Donald Trump made it a two-fer Thursday night and Friday morning, first mocking former Sen. Al Franken for resigning in the face of sexual harassment allegations and then attacking sexual assault survivors protesting Brett Kavanaugh as “paid professionals.” Franken did what Trump would never do: he took responsibility. Trump can't stand that.
“He was wacky,” Mr. Trump said. “Boy, did he fold up like a wet rag, huh? Man. Man. He was gone so fast, O.K.?”
“Oh, he did something,” he said, adding, “‘Oh, oh, oh, I resign, I quit.’”
“I don’t want to mention Al Franken’s name, so I won’t mention.”
Whereas be it Brett Kavanaugh, Roy Moore, or Donald Trump himself, Trump always thinks a man—a white one, anyway—should angrily reject allegations, call his accusers liars, and keep on going. His view of the sexual assault survivors flooding the Capitol to protest Kavanaugh is entirely consistent with that:
Pictures of Trump from Thursday night’s rally show him standing in front of audience members holding professionally made signs identical to many other signs in the crowd. These are not signs made in the basement from love! And yet somehow Trump believes his supporters are sincere, yet not the protesters carrying a great diversity of signs and—and this is the important part—publicly telling their stories of surviving sexual assault.
Donald Trump hates women. He has contempt for men too weak to bully their way through sexual assault allegations. And he’s trying to install that view—embodied by Brett Kavanaugh—on the Supreme Court.