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Election 2016: Trump flaw 2: Bullying and violence #NeverTrump

This is part of a series of posts on Election 2016. 

I’ll just start this post with a list of Trump’s insults. Please peruse it for a moment.

I am not averse to a politician coming out swinging when attacked. If you are in the right, and someone attacks you, I think it is both right and proper to respond, and to respond harshly in appropriate circumstances. But base insults should generally be beneath the dignity of people, and certainly we would expect it to be the rare choice for a presidential contender.

Trump, however, uses bullying and insults as his go-to behavior. He makes fun of (and this is not a comprehensive list) the disabled, POWs, Iowans, Asians, Seventh-Day Adventists, and journalists   … and these are all as groups, not as individuals. (See my past post on his overt bigotry to races, religions, and ethnicities.)  There is no reasonable way to say he is not being a bully here.

He often resorts to threatening to sue people who report anything negative about him, or who just say something negative. This sort of bullying flies in the face of the spirit of the 1st Amendment and long-standing legal doctrine that says we need a robust marketplace of ideas, and it is really tough to defame a public figure (you have to basically know what you are saying is false).  And, of course, there is the unmitigated horror of telling your political opponent that you will have her jailed if you win the election, flying in the face of our democratic institutions and the very idea of peaceful exchange of power, not to mention the rule of law.

Of course, he also judges women by their appearance. Carly Fiorina, a person who has achieved success by virtually any standards and (as much as I disagree with her) a very intelligent woman, was derided for her face.   Do I need to bring up Rosie O’Donnell? Megan Kelly (again, not one of my kindred souls) has been insulted because she had “blood coming out of her … wherever.”   Arianna Huffington is “unattractive both inside and out.”   A female columnist received a copy of a column where she said negative things about Trump, and in it he had circled herface and written “Face of a dog.”   He implied that women who were harassed at work should just get another job, like he hopes his daughter would do.   He did a side-by-side of his wife and Ted Cruz’s wife, implying that their relative prettiness was enough to prove … something. The list goes on. 

That should be enough to disqualify him as a serious contender for any office where he would have to deal with women (so, anything outside of internal fraternity offices, maybe). But, if we are to believe him and a dozen disparate women, it goes beyond words.

We all know of the video.   It was not that he said the word “pussy” that was offensive – that word actually IS locker room talk. It isn’t that he suggested that he would like to have sex with women, or even if he had some jokes about how he would like to be able to walk into a changing room of beautiful women and get away with it. All that sort of stuff really is locker room talk, and if that were it, this would not be more than a blip on the radar. Heck, some people might think it humanized him. (And evidently most evangelicals are okay with all the other stuff, so it definitely wouldn’t have hurt him there.)

The problem is that this was not hypothetical or a joke. He said that he DOES kiss women without their consent, that he can go beyond that into what any reasonable person would consider to be sexual assault by grabbing their genitals, and that he HAS used his power to walk into a changing room of beautiful women. In other words, this isn’t a group of guys trading juvenile but innocuous daydreams, but instead a powerful man who really has invaded women’s privacy and likely sexually assaulted some. This is violent behavior that caused the rise of the #NotOkay hashtag’s prominence to combat the horrific description of this as mere talk.  Trump’s denial that he actually did this caused over a dozen women to come forward and say that, no, he can’t deny it.  And I have no idea what to think of the ongoing suit on sexual misconduct allegations with a young girl.

And he is not against the idea of soliciting violence. We all remember him saying he would pay the legal bills of anyone that was violent to protestors at his rally. And he implied that someone could shoot Hillary Clinton to keep her from appointing judges that might overturn 2nd Amendment rights.    (And, yes, I’m aware of the videos purporting to say that some consultants with affiliations with the Clinton campaign may have used tactics, like insulting Trump supporters or wearing anti-Trump t-shirts, in order to get Trump rally-goers to violently attack them. Like the DNC, I disagree with those tactics. But to get a violent person to show their tendencies is hardly being violent yourself, and to compare someone with a tenuous – at best – connection with Hillary to Trump himself is absurd.)

Trump insults, bullies, and solicits violence. This is completely disqualifying for an American President. But wait … there’s even more.

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