Not many rules from the sociopathic, agoraphobic slap-fights that make up the internet translate well to our physical universe where the grownups live. But here’s a one that does: never attack someone for a transgression you have committed yourself. So the first reaction to misogynist blowdried dust-bunny Donald Trump criticising Bill Clinton’s scuzzy personal record with women should be, Good luck with that. But Trump is waging political war the way that Patriots coach Bill Belichick wins football games: Take away the opponent’s best weapon, then play to your strengths.
It just happens that playing to Trump’s strengths involves sounding like an abusive comment thread with the long-term memory of a mosquito. Last Monday, Trump tweeted: “If Hillary thinks she can unleash her husband, with his terrible record of women abuse, while playing the women’s card on me, she’s wrong!” It’s more pointed than his general, aimless displays of boorishness and chauvinism. Trump was taking a tactical approach.
The Hillary campaign does plan to “unleash” Bill on the stump and people really like Bill. Hillary — be it her demeanour in front of a crowd or the manufactured scandals and mischaracterisations by conservative media and officials — just doesn’t connect with audiences as well as Bill does; but then, Bill’s probably the most charismatic politician of the last two generations.
The logical flaws in Trump’s line of attack against Bill are many and have already been aired during this campaign, when news outlets swarmed on the story of Trump allegedly ripping out then wife Ivana Trump’s hair and allegedly sexually assaulting her (which he denies and she’s since recanted). Combined with his infidelities and multiple marriages, you can see how weak his position on Bill’s scumbaggery should’ve been. And last Tuesday, Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski and Megan Apper made this even clearer by publishing a series of excerpts from Trump interviews about the Clintons in the late 1990s, including gems like, “Can you imagine how controversial I’d be? You think about [Bill Clinton] with the women. How about me with the women? Can you imagine?”
Trump had also condemned the hypocrisy of conservatives who’d attacked Bill while carrying on extramarital affairs that he personally knew about — and even said that Bill would have been considered “everybody’s hero” if he’d cheated on Hillary with a supermodel instead of Monica Lewinsky. All this should be so damningly hypocritical that everyone sets the leeches on Trump, but that’s not the way the news cycle works any more.
Like the movie Memento, reality resets every 24 hours in the American political consciousness and what is real is whatever politicians need it to be. Trump, regardless of his actual circumstances, needs to close the deal with his audience every time he speaks. In a political movement pillaged of historicity, in which constitutional originalism and the founders’ intent is whatever politicians want to say it was to accomplish whatever they want to do, this daily reality reset does not present a liability. It’s just a granular feature of a broader tendency to rewrite the inconvenient at will.
And Trump knows that he can’t lose by attacking Bill because the larger conservative movement has already taken it as an article of faith that Bill is either a sexual predator or close enough to being one that it feels OK to imply it. Their belief in something so ugly outweighs whatever Trump might have actually said about Bill on the record, and it counters whatever appeals Hillary might make on behalf of women.
Sure, when she talks about the ‘War on Women’, she’s talking about conservative legislatures rolling back reproductive rights and access to health care nationwide, as well as GOP candidates who oppose abortion in the case of rape and incest, but that’s small potatoes compared to the body of lurid crime fiction out there that Trump’s casually reminding the audience about.
From the outside, it might seem difficult to accept Trump’s current accusations at face value given his own history with and statements about women, but Trump’s audience has embraced him and his outrageous pronouncements despite plenty of other wild inconsistencies. His negative ratings outside his core group are high, but the people he appeals to remain remarkably dedicated.
At this point, we’re witnessing their allegiance to Trump on an almost purely personal and not a policy level. You can get xenophobia, existential dread and punishment of women from almost anywhere in the Republican field, but only one candidate delivers it from under an expensive orange bird’s nest. Trump and his audience function on loyalty in the same way that internet communities do: You cheer the big fish’s clowning, irrespective of whether the jokes make sense or reveal an equally profound personal weakness as his challengers have.
The point of participating is to reaffirm that you’re in the right club and backing the right horse, and it doesn’t matter if the people who just got burned refuse to acknowledge it and say they’re burning you back even harder. Those people are stupid. Everyone in the club already knows that, anyway.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
