As many people are pointing out, Republicans now trying to distance themselves from Donald Trump need to explain why "the tape" was a breaking point when so many previous incidents weren't.
On Saturday, explaining why he was withdrawing his endorsement, Sen John McCain of Arizona cited “comments on prisoners of war, the Khan gold star family, Judge Gonzalo Curiel and earlier inappropriate comments about women” – and that leaves out Mexicans as rapists, calls for a Muslim ban, and much more. So, McCain, what took you so long?
One excuse we’re now hearing is that the new revelations are qualitatively different – that disrespect for women is one thing, but boasting about sexual assault brings it to another level.
It’s a weak defence since Trump has in effect been promising violence against minorities all along. His insistence last week that the Central Park Five, who were exonerated by DNA evidence, were guilty and should have been executed was even worse than “the tape” but drew hardly any denunciations from his party.
And even if you consider sexual predation somehow uniquely unacceptable, you have to ask where all these pearl-clutching Republicans were back in August when Roger Ailes – freshly fired from Fox News over horrifying evidence that he used his position to force women into sexual relationships – joined the Trump campaign as a senior adviser. Were there any protests at all from senior GOP figures? Of course, we know the answer.
The latest scandal upset Republicans when previous scandals didn’t because the candidate’s campaign was already in free-fall. You can even see it in the numbers. The probability of a House Republican jumping off the Trump train is strongly related to the Obama share of a district’s vote in 2012. That is, Republicans in competitive districts are outraged by Trump’s behaviour; those in safe seats seem oddly indifferent.
Meanwhile, the Trump-Ailes axis of abuse raises another question. Is sexual predation by senior political figures – which Ailes certainly was even if he pretended to be in the journalism business – a partisan phenomenon?
Bad behaviour
Just to be clear, I’m not talking about bad behaviour in general, which occurs among politicians (and people) of all political leanings. Yes,
Bill Clinton
had affairs; but there’s a world of difference between consensual sex, however inappropriate, and abuse of power to force those less powerful to accept your urges. That’s infinitely worse – and it happens more than we’d like to think.
Take, for example, what we now know about what was happening politically in 2006, a year that Nate Cohn, the Times' polling expert, suggests offers some lessons for this year.
As Cohn points out, as late as September of that year it looked as if Republicans might retain control of Congress despite public revulsion at the Bush administration. But then came the Foley scandal.
A member of Congress, Republican Mark Foley had been sending sexually explicit messages to pages, and his party had failed to take any action despite warnings. As Cohn points out, the scandal seems to have broken the dam, and led to a Democratic wave.
But think about how much bigger that wave might have been if voters had known what we know now: that former Republican US Representative Dennis Hastert, who had been speaker of the House since 1999, himself had a long history of molesting teenage boys.
Why do all these stories involve Republicans?
One answer may be structural. The GOP is, or was until this election, a monolithic, hierarchical institution, in which powerful men could cover up their sins much better than they could in the far looser Democratic coalition.
Cynicism
There is also, I’d suggest, an underlying cynicism that pervades the Republican elite. We’re talking about a party that has long exploited a white backlash to mobilise working-class voters while enacting policies that actually hurt those voters but benefit the wealthy.
Anyone participating in that scam – which is what it is – has to have the sense that politics is a sphere in which you can get away with a lot if you have the right connections. So in a way it’s not surprising if a disproportionate number of major players feel empowered to abuse their position.
Which brings us back to the man almost all senior Republicans were supporting for president until a day or two ago. Assuming that Trump loses, many Republicans will try to pretend that he was a complete outlier, unrepresentative of the party. But he isn’t.
He won the nomination fair and square, chosen by voters who had a pretty good idea of who he was.
He had solid establishment support until very late in the game. And his vices are, dare we say, very much in line with his party’s recent tradition.
Trump, in other words, isn’t so much an anomaly as he is a pure distillation of his party’s modern essence.
