The Awful Truth Trump’s Cabinet Picks Make Clear

Yes, the #MeToo movement launched a culture- and law-changing reckoning with sexual harassment, abuse, and power, first in the U.S., then across the globe. But in recent weeks it has become clear that the movement also, perversely, seems to have empowered right-wing men to act with even more impunity than before.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet and close staff picks, several of whom have been accused of sexual misconduct—not to mention the president himself, who has not only been credibly accused but found liable for sexual abuse in court. It’s like the dark inverse of this (lightly paraphrased) line from The Incredibles: If everyone is super, then no one will be.

This appears to be the emerging conservative mentality. If everyone is a sexual predator, then no one’s history of misdeeds matters (or, at least, no one needs to be held accountable). MAGA Republicans seem to be having their own #MeToo moment, except here, a growing cohort of men is essentially saying: Oh, another man accused of sexual predation? #MeToo—and so what? Being accused of sexual harassment, abuse, or assault is no longer disqualifying; on the right, it has been normalized. It may even be an asset.

The file of sexual misconduct allegations against Trump’s Cabinet nominees is certainly robust. There is Matt Gaetz, Trump’s pick for attorney general, who was investigated by the Justice Department he is now set to lead for sex trafficking involving sex with a minor, and by the House Ethics Committee for those same alleged crimes as well as using illicit drugs, showing photos and videos of women he was sexually involved with to colleagues on the House floor, and other improprieties. The committee has rules about not releasing damning reports around the time of a member’s election, and so its report on Gaetz remained unpublished through Nov. 5; as the group prepared to release it, he was nominated for AG and resigned from Congress. There is Fox News host Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, who paid a woman off after she said he raped her at a California Federation of Republican Women conference, which she was attending along with her husband and their young children; Hegseth maintains that the encounter was consensual, and that the payout was only to protect his job. There is Elon Musk, tapped to co-run the yet-to-exist Department of Government Efficiency, who was sued for creating a sexually hostile workplace—according to the lawsuit, “treating women as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size” and “bombarding the workplace with lewd sexual banter.” There is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., accused of groping the babysitter (not to mention a history of womanizing, wildly irresponsible drug use, and the abuse of more than one animal corpse). Even Trump’s very few female nominees aren’t immune: There is Linda McMahon, just nominated to serve as secretary of education, who is currently being sued by victims who assert she knew about the abuse they were suffering at WWE, the company she co-founded and ran with her husband.

And of course there is the president-elect himself. Trump was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation by a Manhattan jury, and ordered to pay the woman the jury found he assaulted, the writer E. Jean Carroll, more than $80 million. Trump was also criminally convicted of falsifying business records for a bribe stemming from sex with Stormy Daniels, with whom he was cheating on his postpartum wife; Daniels’ version of the encounter also sounds not exactly consensual. And Trump has faced sexual assault, harassment, and misconduct accusations from more than a dozen women.

All of these men deny the accusations against them.

Of the more than two dozen Cabinet and staff members Trump has nominated, there are nearly as many accused sexual abusers as there are women. And that sends a pretty clear message about who Trump Term Two is for.

But it also demonstrates the efficacy with which conservatives have undercut #MeToo, and women’s claims to bodily autonomy more broadly. The first election of Trump, after the publication of the Access Hollywood tape on which he bragged about sexually violating women by grabbing them by the genitals, was part of what fueled the Women’s March and later #MeToo, both furious responses to the sexual impunity of powerful men. And while #MeToo managed to hold a handful of prominent men accountable and change laws across several states, many other men dodged accusations and either retained or ascended to important roles. The most notable among them is arguably Brett Kavanaugh, one of Trump’s Supreme Court picks, who was accused of sexually assaulting Christine Blasey Ford while they were both in high school. Kavanaugh denied the accusations; Blasey Ford gave incredible and compelling testimony at his Senate confirmation hearing; and despite Kavanaugh’s angry and reactive testimony, he was confirmed to the bench—the highest court in the land. It was from that perch that he then went on to sign on to the opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the era of abortion rights across the United States.

In the background of all this, reactionary conservative men are cheering the end of the anti-Trump feminist fight. The white supremacist Nick Fuentes started a social media trend when he posted what may be the tagline of this particular moment: “Your Body, My Choice. Forever.” The line is a reference to the longtime abortion rights slogan “My Body, My Choice,” but it also has an undeniably rapey ring. And that is not a coincidence: The power to legally force a woman to endure the permanent and sometimes dangerous full-body evolution of gestating a pregnancy for nine months, followed by the pain and risk of childbearing, is not so different from the power to force a woman into sex. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the same organs are generally involved; both acts force a woman to suffer a painful invasion of her most intimate body parts; both take what should be happy and pleasurable events (having a baby, sex) and turn them violent and violating; and both assume that a woman’s body may be used against her will, as a vessel for someone else’s desires—a man’s sexual ones, the state’s reproductive ones. “Your Body, My Choice” makes clear the relationship between the forced births and pregnancies of abortion bans and the forced sex of rape—and the desire for misogynistic humiliation and male dominance that underlies both.

Trump is coming into his second term as the president who ended legal abortion in all 50 states. He is also the first convicted felon to hold the office, and the first to have been found liable for sexual abuse. He ran a campaign catering to disaffected and often misogynistic men (“Get every man you know to the polls,” Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller tweeted on Election Day) and saw a 12-point advantage among male voters under 30 compared with female voters the same age. It is hard to see this as anything other than an anti-feminist backlash.

And at least on the right, it seems to be the case that so many men were accused of sexual predation that the impact of sexual assault and misconduct accusations has been drained of its potency. One of #MeToo’s revelations was just how many women had experienced abuse, and just how many men had behaved astonishingly badly. Sexual abuse, feminists have argued, is troublingly common. Trump and the conservatives who support him seem to have embraced a fun-house-mirror version of this ubiquity argument: Men accused of sexual abuse are everywhere. And so they should face consequences nowhere.