As sex scandals topple the powerful, why not Trump?
President selective in which fellow politicians he targets with tweets
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?
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 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,” said 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 establishment 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.
He quickly unloaded on Democrat Al Franken after the Minnesota senator was accused Thursday of forcibly kissing and groping a Fox TV sports correspondent, now a Los Angeles radio anchor, during a 2006 USO tour.
Yet Trump has been largely mum as Washington Republicans try to figure out what to do about Moore.
McConnell and company have zero interest in welcoming an accused child molester to their ranks nor in seeing their slim 52-48 Senate majority grow even thinner should Moore lose to Democrat Doug Jones in a special election Dec. 12.
Trump did support moves by the national Republican Party to cut off money for Moore. But he hasn’t said whether he still backs Moore’s candidacy.
Spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders, pressed repeatedly on the matter this week, would say only that Trump “thinks that the people of Alabama should make the decision on who their next senator should be.”
As for the allegations against Moore, Sanders said Trump finds them “very troubling.”
As for Franken, presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway told Fox News that Trump had merely “weighed in as he does on the news of the day” when jabbing at the senator.
But Trump’s broadsides at Franken served as an open invitation for critics to revisit his own history of alleged sexual misconduct.
Leeds called the president “the walking definition of hypocrisy.”
The sexual assault drama is playing out as a painful sequel for Leeds and other women who came forward during the 2016 presidential campaign to accuse Trump of harassment and more — only to see him elected president anyway.
“My pain is every day,” Jill Harth, a former business associate who claimed Trump put his hands under her dress during a business dinner in 1992, tweeted in October. “No one gets it unless it happens to them. NO one!”
It’s the same for those who accused former President Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct.
“I am now 73. ... It never goes away,” nurse Juanita Broaddrick, who accused Clinton of raping her in 1978, tweeted Friday.
Even in the current charged environment, when every new allegation can produce screaming headlines, Trump may well be able to go his own way — and take a hands-off approach to Moore.