A series of revelations about Donald Trump’s past, including the 2005 Billy Bush tapes and now 15 women accusing him of assault, have thrown the Trump campaign into severe jeopardy.
His excuse for the former – that it’s “locker room talk”– is not remorseful enough or honest enough to win back voters alienated by his lewd comments. Young people have been especially critical of Trump’s pseudo-apology. A visual analytics firm, Sticky, found that when Trump addressed the tapes at the second presidential debate, male millennials felt nearly triple the level of sadness experienced by male Baby Boomers. (Millennial women’s feelings were not measured in the study).
Millennials are coming of age in an environment where gender equality is taken seriously. What Trump calls “locker room talk” would be grounds for suspension or expulsion if it had happened in our schools.
We grew up in a world where “rape culture” is discussed openly, where sexual assault is taken seriously in almost all cases, even when it is fictional (see: Duke lacrosse, UVA and Rolling Stone).
Millennial women are fortunate to stand on the shoulders of our foremothers and grandmothers. They pushed for women’s right to vote, they lived through the Mad Men days, and they built a world in which women’s equality is taken as fact. We may have to defend ourselves against the occasional misogynist, but the world we live in treats us well.
When Trump lashed out at one of his accusers, saying “She wouldn’t be my first choice,” he not only sounded spiteful and superficial, he sounded out of touch with the world we live in.
With Trump unwilling to apologize, the responsibility of mitigating this campaign disaster has fallen to the women in his inner circle.
When Melania Trump went on Anderson Cooper’s AC 360, she explained the tapes as…all Billy Bush’s fault, somehow. The mockery came swiftly via Twitter, with the #BillyBushMadeMeDoIt hashtag trending for several hours.
Ivanka – once hailed as her father’s trump card with young people, women, and working mothers – has taken a scaled-back schedule of appearances and ducked questions about the tapes at every turn. She gave a stump speech in a few Philadelphia suburbs and did a thoroughly vanilla magazine interview. Even her social media accounts have gone entirely apolitical, breaking their digital silence only to post the occasional recipe or bit of career advice.
Since Hillary Clinton has had well-documented struggles with millennials, one would think that we are Trump’s voters to lose – and thanks to a well-timed leak of past lewd and misogynistic comments, Trump is now poised to lose with young women in spectacular fashion.
