Caligula

Every man has a right to his opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.
— Bernard Baruch

Here’s a fact for ya: One of the two major candidates for the presidency of the United States raped a woman in the 1990s, and you know perfectly well which one. This is an adjudicated fact; not as close to certainty as a criminal conviction, but indisputable nonetheless. If it were disputable, Trump, famous for his inability to let anything lie, regardless of merit, would dispute it. But pointedly, he did not; he does not, and there’s no indication he ever will. He is a rapist, and you can tell him that to his face—he might howl, but he’s not going to sue you, because it’s true. He knows it’s true, the courts know it’s true. It’s unequivocally true. Not only was he willing to let his otherwise sterling reputation for moral rectitude take a Bill Cosby-sized hit, he gave up real money. Tens of millions of dollars. Oh, the money comes from rubes who think they’re donating to his political campaign, but it’s money that would otherwise find its way into his pockets, and you know he feels the lack.

Even so, there’s no shortage of people willing—out of some misguided sense of loyalty to a man who neither knows or cares whether they exist except insofar as they are willing to pony up some of their hard-earned cash to buy his shitty red hats or gold sneakers or indeed Bibles¹—to defend him at lengths that absolutely boggle the mind. Nobody could get away with raping someone in a dressing room, they insist, as though some body of expertise about rape and dressing rooms is a thing. But let’s give them, for a moment, the benefit of a doubt. Let’s stipulate that Donald Trump, a man with a sexual history suggestive of a goat eating a Coke can, is as pure as the driven snow. This would imply one of two things:

One, his lawyers failed because they’re bad lawyers who didn’t know anything about rape or dressing rooms and somehow couldn’t figure out how to put together an argument as winning as the ones promulgated by battalions of keyboard warriors on X and Truth Social. This isn’t impossible—one can find stories daily about some unlucky sod rotting on death row because his lawyer was sleeping when he wasn’t taking nips from a hip flask. But let’s be real: I’m talking about poor people and their overworked, underpaid public defenders (the vast majority of whom do not in fact sleep through trials or carry hip flasks); not the guy who won’t ever stop reminding us how much money he’s got and who can direct torrents of cash at the most unscrupulous lawyers the Ivy League can churn out. He might well shit on them later. when they finally realize that even their uncommon admixture of wickedness and perspicacity can’t insulate them from the corroding influence of their client’s never-ending feud with everything good and pure in the world, but they are in no way incompetent lawyers.

The other possibility is that he was railroaded by a system out to get him—a vast conspiracy of prosecutors and judges, a jealous woman hustling for a payday, flesh-eating press outlets, and even corrupt jurors. It would be a stretch to say this could happen to anyone, but the powerful often face opposition, it’s true. This defense loses some of its power, however, when you have to keep deploying it over and over again. Trump wasn’t accused once. Over twenty women have accused him of various acts of sexual harassment, molestation, and rape. These are, admittedly, just accusations, but what moral pillars can you name who have been wrongly accused in more than two dozen incidents of even mild sexual impropriety without so much as a visit from the HR department? What is happening here? How is it possible that this many women independently decided to simply lie to the public out of jealousy or with the idea that they might be able to chisel some money out of the man. The sheer scale of the accusations make any such defense patently ridiculous. Trump’s dumb luck to find himself thrust into a flock of money-grubbing harpies? This is the sexual equivalent of the dog-ate-my-homework excuse, and even the laziest among us knows you need to find something new by the third or fourth iteration.

At least Mose didn’t look like the personification of a cheeseburger.

Please explain to me how this doesn’t happen to other wealthy men. Surely Warren Buffet should be at the eye of a hurricane of vindictive gold diggers. Bill and Melinda Gates got divorced—was it because Melinda was tired of floozies lurking around every corner ready to charge Bill with grabbing them by the crotch? Even ethically challenged cretins like Elon Musk isn’t at the center of a welter of rape charges. Indeed, the sort of people who come under this degree of suspicion are usually either enjoying the coziness of a 9’ x 12’ cell or, in the case of Trump’s old buddy Jeffrey Epstein, fertilizing a field somewhere.

As weak as the argument is, it’s also continually undermined by Trump himself, who, aside from engaging in a lifetime of very public adultery² (including with at least two porn stars) and repeatedly making creepy remarks about his daughter, has literally bragged about sexual harassment, in both the Access Hollywood tape as well as his remarks about loitering in the dressing rooms of teenaged beauty pageant contestants. Being a disgusting pervert ought to be a disqualifier for public office by itself, but the man has been accused of sexual crimes and has freely and proudly talked about committing sexual crimes. Where is the mystery here?

