old analytical terms we use to describe sexism in politics aren’t sufficient to deal with this onslaught of repugnant hatred. Michelle Obama was right, in her closing argument of the 2024 campaign, to note that Harris had faced an astonishing double standard: Both the media and Americans more broadly had picked apart her arguments, bearing, and policy details while skating over Trump’s “erratic behavior; his obvious mental decline; his history as a convicted felon, a known slumlord, a predator found liable for sexual abuse.” She also captured the stakes of the election when she said that voters were fundamentally making a choice in 2024 about “our value as women in this world.” On that front, the people have spoken. But women don’t have to play along.
All his life, Trump has ruined people who get close to him. He won’t ruin women, but he will absolutely destroy a generation of men who take his vile messaging to heart. And, to some extent, the damage has already been done.
This old union will not be perfected anytime soon. Don’t let the bastards walk away with an easy win.