The most surprising thing about the sordid Donald Trump sex tape that’s finally blowing apart the Republican nominee’s horrific presidential campaign is that there was absolutely nothing surprising about it at all.
It’s not exactly a startling revelation that Trump is a horrible human being who openly holds hateful, demeaning views of others based on gender and race.
Republicans have known exactly who their nominee was for a long time. They just hoped to keep pretending Trump wasn’t a sleazy, upper-class lowlife long enough to make it through the election.
Their feigned ignorance is shot now that voters have heard Trump gloating that as “a star,” he has total freedom as a sexual predator to grab any woman’s body part he wants, name checking an obscene term for her vagina.
No surprise either that despite all the pious Republican statements of shock and contempt over Trump’s despicable attitude toward sexually assaulting women, so far only a relatively small number of them have withdrawn their endorsements of the vile Trump for the presidency.
Much more typical is House Speaker Paul Ryan. Ryan declared himself “sickened” by Trump’s sex talk tape. It left him feeling so woozy he won’t defend or campaign with Trump, but he still endorses inflicting four years of a gut-wrenching Trump presidency upon the American people.
Ryan’s fellow Wisconsinite Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, declared no one should ever, ever use such language about women as he shoveled money raised by the party into Trump’s campaign.
Wisconsin’s Republican leaders have been such hypocritical, two-faced shills for Trump, it was fitting they were among the first to be publicly humiliated by the widespread revulsion over Trump’s disgusting words.
Through much of the campaign, Ryan had frenetically danced back and forth like some flapper out of the Roaring ’20s trying to balance his support of Trump with enough sanctimonious criticism to avoid being tarred by Trump’s bigotry.
|
|
But last weekend Ryan was finally ready to be seen in public with Trump at a Wisconsin rally. They were to be joined by Gov. Scott Walker and Sen. Ron Johnson, who’d also tried to keep their distance from Trump while still endorsing him to win political support from Trump’s famous basket of deplorables.
Suddenly, Ryan, Priebus, Walker and Johnson all found themselves chest deep in the rising muck from Trump’s pornographic tour of the nether regions of hot women’s bodies.
Ryan initially announced that Trump would not attend the Wisconsin rally and was being replaced by vice presidential candidate Mike Pence. That didn’t really make any sense at all.
Pence is Trump’s running mate. He can’t be elected vice president on his own. Whenever Pence campaigns, he’s campaigning to elect Trump president. Pence is the free set of steak knives you get when you buy that amazing Miracle Knife from the fast-talking guy at the fair.
Not only that, but Pence proved at the vice presidential debate that he was either totally unaware of all the reprehensible things Trump has said or had become just as adept as Trump at lying about it. Pence spent the entire debate denying Trump ever said all the vicious, racist, ignorant things the rest of us have heard him say repeatedly.
It didn’t matter, because Pence quickly backed out of the Wisconsin rally too, possibly waiting to see if growing Republican outrage could somehow force Trump out of the race and allow Pence to grab the nomination.
Fat chance, since it’s too late to change ballots in a number of major states and early voting has already begun in many, including Wisconsin.
Trump is Deplorable
If anyone thought Sunday’s presidential debate would somehow give Trump an opportunity to stop his campaign’s conflagration, they didn’t know Trump.
Once again loudly sniffing from whatever is his debate preparation of choice, Trump not only trivialized his ugly bragging about taking indecent liberties with women as harmless locker room banter, but he threatened to use the power of a Trump presidency to jail his political opponent.
We’ve all heard the cries of “Lock her up” from hysterical mobs at Trump rallies, and even at the Republican convention. But imprisoning your political opposition doesn’t happen in democracies, only in those totalitarian dictatorships that Trump admires and wants to emulate.
Trump continued to smear Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton with proven untruths and insults that apply much more clearly to him. He said at one point Clinton has “tremendous hate in her heart.”
He was referring, of course, to Clinton identifying all the virulent strains of hatred Trump has openly appealed to in his campaign—“The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it”—calling them Trump’s basket of deplorables.
Just to be clear, there’s nothing hateful about opposing the use of reprehensible hate mongering in a presidential campaign. It’s positive to be against bad things.
It seemed to take the release of a sordid sex tape for some Republicans to realize that. We’re still waiting on the party’s so-called leadership.