Of course, the sufficiently motivated can dispute each point using the standard hand-waving. He was kidding. He was trolling the libs. Fake news. Whatever. Doing it over and over again smacks of pride. Perhaps it’s Trump’s talent for slithering out of accountability that drives people’s blind adoration, but it’s wild to watch millions of people who are constantly blathering about “doing your own research” being so colossally uncritical. The individual work people put in, matching scandals with tired excuses in a kind of MAGA DNA replication process—it’s so far beyond the degree to which any thinking person should be going in support of a single so-called politician. It’s no wonder that the MAGA movement has become infused with messianic fervor—there can be no reward worth the effort unless it should involve the blessings of Heaven itself.

It gets worse, of course. We’re only talking so far about his sexual crimes. There’s also the 88 felony charges in four different cases, stemming from five separate grand jury indictments in multiple jurisdictions, of which he’s already been convicted on 34. Getting to this point has required the judgement of more than a hundred citizen jurors, 12 of whom were selected with the acquiescence of his own lawyers. The remainder were chosen at random. I know that this is a man who bankrupted a casino, but in a nation where Trump supposedly won the 2020 election by “millions of votes,” how was he unable to draw one confederate in over a hundred tries? That’s some luck.

The many fraud rulings against Trump are probably the least sensational of his countless legal setbacks but I believe they are also the most instructive. Reaching back well before his time as president, the key rulings put the kibosh on Trump University, the Trump Organization, and his ability to conduct business in the state of New York. These rulings constitute a pattern of fraud—of lying—and ought to be the basis of any approach to any sentence that emerges from Trump’s mouth. Anyone parroting the accusations of untruth Trump has lobbed at his various political opponents over the years—accusations that are almost always devoid of even the smallest shred of hard evidence—really ought to consider the possibility that the man who has paid a mind-boggling financial price for lying might be lying.

Now I don’t think I will ever understand the psychology of the average Trump voter. It’s easy to say that they’re stupid and simply seeking entertainment. Maybe that’s true, maybe saying it is just as bad as building a political movement out of deliberately trying to trigger the other half of the country. Given the abject totality of Trump’s sway over the GOP (and his MAGA inner-party core in particular), the near-total erasure of traditional Republican principles, and the centrality of Trump as the sine qua non of the Republican party, I don’t see how anyone can argue that it’s anything but a cult. People disappear into it, devolving from normal lives with normal interests into meme-spraying hatebots continually jovially ribbing friends and family about how Democrats feed on the blood of babies and they’re going wind up in concentration camps after Trump gets back into office. They disappear into this black hole of creepy, insular shibboleths like the fucking Scientologists. I don’t think I could understand them any more than I could understand some middle-aged woman from Nebraska drinking cyanide in a field in Guyana. But I know from the literature that they can deprogrammed and I guess there’s some chance they could be normal human beings again one day.

What gets me are the leaders of the Republican Party. There’s no way men like Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell don’t know what a terrible excuse for a presidential candidate Trump is. They clearly don’t care. They see in Trump an opportunity to ram through narrow policy objectives without all of the usual compromises of normal democratic process, and they are willing to toss all else aside. It’s pretty rich for a party that once made objection to Bill Clinton’s character a centerpiece of a presidential campaign.

Of course George H.W. Bush wasn’t a great president. He deserves probably more credit than I gave him at the time: he was a decent enough fellow who risked his life fighting for his nation and served it publicly for most of his career, whether or not I agreed with him on political matters. Above all, he didn’t fuck around on Barbara, and he never raped anyone. He was never even accused of raping anyone by one woman, let alone dozens.

Healthy political parties slough off diseased characters like Trump. They occasionally slough off valuable members with a mere whiff of impropriety. Al Franken lost his career in the Senate because of a single off-color joke. I think there’s a reasonable limit on the standard to which you can hold a presidential candidate, but Trump is so far beyond it you can’t see him without a telescope. He is a cancer in the body politic and a functioning GOP would expel him. They had a chance, in the Republican primary. Plenty of people tried. But when they failed, everyone lined up like iron filings drawn to a magnetic field.

I don’t know how you heal a party in a two-party system but I know that the first step is to get rid of the tumor. If we knowingly let a rapist walk back into the highest office in the land, that’s it. There’s no bottom.

1. It’s not enough that Trump is a con-man, but his brazenness is such that he actually echos one of the most famous con-men of the silver screen, none other than Ryan O’Neal’s Moses Pray, a man who is redeemed by his daughter, while Trump has openly expressed a desire to sleep with his.

2. Stormy Daniels wasn’t some sort of outlier; neither was Marla Maples. Quite the contrary: Trump was a staple of the New York tabloids in the 1990s, when he was going through women like tissues. Trump actually told a reporter that he didn’t believe that adultery was a sin, and boasted in The Art of the Comeback, “If I told the real stories of my experiences with women, often seemingly very happily married and important women, this book would be a guaranteed best-seller.” What a disgusting pig.