The Republican Party had scarcely given up trying to make Donald Trump go away when someone dug up evidence of misbehavior that they hoped would free it from him at the last minute: In 2005 he confided to a muck raker that he was strongly attracted to beautiful women and that his wealth and fame enabled him to kiss them - and even 'grope them', or visit them in his beauty pageants' dressing rooms.
Compared to Bill Clinton's trysts, Trump's antics are sophomoric, but hardly surprising in a country that has been using women's likeness to sell everything from toothpaste to viagra. Industry will never accept to change its ways, so feminists double down on individual men who show inappropriate lust. Never missing a beat, the media is turning the story into a crisis that could be fatal for the Republican Party, perhaps forgetting which candidate is most likely to deliberately bring on World War III.
The party of Lincoln is not only known for its flag-waving, but also, for its pudibundity. In recent years, purity balls have been held in which a girl pledges to remain 'pure' until her wedding day, symbolically 'marrying' God, and promising her father that she will remain a virgin until she becomes a wife. The balls resemble giant wedding ceremonies, the twelve year old girls in white gowns dancing with their fathers, who promise to 'protect' their daughter's chastity.
Republican candidates must be seen against this background, yet unlike most of those he defeated, Trump has drawn major support from two groups: religious voters and those without a college education. The former were won over against their better judgement by promises to alleviate their economic problems, and are likely to be horrified by documentary proof of Trump's lack of respect for women. As for the other, gun toting group, it is likely to rise up if Trump is booted out of the election.
Democrats have been speculating whether Trump would bring up the infidelities of Hillary Clinton's husband that almost wrecked his presidency, in retaliation for attacks on his character, and few woud have blamed him for letting lose on those episodes during the presidential debates. I was still living in France during Bill Clinton's impeachment, and remember how Europe laughed at seeing the President of the most powerful nation in the world forced to respond to charges of having sex in the Oval Office. His 'European Allies' were largely indifferent to NATO's repeated bombing of Yugoslavia, but Clinton's peccadillos had them laughing in the aisles.
This was during the waning days of the Mitterrand Presidency, when the existence of a teen-age daughter by a long standing mistress was becoming back page news, the appropriate place for politicians' peccadillos in a society that was known to be wise about sex. As CNN obligingly provided wall to wall coverage of Bill Clinton being grilled by members of both parties, then in formal impeachment proceedings, the French were ridiculing the US.
Now, America's growing respect for victims of sexual harassment, the last remaining category of sex crimes to be given prominence in the media, is being drafted in an attempt to ensure a Clinton win. National anchors grill individual members of both parties as to what should happen, two weeks before the fateful election, seemingly forgetting that Donald Trump wiped out sixteen opponents in the primaries.
Meanwhile, Europeans no longer have the stomach for laughter that they did when Bill Clinton was being impeached, as they try to figure out how to live with an unstoppable flow of Muslim migrants. Having finally caught up to the US and no longer considering unwanted sexual advances as criminally liable, it will not suffice to have a new border protection agency: how will they prevent the growing Muslim population from pointing out that America's condemnation of Donald Trump proves they are right to hide their women?
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