Trump mocks Franken, despite own past filled with numerous allegations
of cleansing debate about sexual harassment into another weapon in the war between the political parties, led by the president himself.
Indeed, Republicans on Friday were more than happy to talk about Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., who apologized this week after a radio newscaster said he forcibly kissed her and posed for a photograph a decade ago appearing to fondle her breasts while she was sleeping. Democrats, for their part, sought to keep the focus on Roy Moore, the Republican candidate in Alabama who has been accused of unwanted sexual conduct by multiple women going back even further, including one who was 14 at the time.
But the notion that Trump himself would weigh in given his own history of crude talk about women and the multiple allegations against him surprised many in Washington who thought he could not surprise them anymore. A typical politician with Trump’s history would stay far away from discussing someone else’s behavior lest it dredge his own back into the spotlight.
“Like everything else Trump touches, he hijacks it with his chronic dishonesty and childishness,” said Mark Salter, a longtime adviser to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
White House aides labored Friday to distinguish Trump’s case from those of others, arguing that the president’s conduct was not at issue because he won the election last year after voters had a chance to evaluate both the claims against him and his denials.
“This was covered pretty extensively during the campaign,” said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary. “We addressed that then. The American people, I think, spoke very loud and clear when they elected this president.”
She added that Trump still maintained that the more than a dozen women who have said that he kissed or groped them against their will were all lying.
But Democrats saw the distinction differently. Hillary Clinton said Franken’s apology and call for an ethics committee investigation “is the kind of accountability I’m talking about — I don’t hear that from Roy Moore or Donald Trump.”
Trump jumped into the sexual harassment debate about 10 p.m. Thursday. “The Al Frankenstien picture is really bad, speaks a thousand words,” he wrote on Twitter, misspelling Frankenstein. “Where do his hands go in pictures 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6 while she sleeps?”
Trump has said nothing on Twitter about Moore, who has been abandoned by many national Republicans. When the allegations arose, Trump was in Asia and he had Sanders issue a statement saying he hoped that “if these allegations are true, Judge Moore will do the right thing and step aside.” Asked by reporters on Air Force One about the case, Trump said he did not know much about it and would comment once he returned to Washington.
Since returning, however, he has said nothing, leaving it instead to Sanders. “The president certainly finds the allegations extremely troubling,” she said Friday, adding that it would be up to “the people in the state of Alabama” to decide “whether or not they support and vote for Roy Moore.”
Kellyanne Conway, the president’s counselor, explained the president’s decision to speak out about Franken and not Moore as a function of the news cycle. “Al Franken was a brandnew news story yesterday and the president weighed in as he does on the news of the day, often enough,” she said on Fox News. “The Roy Moore story is eight days old and the president put out a statement during his Asia trip on that.”
Other Republicans shook their heads. “It’s surprising to me that he would draw attention to this given the conversation about him, even if it’s all untrue,” said Sara Fagen, a White House political director under President George W. Bush. “This is one you send your vice president on.”
The president’s comment on Franken inevitably led television networks to replay his now infamous Access Hollywood tape, in which he was recorded saying that when he saw beautiful women, “I just start kissing them” and would try to “grab ’em” by their private parts. “And when you’re a star, they let you do it,” he said.
He apologized, saying those remarks did not reflect his real self, but later dismissed them as “locker room talk.” A succession of women, however, accused him of grabbing their breasts, trying to put his hand up a skirt and other sexual misconduct. Trump called such claims “lies” but never followed up on his threat to sue them.