Having endured Donald Trump in their faces for nearly a decade now, one would think more Republicans would understand better the man they've kept as their party leader. Instead, they are running to reporters, professing shock and outrage at the cast of dangerous clowns he is tapping to serve in his cabinet. Regarding Pete Hegseth, who Trump nominated to run the Defense Department, an anonymous person linked to Trump's transition team professed "frustration" to the Washington Post, complaining, "He hadn’t been properly vetted."
No level of "vetting" can turn a Fox News host into someone capable of running the world's largest military, but the immediate cause of this complaint appears to be an accusation of sexual assault made against Hegseth in 2017. The details of the allegation are disturbing. According to the Washington Post, a memo sent to the Trump team claims Hegseth "raped the then-30-year-old conservative group staffer in his room after drinking at a hotel bar" after she was tasked with getting the visibly intoxicated man to bed. Hegseth later paid her, in exchange for a non-disclosure agreement, but the Post verified the police had investigated the incident without filing charges. Hegseth claims the sex was consensual.
However cranky members of Trump's team seem to be about this, however, Trump himself continues to be pleased with Hegseth. Maggie Haberman at the New York Times reported Trump is "standing by" Hegseth, and his spokesman told the newspaper, "We look forward to his confirmation."
This should not be a surprise to anyone. In the past two years, Trump lost two civil lawsuits filed against him by E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of sexually assaulting her in a department store. In response, Trump blamed Carroll for being alone with a man "within minutes" of meeting him. Trump's instinct whenever a man is accused of sexual abuse is to rush to his defense. Just last month, Trump was complaining that movie producer Harvey Weinstein "got schlonged" by a successful rape prosecution. It's unlikely that Trump believes Weinstein, who has been accused of abuse by over 80 women, is innocent. This fits into his history of treating all sexual abuse allegations — at least against white men — as categorically illegitimate.
It's not just that Trump doesn't care about sexual assault. He appears to see it as a bonus if one of his nominees or allies has faced such allegations. When he nominated Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., to be attorney general, it was already well-known that Gaetz had been accused of sexual abuse of a 17-year-old girl. Reports suggest that Trump put forward Gaetz's name after finding out that the House Ethics Committee was close to releasing the damning findings of a lengthy investigation of the alleged crime.
In 2018, Christine Blasey Ford accused Trump's new nominee to the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, of attempting to rape her in high school. A recent Senate report revealed that, despite claims to investigate the accusation, the Trump White House focused its energies on suppressing corroborating evidence. Republicans swiftly realized that the MAGA base shared Trump's view that it was a travesty that Blasey Ford had been allowed to tell her story at all. The myth of Kavanaugh's victimization became a central plank of the 2020 Trump campaign narrative. Even though Trump lost that election, he only seems to have doubled down on the view that it's good if a nominee is accused of sexual assault, because that means he can paint the man as a victim of the "woke mob" to his base.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., seems to agree. Even as other Republicans grouse, often anonymously, about Hegseth and Gaetz to reporters, the self-declared "Bible-believing Christian" is publicly engaging in a shameless cover-up of the House Ethics report on Gaetz. When CNN's Jake Tapper asked Johnson how he could support such nominees while claiming to be "a man of God," Johnson flashed his signature smarmy smile before praising them as "persons who will shake up the status quo." But, of course, it's only in the delusional alternative universe where Republicans live that the "status quo" is a space where victims of sexual violence typically see justice. The real status quo is the one Trump and his cronies are trying to defend, where only 2.5% of rapes lead to prison time for the perpetrator.
Johnson's showy piety is even more ludicrous in light of the report's leaked details. Politico spoke to an attorney for two of the women who testified to the Ethics Committee and said his clients "attended more than five and as many as 10 'sex parties' with Gaetz between the summer of 2017 and the end of 2018, during his first term in the House." Democrats are seeking alternate ways to get the evidence into the public light if Johnson continues to suppress it.
Even if the report becomes fully public, though, don't expect Trump to care. His campaign was constructed on an implicit promise to male voters that Trump was on a mission to restore sexist privileges many men feel have been lost in the #MeToo era. Defending a man's "right" to have sex with underage girls would be making good on a campaign promise. It's tempting to hope this will anger the public and result in consequences for Trump, but frankly, that's unlikely. As noted above, a New York civil jury found Trump to have committed sexual assault against Carroll, but this information did not stop him from winning the 2024 election.
In an understandably angry New York Times editorial on Sunday, Roxane Gay wrote, "Trump is successful because of his faults, not despite them, because we do not live in a just world." That understanding is what Trump is counting on when he puts forward nominees like Hegseth and Gaetz. He expects his base voters to see these two like they see him, as an aspirational figure. And not because they believe they're innocent men done wrong, either. The ability to commit crimes — even sex crimes — and get away with it is part of the allure of Trumpism.
