Trump campaign created own rules on sexual harassment
JOHANNESBURG -- Emmerson Mnangagwa, elected Sunday as the new leader of Zimbabwe's ruling political party and positioned to take over as the country's leader, has engineered a remarkable comeback using skills he no doubt learned from his longtime mentor, President Robert Mugabe.
Mnangagwa served for decades as Mugabe's enforcer — a role that gave him a reputation for being astute, ruthless and effective at manipulating the levers of power. Among the population, he is more feared than popular, but he has strategically fostered a loyal support base within the military and security forces.
A leading government figure since Zimbabwe's independence in 1980, he became vice president in 2014 and is so widely known as the "Crocodile" that his supporters are called Team Lacoste for the brand's crocodile logo.
The 75-year-old "is smart and skillful, but will he be a panacea for Zimbabwe's problems? Will he bring good governance and economic management? We'll have to watch this space," said Piers Pigou, southern Africa expert for the International Crisis Group.
Mugabe unwittingly set in motion the events that led to his own downfall, firing his vice president on Nov. 6. Mnangagwa fled the country to avoid arrest while issuing a ringing statement saying he would return to lead Zimbabwe.
"Let us bury our differences and rebuild a new and prosperous Zimbabwe, a country that is tolerant to divergent views, a country that respects opinions of others, a country that does note isolate itself from the rest of the world because of one stubborn individual who believes he is entitled to rule this country until death," he said in the Nov. 8 statement.
He has not been seen in public but is believed to be back in Zimbabwe.
For weeks, Mnangagwa had been publicly demonized by Mugabe and his wife. Grace, so he had time to prepare his strategy. Within days of the vice president's dismissal, his supporters in the military put Mugabe and his wife under house arrest.
WASHINGTON -“You can do anything,” Donald Trump once boasted, speaking of groping and kissing unsuspecting women.
Maybe he could, but not everyone can.
The candidate who openly bragged about grabbing women's private parts — but denied he really did so — was elected president months before the cascading sexual harassment allegations that have been toppling the careers of powerful men in Hollywood, business, the media and politics. He won even though more than a dozen women accused him of sexual misconduct, and roughly half of all voters said they were bothered by his treatment of women, according to exit polls.
Now, as one prominent figure after another takes a dive, the question remains: Why not Trump?
“A lot of people who voted for him recognized that he was what he was, but wanted a change and so they were willing to go along,” theorizes Jessica Leeds, one of the first women to step forward and accuse Trump of groping her, decades ago on an airplane.
The charges leveled against him emerged in the supercharged thick of the 2016 campaign, when there was so much noise and chaos that they were just another episode for gobsmacked voters to try to absorb — or tune out. “When you have a Mount Everest of allegations, any particular allegation is very hard to get traction on,” says political psychologist Stanley Renshon.
And Trump's unconventional candidacy created an entirely different set of rules.
“Trump is immune to the laws of political physics because it's not his job to be a politician, it's his job to burn down the system,” said Eric Dezenhall, a crisis management expert in Washington.
Now Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, accused of assaulting teenage girls when he was in his 30s, is waving that same alternative rulebook.
Long a bane to establish- ment Republicans, Moore is thumbing his nose at calls by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other GOP members of Congress to drop out of the campaign, and accusing them of trying to “steal” the race from his loyal insurgents.
As for Trump, the president who rarely sits out a feeding frenzy is selectively aiming his Twitter guns at those under scrutiny.