It is not a scandal that Donald Trump sexually assaulted a child onstage.

Sorry to write about Donald Trump again, but he’s such a good foil for talking about justice. I'll keep this short.

People have been talking about an incident in which he publicly tried to kiss a child without her consent.

This is wrong behavior, and it is also normal adult behavior.

It is a scandal that Donald J. Trump, who is probably a serial rapist, and has obviously committed multiple sexual assaults and bragged about them, is not in prison. The scandal is not that some exceptionally bad thing occurred, but that this is apparently the expected, normal outcome. That the women assaulted by Trump apparently believed that they had no legal recourse, that they did not think that this was unacceptable behavior that would be punished as such if they spoke up.

It is not additionally a scandal, given the apparent absence of rule of law in this country, that the Republican party has nominated this criminal for the Presidency of the United States. (The scandal there is that he seems totally uninterested in actually doing the job, and therefore likely to cause an unusually large amount of damage to the current world order, to no purpose. I'll try to write about this before election day.)

It is separately a scandal that it is normal adult behavior to kiss a child who clearly does not want to be kissed by you.

It is not additionally a scandal that the Republican presidential nominee engages in normal adult behavior in public.

If you think that this ought to be scandalous, the place to start is by objecting to it in the cases where you have the social power to change behavior - when you personally witness it. That’s the beginning of the process. The end of the process is that it’s actually scandalous when anyone - bad person or not - sexually assaults a child in public.

2 thoughts on “It is not a scandal that Donald Trump sexually assaulted a child onstage.

  1. B

    "Donald J. Trump, who is probably a serial rapist"

    That's quite a serious claim that I haven't heard being made in the media.

    Reply
    1. Benquo Post author

      I don't have private info suggesting that it's true. I'm going on the many sexual assault claims, the deposition by his ex-wife (and his lawyer's subsequent incorrect explanation that this couldn't have been criminal behavior because of an exemption for marital rape), the lawsuit in progress against him alleging he raped a 13-year-old girl, and his apparently frequent visits to Jeffrey Epstein's rape island. Some of this is double counting, and it's of course possible that it's all false, but I know enough to come in from the rain.

      For the sake of political balance, I should mention that it seems like Bill Clinton was a frequent visitor to rape island, though as far as I know there's no specific allegation that he raped a child on the premises.

      Reply

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