Zero respect for people’s lives, rights, and property
Robby Soave at Reason says Trump is no libertarian but a self-entitled authoritarian.
“You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful [women]—I just start kissing them,” Trump toldAccess Hollywood‘s Billy Bush, according to an audio tape leaked to The Washington Post on Friday. “It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Emphasis mine, because, well, you can’t do that. Grabbing an unsuspecting and unwilling person’s genitals is a criminal act of sexual assault under any definition of sexual assault. Trump is evidently proud of the fact that he wielded his wealth and star power as a weapon to help him abuse women—to kiss and grope them without their permission. This is violence, full stop.
Trump has a lot of company though in thinking it’s just something guys get to do, because they want to – it’s just hijinks, it’s boys will be boys, it’s “copping a feel.” It’s normalized.
Some people might be tempted to write off Trump’s comments to Bush as empty boasts. They would be utter fools to do so. The New York Times, in fact, has just run an interview with a woman who says she was given the Trump treatment by the reality TV star. This is not an isolated incident: there is ample evidence that Trump has physically harmed women. And he has now admitted on tape that he feels license to mistreat them.
To be absolutely clear: there is nothing ambiguous about Trump’s stated (and demonstrated) approach to women: it’s battery, at a minimum.
And, even though it’s looking more unlikely every hour, it’s still possible that he could be elected president of the US. It’s disgraceful. It’s truly disgraceful that none of this stopped him until (perhaps) now.
Some months ago, I described Trump as the least libertarian Republican presidential candidate in decades—in no small part because he displays zero respect for people’s lives, rights, and property. His treatment of women is only the most obviously disturbing manifestation of the philosophy of brutishness and authoritarianism that characterizes his entire worldview.
No man whose overriding ideology is that he gets to do whatever he wants—to whomever he wants—should be president.
That’s an aspect of libertarianism I can respect.
H/t Helen Dale
The problem is that Trump is saying what much of his base believes. They envy him, because he has the star power and the money, and they believe women are property, and we feminist women have tried to insist that we are not property (sort of like those uppity blacks?) but people. How dare we.
The news continually portrays them as angry men. Yes, they are, but the media is rarely honest about what they are angry at – women, people of color, LGBTQ, and educated people. All of these are their targets. They long for the days when they could walk down a lily white street full of lily white people and see no one that didn’t look like themselves, except maybe the occasional lily white frazzled woman pushing a stroller full of children, and pregnant with the next. This is what they want, and they tell us this is what they want, but the media chooses to ignore that and focus on trade deals and jobs, which convinces some people who aren’t paying close attention that Donald is about something more serious and more long lasting than just being a duedebro.
Oh I know.