![\"dd195519ff0ae9472613fc09e772c973\"](\"http:\/\/forefrontnews.cn\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/dd195519ff0ae9472613fc09e772c973.png\" "\\"dd195519ff0ae9472613fc09e772c973\\"")
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Donald Trump was found civilly liable last year for the\u00a0defamation and sexual abuse<\/a>\u00a0of the writer E Jean Carroll – just one of the\u00a0more than 27 women<\/a>\u00a0who have accused him of sexual misconduct. In January 2025, he will again be president of the United States \u2013 the first to take office with a court-adjudicated history of sex crimes.<\/p>\n And it seems he\u2019s eager to pack the White House with people just like him.<\/p>\n Four of president-elect Trump\u2019s cabinet-level nominees have faced serious allegations of sexual misconduct, ranging from\u00a0workplace sexual harassment<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0assault<\/a>, and a fifth is embroiled in a\u00a0sexual abuse-related lawsuit<\/a>.<\/p>\n As Americans brace themselves for Trump 2.0, it\u2019s time to be clear-eyed about the Maga machine: a history of alleged sexual criminality isn\u2019t a bug, it\u2019s a central part of the hardware; an organizing principle that clarifies how Trump and those like him view their power and how they intend to wield it.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s first choice for attorney general, the former representative Matt Gaetz, was concurrently under investigation by the\u00a0Department of Justice<\/a>\u00a0and the House ethics committee for allegedly\u00a0violating federal sex-trafficking laws<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0statutory rape<\/a>. The disgraced representative also\u00a0reportedly bragged about his sexual conquests and showed nude photos of women to his fellow lawmakers<\/a>. On Thursday afternoon, Gaetz\u00a0announced he would be withdrawing his name<\/a>\u00a0from consideration to avoid being a \u201cdistraction to the critical work of the Trump\/Vance Transition\u201d, just hours before CNN published a report about\u00a0a second alleged sexual encounter between Gaetz and a 17-year-old<\/a>. (The age of consent in Florida is 18.)<\/p>\n Gaetz\u2019s withdrawal provided a brief moment of relief. But, still, Trump\u2019s would-be cabinet is filled with alleged criminals, all of whom the president-elect has vociferously defended, and all of whom deny wrongdoing.<\/p>\n Elon Musk<\/a>, whom Trump has tapped for the made-up position of \u201cefficiency czar\u201d, reportedly exposed his penis to a SpaceX flight attendant in 2016 and offered to buy her a horse in exchange for sex. Musk\u2019s company SpaceX paid her $250,000 in 2018 to settle the sexual misconduct claim. He was also\u00a0sued this year by eight former SpaceX employees<\/a>, who alleged that the CEO treated \u201cwomen as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size, bombarding the workplace with lewd sexual banter\u201d.<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s the nominee for secretary of defense, the Fox News host Pete Hegseth, who was accused of sexually assaulting a staff member of the California Federation of Republican\u00a0Women<\/a>\u00a0in 2017.<\/p>\n In the\u00a0police report that was filed<\/a>\u00a0at the time, and which was obtained by the New York Times, the unnamed woman told law enforcement that Hegseth had taken her phone and blocked her exit from his hotel room before assaulting her. Though Hegseth was never charged with a crime, he did enter into a nondisclosure agreement with the woman, which included a financial settlement.<\/p>\n Robert F Kennedy Jr was accused of\u00a0sexually assaulting Eliza Cooney<\/a>, a former family babysitter, in the late 90s. Trump now wants him to run the Department of Health and Human Services.<\/p>\n Finally, Trump\u2019s pick for secretary of education,\u00a0Linda McMahon, was recently named in a lawsuit\u00a0<\/a>alleging that she and her husband, Vince McMahon, failed to stop an employee from sexually abusing children in the 1980s and 90s, when the McMahons were running World Wrestling Entertainment. (An attorney for McMahon\u00a0told CNN<\/a>\u00a0that the lawsuit is \u201cfilled with scurrilous lies.\u201d)<\/p>\n These picks feel comically brazen, like shots fired directly at the #MeToo movement, which erupted in the wake of Trump\u2019s election in 2016. It\u2019s not a stretch to imagine that Trump, a man who has\u00a0threatened to sue every one of his accusers<\/a>\u00a0and has openly bragged about\u00a0grabbing women \u201cby the pussy\u201d<\/a>\u00a0without their consent, is attempting to exact revenge on a movement designed to use the collective to force consequences for a handful of powerful predators.<\/p>\n #MeToo was just one piece of a slate of shifting gender norms over the last decade. Now, we\u2019re living in the middle of a backlash.<\/p>\n Roe v Wade has fallen, a known sexual abuser is re-entering the Oval Office, and the very online far right has found a new slogan: \u201cYour body, my choice<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n In Susan Faludi\u2019s 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women,she writes that these moments of backlash are not random. They are \u201cpreemptive strikes\u201d, which \u201chave always been triggered by the perception \u2013 accurate or not \u2013 that women are making great strides\u201d.<\/p>\n The perception that women were gaining status at the expense of men\u2019s, combined with the real ways in which many men in this country are\u00a0struggling economically, socially and mentally<\/a>, has seemingly helped fuel the Trump campaign.<\/p>\n Trump\u00a0sneered at<\/a>\u00a0\u201cchildless cat ladies\u201d, courted Joe Rogan listeners and crypto-bros, and trotted out Hulk Hogan to perform hyper-macho drag at the Republican national convention. The campaign deployed far-right influencers to wax poetic on X \u2013 which Musk owns \u2013 about the dangers of \u201ctoxic femininity\u201d and mock the peeing habits of men who supported Kamala Harris.<\/p>\n On election day, Trump senior adviser and noted white nationalist\u00a0Stephen Miller tweeted a very particular plea<\/a>: \u201cGet every man you know to the polls.\u201d After Trump\u2019s win, the far right were out in full force celebrating what they clearly perceived not just as a win for their preferred political leader, but for their gender as a whole; they\u00a0flooded X and TikTok with the phrases<\/a>\u00a0\u201cyour body, my choice\u201d and \u201cget back in the kitchen\u201d and crafted supercuts of liberal women crying.<\/p>\n Perhaps what Trump is counting on is that people who oppose the draconian agenda of his administration will be so exhausted by the piling horrors that they\u2019ll get overwhelmed and give up \u2013 that all of the allegations will blend together and the backlash will become the norm. And yet, we know where a backlash brews, so does a resistance to it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Donald Trump was found civilly liable last year for the\u00a0defamation and sexual abuse\u00a0of the writer E Jean Carroll – just one of the\u00a0more than 27 women\u00a0who have accused him of… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3347,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[260,257],"tags":[1178,350,1177,1176],"views":470,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/forefrontnews.cn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3346"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/forefrontnews.cn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/forefrontnews.cn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/forefrontnews.cn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/forefrontnews.cn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3346"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/forefrontnews.cn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3346\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3348,"href":"http:\/\/forefrontnews.cn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3346\/revisions\/3348"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/forefrontnews.cn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/forefrontnews.cn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/forefrontnews.cn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/forefrontnews.cn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/div>\n