‘The US Right is supposed to be big on morality. Compromise with Trump leaves it looking hypocritical and debased’
Donald Trump was probably never going to be president. His exposure as a sexist lecher all but guarantees it, because women can vote nowadays. In the short term, this is a personal humiliation for him. In the long term, it could wreck the conservative movement. The US Right is supposed to be big on morality. Compromise with Trump leaves it looking hypocritical and debased.
It’s true that there have been presidents who have been pottymouthed or corrupt before. But, in America’s defence, the public didn’t know it at the time, and when they found out – think Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton – Congressmen moved swiftly to propose impeachment.
Ignorance is no excuse in this case. Trump has talked about flirtation with married women, the merits of flat and ample chests, called wives golddiggers, detailed his attraction to a 12-year-old Paris Hilton and, we recently discovered, suggestively popped a bottle of champagne over a limo in a soft-core porn movie. He leers in plain sight.
Video of him joking about sexual assault probably won’t drive him out of the race. His ego is too large; key Republicans are openly critical but fear it is too late to dislodge him. His loyalists have suggested that he is a flawed man on the road to redemption. Sean Hannity, a conservative pundit and pal of Trump’s, compared him to King David – who “had five hundred concubines, for crying out loud!”
This is a sad thing to see. Christian piety has always underpinned American democracy, from the black rights movement to Prohibition. Conservatives have toiled to make America into a shining city on a hill. Trump’s backers have argued that
‘The great irony of conservative support for Trump is that it will almost certainly put a Clinton back in the White House’
while he is unlikeable, he is at least right on the issues, such as abortion.
But his conversion was late and unconvincing. And those who defend Trump at this hour repeat the moral compromise that coloured liberal support of Bill Clinton when he was impeached for perjury and obstruction related to his affair with Monica Lewinsky and a suit of sexual harassment. Susan Faludi, a journalist and author, said of Lewinsky: “If anything, it sounds like she put the moves on Betty Friedan, the feminist thinker, said: “I simply don’t care.” Extreme partisanship clouds moral judgment.
The great irony of conservative support for Trump is that it will almost certainly put a Clinton back in the White House. On Friday night, when the Trump tape was released, the world ought to have been paying attention to the leaked transcripts of Hillary’s closed-door speeches to Wall Street executives.
They are illuminating. Clinton said that the State Department she headed was targeted by hackers “every hour, more than once an hour” – indicating that she understood the security situation when she chose to process classified information through a vulnerable private email server.
Clinton also detailed her vision of a northern hemisphere without borders and argued for European-style health care. All of this would have damaged her in an ordinary campaign. But Trump has let her off the hook. The sheer spectacle of his candidacy has eclipsed her mistakes.
If she does win, her opponents on Left and Right will correctly judge that she got to the White House on luck rather than talent. Much of her limited political capital will be spent on clearing her name of various charges.
What a depressing state of affairs. American democracy has been hijacked by a political arsonist – a man with little regard for his party or democratic institutions, who has treated voters in much the same way as he fantasised about treating women. And it was all, I suspect, a fantasy. It’s worth watching the video in full. He boasts that as a famous man, he can kiss and even touch women at will. But when we see him greeted by an attractive television actress, he doesn’t actually do it. The camera is rolling, of course, but why would that stop a true Casanova?
He talks to her in a flirty way. She looks like she’s heard every line before. That’s it. The reality is that Trump’s bravado camouflages inadequacy. He probably doesn’t have as much money as he says. He almost certainly doesn’t have a plan to beat the Islamists in Syria. He can’t string a coherent thought together.
He has raised some good, necessary issues that affect the working class. But by behaving like a parody, he has turned them into a parody, too.
The Republicans, meanwhile, are left with what? The growing certainty of defeat, a fear that Trump will lose them congressional seats, too. Worse, they have undone their own aspirations to make America a cleaner place. Anyone who thinks you can’t serve God and Mammon hasn’t seen the Republican Party lately.