The national news media is increasingly directing the growing anger about sexual harassment and assault against women at President Trump, and is demanding he answer to the allegations he faced years ago as Hollywood moguls, lawmakers and even well-known journalists are being forced out of their jobs over similar charges.
Senate Democrats last week seemed to clear the deck for the attack, by pressuring Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., to resign after several women said he groped them over the last several years. Democrats were expected to use that move as a way to take the moral high ground, and push Republicans to denounce Roy Moore, who might win Alabama’s Senate race Tuesday even after women accused him of pursuing teen girls when he was in his 30s.
But the move is also helping members of the press demand that Trump answer to his own charges. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and several other Democrats have already called on Trump to resign, and Tuesday morning, the battle between Gillibrand and Trump exploded when Trump said the senator once was ready to do “anything” to get Trump to donate to her campaign.
“Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a total flunky for Chuck Schumer and someone who would come to my office ‘begging’ for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them), is now in the ring fighting against Trump,” he tweeted. “Very disloyal to Bill & Crooked-USED!” (Trump made donations to Gillibrand’s campaign committee several years ago.)
Though Trump has made similar comments about politicians in both parties — he said during the 2016 campaign that Mitt Romney would have “dropped to his knees” for his endorsement in 2012 — many in the press saw Trump’s comment as sexually suggestive.
Women on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” panel, for example, reacted to his tweet with fury. Co-host Mika Brzezinski said it was “derogatory and disgusting” and that Trump “treat[s] women like punching bags, because it’s fun for you, because you are intimidated by women.”
“It makes my blood boil,” said Time magazine columnist Elise Jordan. “You know, Kirsten Gillibrand might be on the other side of the political aisle, [but] she’s a class act, she’s a brilliant woman. She’s had a great career. She’s an inspiration and he is trying to silence her. … It is so gross and beneath the office.”
Liberal New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof suggested on Twitter that Trump’s tweet was “a scurrilous sexual innuendo meant to mock, discredit and humiliate” Gillibrand.
When Trump accuses a woman senator of being ready to “do anything” for campaign contributions, isn’t that a scurrilous sexual innuendo meant to mock, discredit and humiliate her? Is that how others read it? https://t.co/uxd4LDQ35r
— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) December 12, 2017
Trump remains a major target for members of the media who have supported efforts to take down rich and powerful movie producers, and have agreed that men in powerful media positions also need to go if they harass or assault women. Media members are now saying that if Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., the longest-serving Democrat in the House, had to leave over past claims of harassment, Trump should too.
During the 2016 election, several women accused Trump of sexual assault and harassment, all of which he has denied. Trump went on to win white women voters, a massive voting bloc, by 10 points in the general election.
But now, the press is bringing back those accusers. Monday on NBC’s “Today,” three of the women who accused Trump in the past were featured again to retell their stories.
At the White House press briefing later that day, reporters for NPR and NBC both asked the administration’s spokeswoman, Sarah Sanders, about the allegations against Trump.
“[T]he president told Howard Stern in 2005 that he had walked into a teen beauty pageant dressing room where he said that teen contestants had no clothes on because he could sort of get away with things like that,” NBC’s Jacqueline Alemany said. “Is that not an admission of sexual harassment?”
Sanders would only say that Trump had already addressed all of the allegations and that she didn’t “have anything further to add on the process.”
Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” anchor John Dickerson asked United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley about the “cultural shift going on in America” and how in that context people should “assess the accusers of the president?”
Some seem to see Trump as the endgame to the sudden cultural shift that calls for no tolerance against those accused of sexual harassment.
“The incendiary rage unleashed by Trump’s election needs to be directed back at him,” wrote liberal New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg. “Otherwise, only those who already advocate women’s equality will be forced to grant it.”
The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus likewise said of those accused, including Trump, “[T]here is more than enough reason to disbelieve their denials and more than enough reason, given the seriousness of the allegations, to conclude they are not fit to hold office.”
