Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and President Trump. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)
Michael Wolff is on blast for implying that Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is sleeping with the president; and liberals are on blast for . . . putting Michael Wolff on blast.
Two weeks ago, the author of “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” encouraged readers to sleuth out a hint about an executive affair that Wolff had embedded toward the end of his book. They did, and spotted Haley as the subordinate supposedly entangled with the commander in chief. Wolff continued to feed his flames on the talk circuit, until Thursday, when Mika Brzezinski booted him from MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” for “slurring a woman” and then blaming the widespread speculation on everyone but himself.
At first, partisans of both stripes cheered Brzezinski. Soon enough, though, some conservatives on Twitter decided they were in bad company, and turned to criticizing the left for reveling in Wolff’s salacious book weeks earlier. It’s fair to say Democrats never should have embraced Wolff’s stories: Even before the Haley hullabaloo, there were plenty of problems with Wolff’s reporting that Trump critics ignored, delighted by fresh dirt on a White House they wanted even more reasons to hate. But now, liberals are getting slimed for switching course after a sexist smear. And that leaves them with no way to win.
Liberals could stand by Wolff, and be hypocrites for singing their own praises on women’s empowerment and then forgetting the words when it counts. Or they could cast Wolff aside as another in a long history of men eager bring women down to lift themselves up — and be hypocrites, because for a while they embraced his confirming depiction of a destructive presidency.
For too long, progressives chose the first path. (The Hillary Clinton staged reading of “Fire and Fury” at the Grammys was not a flattering look.) Yet now, finally, many of them seem to have self-corrected. That’s a good thing.
The sleaze-filled saga of Wolff’s allegations against Haley touches on a host of old tropes. A spotlight-seeker uses a woman’s sex life as a prop for his one-man show, playing on the audience’s interest in all things prurient to earn himself attention and cash.
Then the trusty rumor mill does what it has done for centuries: churn and churn, crushing whatever women are thrown in its way. In this case, Wolff has harnessed the machine’s oomph to squirm away from responsibility. I never said Haley slept with anyone, Wolff has cried more than once. It was everyone else on the Internet who turned this into news.
Finally, the blame falls on the woman herself. Wolff doubled down on this tactic even after his “Morning Joe” mishap: “Nikki Haley has chosen to vociferously deny something she was not accused of.”
So, to recap, Haley deserves blame for addressing accusations that didn’t exist, except they did because irresponsible reporters and readers spread them, and none of this has anything at all to do with Wolff, who only wrote a book, for gosh sake.
The other person it doesn’t appear to have anything to do with is President Trump. Instead, the focus is all on Haley. Observers wonder what kind of woman she is, what she’s angling to gain from these liaisons and what she’s done already to make it this far. And Wolff has trapped Haley into amplifying these rumors even as she denies them — because the only other choice is to say silent.
We’ve seen this over and over: Men can shame successful women for deeds they may not even have done, and then dodge the consequences because the world is too busy speculating about the wiles the women must have used to become so successful in the first place. Wolff’s a storyteller. He’s familiar with the script. And he didn’t care what happened to Haley when he set the tired tale in motion.
Democrats can’t say “time’s up” and also keep the reel running. The attack Wolff started on Haley offered them a choice: keep clinging to this man because his book satisfies their partisan schadenfreude, or switch course to stand by a woman who is a casualty of the same societal sickness they claim they want to change. Though it took many of them long enough, eventually they chose the woman.
Some may say that’s hypocrisy, but it looks an awful lot like principle.