There are lots of thankless odious jobs in America – sanitation worker, septic tank repairman – but surely none are worse than cleaning up Donald Trump’s serial excrement. That goes double for his top female acolytes, who are tasked with defending a thrice-married adulterous crotch-grabbing rapist currently on the hook for $92 million in defamation damages and slated for criminal trial two weeks from now in the porn star-business fraud-hush money case.
It’s a tough job, defending a guy who also brags about ending Roe v. Wade (sparking a new generation of pro-choice voters), a guy who’s anathema to most suburban women (voters who may well be pivotal in November); nevertheless, some high-profile Republican women have already demonstrated their willingness to tout Trump and thus humiliate themselves.
By now you’ve met Katie Britt, the junior Alabama senator who got caught last Friday concocting a story about how Joe Biden’s border policies had caused a Mexican girl to be raped for four years in an American brothel (the brothel was in Mexico city, and George W. Bush was president at the time). Britt, by the way, is still attacking us fact-checkers. On Fox News Sunday (natch), she said: “It is disgusting to try to silence the voice of telling the story.” But what’s really disgusting is that she lied about a sexual abuse case – falsely tying it to Biden – in order to boost Biden’s challenger, a court-convicted sexual abuser.
But the headliner this weekend was House member Nancy Mace, a South Carolinian who was once wary of Trump but has since had her brain pounded to dust beneath the MAGA heel. Her Sunday morning performance on George Stephanopoulos’ ABC News show warranted a Sunday night honorary Oscar for Best Implosion.
Mace has repeatedly shared her story of being raped at age 16. So Stephanopoulos, multiple times, asked her a simple straightforward question: As a rape victim, how can you endorse a rapist?
He pointed out: “Two separate juries have found him liable for rape and for defaming a victim of that rape…Its been affirmed by a judge.”
A MAGAt doesn’t like being confronted with facts. The reflexive response is to huff and puff and feign persecution. These were Mace’s responses:
“I’m not going to sit here in your show and be asked a question meant to shame me…You are shaming me, you’re trying to shame me…You are trying to shame a rape victim. I find it disgusting…I find it deeply offensive…I find it offensive, as a rape victim, that you’re trying to shame me for my political choices.”
He wasn’t shaming for being a rape victim. He was asking her a legitimate question; she was trying to exploit her standing as a rape victim to avoid giving an answer.
Her eventual answer was that Trump (“the man I believe is best for our country”) didn’t really do anything so bad: “He was not found guilty in a criminal court of law. It was a civil, it was sexual abuse. It wasn’t actually rape by the way…He defended himself over that and denies that it ever happened. But he was not found guilty in a criminal court of law. It was a civil judgment over sexual abuse.”
Oh.
So…civil courts don’t count? So it’s OK for a rape victim to support someone she admits is a sexual abuser? So the fact that Trump “defended himself and denies that it ever happened” is more credible than two jury verdicts and a judge’s affirmation? So her faux rationale (“it wasn’t rape by the way”) is more credible than the judge’s ruling that, under New York law, what he did to E. Jean Carroll constituted rape?
But those who wear the Trump armband believe that the best defense is to stay on offensive. Mace triple-downed on Stephanopoulos yesterday by calling him a “piece of shit” via the acronym POS.
Actually, I hope these MAGA women – Katie Britt, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Nancy Mace – keep punching themselves in the face. We need them on TV to repel more women voters. Indeed, we’ll need all the help we can get to defeat the Putin-Trump ticket.