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.
Former Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, who has been accused of “sexual encounters” with a minor and paying women for sex, withdrew his nomination for attorney general last month. Gaetz, who has denied the allegations, was in no way qualified for the position, but he met Trump’s main criterion of being likely to comply with the president-elect’s every decree. (In Gaetz’s stead, Trump has nominated former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who faces claims of more pedestrian political corruption.)
[Read: Either way, Matt Gaetz wins]
Trump’s nominee to lead the Pentagon, the former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, has a military background, but he holds extreme views and beyond being another Trump toady is similarly unqualified to lead America’s large, complicated military bureaucracy. A 22-page police report describes an alleged sexual assault in California seven years ago—Hegseth has insisted that the encounter was consensual, and later entered into a financial settlement with the accuser; no charges were ultimately filed. Beyond the accusation, Hegseth’s statements about sexual assault and women reveal someone who appears to not take either rape or women’s contributions to the military seriously; he has, for example, suggested reversing the rule allowing women in combat roles, because they might be raped by their comrades. If Hegseth is innocent of the sexual-assault allegations, he would nevertheless remain unfit for the role.
Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is a staunch ally of preventable childhood diseases who belongs nowhere near a public-health position in the federal government, given his views on vaccinations alone. He also stands accused of sexually assaulting his former live-in nanny. (As The Guardian reported, when asked about the incident publicly, Kennedy acknowledged having “skeletons in his closet,” and later sent the nanny a text saying he had no memory of the incident but apologizing for making her uncomfortable.)
Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick to ruin the Department of Education, is being sued alongside her husband, the wrestling magnate Vince McMahon, over allegedly having enabled the sexual abuse of underage “ring boys” who worked for what was then known as the World Wrestling Federation, now World Wrestling Entertainment. (The McMahons have also denied any wrongdoing.) McMahon’s husband reportedly remains under federal investigation for sex trafficking related to their business, and she has no background in education, other than a brief stint on the Connecticut Board of Education that ended shortly before the revelation that she had falsely claimed to have an education degree.
Then there is Trump himself, who in a 2023 civil suit was held liable for sexually abusing the writer E. Jean Carroll. As Quinta Jurecic writes, “The choice to begin a new administration with this particular slate of picks represents a remarkable commitment to moral ugliness.” The message seems to be that allegations should be taken seriously only if they involve a certain class of persons.
These allegations are credible because they are backed up by official documents, witness accounts, and in Trump’s case, a verdict. That gives them more weight than a mere accusation. Notably, no standard of evidence would make these accusations credible to many conservatives, because the individuals are Republicans, whereas unfounded claims of sexual misconduct against entire categories of people have been a basis for right-wing policy making over the past four years.
[David A. Graham: Guilty on all counts]
Republicans spent much of the Biden years baselessly accusing LGBTQ people of being “groomers” seeking to sexually assault children, and then passing discriminatory laws using those same unfounded accusations as justification. They then nominated Trump, who had admitted on the infamous Access Hollywood tape that he believed his celebrity status allowed him to “grab” women “by the pussy,” and sent him back to the White House. Trump spent his campaign smearing immigrants as sexual predators as well. The contradiction here can be understood as a key element of Trump-era conservative ideology, which is that such categories as “sexual predator” can apply only to groups that conservatives are targeting, and never to conservatives themselves. An immigrant or LGBTQ person is therefore a “groomer” until proved otherwise, whereas a conservative by definition cannot be one, no matter what they’ve allegedly done.
For example, prior to Gaetz’s withdrawal, as reported by HuffPost’s Arthur Delaney, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham told a reporter, “We’re not going to try Pete Hegseth or Matt Gaetz based on press statements.” When the reporter pointed out that the allegations against Hegseth had been outlined in a police report, Graham responded, “I don’t care.”
Again, after several years of passing laws and demanding mass deportations on the pretext that sexual crimes are abhorrent and must be prevented without regard for the individual rights of entire groups of people, the response to such allegations made against a prominent Republican is “I don’t care.” Which at least has the virtue of being honest.
Contrast this indifferent response with the treatment of Representative-Elect Sarah McBride of Delaware, the first transgender person elected to federal office. House Speaker Mike Johnson and the publicity-hungry Representative Nancy Mace—who just four years ago attempted to present herself as someone who “strongly” supports “LGBT equality” when that seemed politically advantageous—have spent recent weeks publicly trying to humiliate and bully McBride. Johnson set a House rule banning her as well as any other trans-women staffers or visitors from women’s bathrooms on Capitol Hill, and Mace proposed a federal law that would do the same for “members, officers and employees” of the House. Mace has presented her bill as an attempt to protect women from sexual assault.
McBride, for her part, has said, “I’m not here to fight about bathrooms, I’m here to fight for Delawareans and to bring down costs facing families. Like all members, I will follow the rules as outlined by Speaker Johnson, even if I disagree with them.” Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that such “bathroom bills” ultimately have the perverse effect of making any woman deemed insufficiently feminine subject to suspicion, as well as forcing men to use the women’s room.
As the writer Parker Molloy notes, the Republican fixation on McBride illustrates the folly of the punditocracy’s constant advice to Democrats to lay off “identity politics,” beyond the obvious fact that Trumpism is itself identity politics. Republicans get a say in which issues become salient, and if they want to make every news cycle about trans people or immigrants or whichever group they want to demonize, then they can do that. If Democrats then defend the rights of that group, prominent voices in the media will inevitably accuse the Democrats of being obsessed with identity politics, as though it was their choice to bring up the issue in the first place.
The contrast between how Republicans react to conservatives actually accused of sexual assault and a trans person who simply exists is instructive. If you are a conservative, then you cannot be a sexual predator no matter what you have done. If you are a member of a community that conservatives despise and wish to justify discrimination against, then you are a sexual predator, even if you have never preyed on anyone. This is not principled opposition to sexual abuse; it is a commitment to disparaging entire groups of people in order to legitimize intolerance against them. These divergent reactions offer a grim shorthand for Trumpist politics, which seeks not to solve problems but provide scapegoats for those problems, and then hope that people are too distracted by hatred to notice.