Truth Social, Donald Trump’s (failing) social media site, is the playground for his id.
He regularly amplifies QAnon conspiracy theories, vents with his signature random capitalization about witch hunts and rigged elections and boosts thinly veiled calls to recreate the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Because it’s not a mainstream platform and Trump’s lunacy is baked into both public and media perceptions of him, Trump gets away with regularly posting or reposting unhinged content with very little backlash. For a Trump scandal to rate, it has to be more than online behavior that, if replicated by a Democrat, would be met with simultaneous calls to drop out of the race and for a mental evaluation.
This dynamic is stark this week, as Trump’s Arlington Cemetery brawl — where he and his team not only held an illegal campaign event with the graves of recently dead soldiers as a backdrop, but also physically fought and retroactively smeared a cemetery employee who tried to stop them — slowly unfurls into a major scandal. It has additional elements that boost it into the category of headline news: dueling accounts of what happened, promised video footage, physical violence, a drip-drip-drip of additional details, the grotesqueness of using recent casualties as props.
It should be treated as a big story, especially with the added political valence that Republicans so often name themselves the only real supporters of the military.
But a concurrent scandal, concerning behavior just as abhorrent, has received a fraction of the attention. On Wednesday, Trump reposted a screenshot of another user’s response to a photo of Kamala Harris smiling with Hillary Clinton. It reads “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently…”
For Clinton, this is an obvious allusion to Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. For Harris, it’s a reference to a right-wing smear, that her 30-year-old relationship with Willie Brown, then speaker of the California State Assembly, is the only reason she succeeded in politics. This latter misogyny has often been shorthanded on the right with references to knees and kneeling; a few days earlier, Trump reposted a parody of the Alanis Morissette song “Ironic,” which said that she’d “spent her whole damn life down on her knees” with a photo of Brown in the background (in case the point was too subtle), per the New York Times.
This kind of violent misogyny, in which a woman can only succeed not just with a man’s support, but by earning that support by granting him full access to her body to fulfill his sexual desires, is par for the course for Trump. He’s been found liable for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll, and has been accused of sexual harassment and assault by dozens more. He reportedly refers to Harris as a “bitch” in private. His followers gleefully echo his disdain for women, selling and buying merchandise in 2016 reading “Hillary sucks, but not like Monica,” and in 2020 reading “Joe and the Hoe.”
The repost did get some pickup; the New York Times did a writeup, and it got some play on CNN. But the cemetery story is already eclipsing it in relative “badness.”
Trump’s misogyny isn’t novel, and the Harris camp is helping let those stories die because it’s made the clear calculation not to focus on “the first woman president” of it all (in and of itself, a sad triangulation performed in the wake of 2016). But misogyny has always been the special sauce of the MAGA movement, the glue that keeps a party with no remaining ideological coherence together — and it’s a critical thing to recognize and remember, as Harris seeks to vanquish Trump once and for all.
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