Donald Trump Did It

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Yes, President Donald Trump has sexually harassed women. This concludes my ethics investigation.

I hate to bore you with technical jargon, but I suppose it’s important, in the interest of nonpartisan professional transparency, to offer some insight into my methodology. First of all, as a very good sexual harassment investigator, I know that one of the sexual harasser’s classic tells is a history of repeatedly sexually harassing women, or talking about sexually harassing women, in public, either on the internet or on video or on the record with reporters, perhaps as recently as today. A second thing that investigators like me are trained to look for is whether or not saying degrading things about women like a cartoon sex creep is kind of an accused harasser’s whole deal. A third subtle and suspicious clue is if you, the investigator, recently woke up to 17 news alerts on your phone that say, “[Accused Harasser] Just Sexually Harassed [Female Senator] in Front of Everyone Just Now!”

Armed with these parameters, I began my investigation by thinking about Donald Trump for an infinitesimally small measurement of time, the barest whisper of consciousness, a mayfly’s breath. And I have some terrible news, America. It is with 100 percent professional certainty that I must inform you our president, Donald Trump, is a sexual harasser, on account of all of the sexual harassment he constantly does. I know this comes as a shock. App-based pay-per-minute grief counselors will be on call at your neighborhood Costco; they are not covered by insurance, but they are covered by In-Churro-Ance™, the Republicans’ Obamacare replacement run by Taco Bell. Caliente savings! Live más!

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t subject Donald Trump and every politician accused of sexual misconduct to a rigorous, standardized ethics investigation — we absolutely should — just that I am so tired of participating in the collective national farce that things happening right in front of our eyes might not really be happening. That we do not already know the truth about what our president and the nation he rules think about women. We know. Anyone who says he doesn’t know is lying.

The term “sexual harassment,” used here in a social sense, not a legal one, refers to a spectrum of behaviors from unwanted sexual advances to belittling, intimidating or uncomfortable sexual comments. In other words, a spectrum of behaviors that Donald Trump engages in all the time. Barging into the dressing rooms of Miss Teen USA in order to see teenage girls naked (“I sort of get away with things like that,” Trump once told Howard Stern); calling Caitríona Perry, a reporter from Ireland, up to his desk to tell her she has a “nice smile”; once speculating, while seated next to his daughter, Ivanka, that if he weren’t her father, “perhaps I’d be dating her”; instructing a female “Apprentice” contestant to stand and twirl so the male contestants could rate her body; implying, as he did on Twitter Tuesday morning, that his professional colleague Senator Kirsten Gillibrand offered him sexual favors for political donations; bragging about forcibly kissing women and grabbing their genitals — I don’t have to keep listing them, do I? Trump’s own interviews, memoirs, news conferences and Twitter feed evince a pattern of sexual degradation, objectification and assault stretching back decades.

Not only does Trump not try to hide these behaviors from the public, he brags and laughs about them. They are, to a certain set of Americans, what makes Trump a real man. Mitch McConnell reassured the public this week that if Roy Moore won the Alabama special election (R.I.P.), he would have been subject to an ethics investigation. How comforting for the teenage girls of America to know that their government is happy to elect a man like Moore first and ask questions later, as long as he’s openly nostalgic for slavery.

Investigation, due process, objectivity — yes, these are fundamental to our justice system. And yes, Congress (like any workplace) needs some sort of routine and fair internal protocol for addressing sexual misconduct allegations. But in the far less rigid and more mercurial court of public opinion, we, as a populace, must remain cognizant of the fact that spinning eternally in the “investigation” stage is a well-established right-wing tactic to avoid meaningful action.

That’s how Republican politicians can uniformly claim to abhor racism while enacting policies that disenfranchise and ruin black and brown people — because the right-wing political and pundit classes work furiously to muddy the public understanding of what racism actually looks like. That’s how they can justify savaging abortion rights even though we know how many Americans oppose overturning Roe v. Wade (almost 70 percent!) — because they’ve successfully framed abortion as a perpetual “debate” instead of a constitutional right. That’s even how Trump justified what turned in to his Muslim ban — we need to stop accepting refugees, stop allowing citizens to travel freely, stop upholding freedom of religion and anti-discrimination statutes, he insisted, until, as he said as a candidate back in 2015, we “figure out what the hell is going on.”

So clamor for investigations, always, but don’t stop there. Demand consequences. Reject the pressure to participate in the blurring of obvious truths. Don’t let “investigation” become another bit of right-wing dazzle camouflage that Mitch McConnell can trot out to appease the center while he shoves his latest Faustian monstrosity through Congress.

No, the Democrats don’t currently control any branch of the federal government, but that doesn’t mean Republicans get to control how we communicate. We don’t have to frame everything the way that they want us to frame it. We don’t have to indulge false equivalencies, plausible deniability and disingenuous debate. Sometimes a sexual harasser is just a sexual harasser.