Reckoning by Linda Hirshman

Author:Linda Hirshman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

9

Roger Ailes and Donald Trump

Republicans Corner the Market on Sex Abuse

2015–16

Candidate Trump Treats Women Like Animals

As many conventional liberals in academia and the ALI were lining up to fight against strengthening protections for victims of sexual abuse, an ally for women surfaced in the form of a commentator at the conservative television network Fox News. And not just any commentator, but the second-highest-rated star of Fox News, the host Megyn Kelly, who worked for Fox but had her own show with real control over its content. Kelly, one of several unambiguously beautiful blonde women at Fox, was, as the Times later put it, an “unlikely feminist heroine.”1 As part of a brilliant career as a harsh interviewer, she had inveighed against many feminist positions. For instance, she once ranted about the new federal guidelines on college sexual-assault adjudication: “Once you are accused, you’re done, you can’t have a lawyer in there representing you, and the rules say, ‘Don’t allow the accused to cross-examine the accuser, because it could be intimidating and threatening for her.’ Well—she might be a liar! She might deserve a little intimidation!”2

But in August 2015, sitting in the powerful moderator’s seat at the first Republican primary debate, she leveled a shot at candidate Donald Trump. After all, conservatives were still ostensibly the party of family virtue and upright sexual behavior. “You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals,’” she asked. “Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president?”3

In that moment, Donald Trump revealed the secret of his improbable election as president of the United States. He knew women weren’t powerful enough to call him to account for his long practice of judging them by their looks like cattle at a sexual auction. Thrice married and unfaithful to all his wives, he had probably known it his entire adult life. Without missing a beat, he revealed that he’d brought a gun to what Kelly, and probably everyone watching, thought was a knife fight. Instead of waffling, apologizing, defending, or reframing his insults as humor, he blamed the people he had defamed. For taking offense. His temperament was not the problem. “I think,” the Republican primary candidate said, “the big problem this country has is being politically correct.”4 Looking back on the exchange a few years later, Kelly remembered it with impressive shrewdness. “His response to me was, ‘What I say is what I say, and we’ve gotten too PC in this country,’” the conservative host told a FOX roundtable. “And that resonated with many people.”5

In a heartbeat, he opened the door to the frank abuse of women in a world of unbridled sexuality to conservatives, who had always cloaked their hostility to women’s rights in a mantle of virtue and paternalistic tradition. This was not a complete surprise. As Kelly’s earlier remarks about rape victims on campus reflected, the conservative movement was never very sympathetic with women’s efforts to get some traction for themselves. But

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.