In the less than three weeks between the first and second presidential debates, the Donald Trump campaign veered toward the precipice of full-fledged implosion. The Washington Post released a behind-the-scenes Access Hollywood recording of Trump bragging, in language heretofore considered too graphic for print, that his celebrity status gave him the latitude to sexually assault women. In the aftermath, Trump’s national support began lagging double digits behind Clinton’s, while a slew of Republican leaders withdrew their endorsements and multiple segments of the electorate pulled back their support. The latter development is a potentially fatal ailment for Trump’s campaign, since he must broaden his appeal in order to prevail in November. In polls immediately following the tape’s release, only white men without a college degree doubled down in support of their nominee. Michelle Obama pilloried Trump at a Hillary Clinton rally for behavior “below basic standards of human decency.” After Anderson Cooper pressed Trump at the second presidential debate to declare for the record that he had never committed the acts described in the Access Hollywood tape, a growing number of women—a total of 15 as of October 13—publicly accused him of forcibly groping or kissing them, adding to those who have already described instances of his inappropriate behavior toward them. Trump has dismissed his recorded lechery as “locker room banter” and called the accumulating allegations “false smears.” The presidential campaign has become, in the words of Slate’s Jamelle Bouie, an increasingly well-defined “referendum on misogyny and sexual assault.” The controversy surrounding Trump’s remarks is disheartening. Despite their criticism, much of the GOP establishment still stands by him. The recent condemnations cannot erase months of similar remarks from Trump which were met with silence and tacit support from the GOP. Throughout his campaign, Trump has brought bigotry into the mainstream, and the recent GOP queasiness over their nominee cannot undo that harm.
While some establishment Republicans have condemned Trump’s comments, some GOP figures have failed even to express opposition to his sentiments. Representative Blake Farenthold told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes that he would “consider” retracting his support if Trump had stated that he enjoyed raping women (as opposed, apparently, to groping them). Moreover, multiple leading Republicans, including Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have condemned the content of the tape but stopped short of withdrawing their endorsements of Trump, bowing, it seems, to the demands of maintaining a semblance of party unity.
But even those Republicans who have condemned Trump’s language—and the even fewer who have withdrawn support for his candidacy—have hardly stepped forward in favor of equity; rather, they have demonstrated the expansive bounds of what they will tolerate. The list of apparently acceptable behaviors by the nominee includes the racism Trump has exhibited since the first day of his campaign – when he called Mexican immigrants criminals and “rapists.” It includes his refusal to condemn the white supremacists supporting him, including former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke; his tweeting anti-Semitic images; and his proposal to ban the entrance of Muslims into the United States. His unabashed bigotry toward federal judge Gonzalo Curiel prompted a critique from Paul Ryan as a “textbook” racist comment but also a clarification that Ryan would continue to support Trump in the pursuit of “moving our agenda forward.” His enthusiasm for torture, his calls for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants and summary waiving of 14th Amendment citizenship rights, and his condoning violence committed by his followers sparked no mass exodus. Even the ostensible shock over his comments about women seems relatively surprising given the ways in which Trump has referred to women since the beginning of the primaries. To catalogue every outlandishly inappropriate statement Trump has made would be an exhaustive task. Indeed, on the day before the Access Hollywood tape was released, Trump insisted on the guilt of the Central Park Five, five men accused of rape as a result of racial bias and subsequently exonerated. There is no clear reason why the Access Hollywood tape ought to have been the straw that broke the camel’s back and sparked this degree of condemnation.
Yet, the Access Hollywood scandal is what resulted in the most criticism. Perhaps the proportionally greater response can be explained by the vulgarity of his language, or the increasing proximity to November 8. But some activists have pointed out that this tape—in which Trump brags about sexual harassment to the snickers of Billy Bush and greets the actress Arianne Zucker moments later—can be perceived as demeaning white women, in contrast to much of Trump’s bluster aimed at people of color. His prior denouncements of white women have largely singled out specific individuals—Rosie O’Donnell, Megyn Kelly—but the Access Hollywood tape features Trump bragging about his advances on any number of “beautiful women,” so as to shatter any previous illusion that his views are anything but generalized misogyny. Voters of color were unlikely to support Trump even if he had not escalated the GOP’s indifference to their concerns into outright hostility, but white Republican women might well forestall his presidency by withholding their votes. The number of post-tape statements from Republicans referencing their wives, mothers, and daughters suggests that these political figures only felt their passions stirred when the figures in their own household became targets. Trump is far more blatant in his bigotry than his political compatriots, but he spent months joyfully fulminating against women he deemed unattractive or defiant, people of color, and Muslims because the GOP apparently lacks the will or ability to condemn such speech.
After months of Trump receiving little to no criticism for his behavior, his supporters seem to struggle to adjust to the notion that his conduct is no longer acceptable. In the aftermath of the tape’s release and resulting fallout with the GOP, his supporters have continued to cling to their candidate. One reporter covering a Trump rally in Charlotte described attendees saying, “Women say all the time they’ve been raped. They lie all the time”; depicting the women accusing Trump of sexual harassment as unattractive and, as a result, lying since none of them could induce a loss of his self-control; and chanting “lock them up” to not only Trump’s typical target, Clinton, but also Trump’s accusers and the deceitful media.
Patrik Jonsson of the Christian Science Monitor recently analyzed the way in which “deeply buried” racism is rising to the surface of American politics, identifying the process to which Trump is contributing by re-packaging bigotry for delivery into mainstream public discourse. Trump could not have found success with this campaign strategy—enough to clinch the nomination and remain fairly competitive with Clinton in national polls—in the absence of pre-existing popular receptiveness to these ideas and its equally insidious counterpart, apathy to their prevalence. Four congressional Republicans who rescinded their Trump endorsements have quietly returned to him in the face of outrage from his supporters, including South Dakota Senator John Thune, whose constituents called for him to resign after he publicly pushed Trump to drop out of the race. The day after the Access Hollywood comments became public, 74 percent of Republican voters surveyed in a POLITICO poll felt that party officials should continue to support Trump. When poll respondents were asked to rate their feelings about the video, 10 percent of Republicans said that the video gave them a positive feeling. 36 percent said it did not affect their opinion of Trump; less than half said that the tape made them feel more negatively toward him. (Continued support for Trump among white working-class voters was split along gender lines, with Clinton pulling even among women and continuing to lag with men.) For this 46 percent of Republican voters, a tape confirming Trump’s past degradation of women, if surprisingly vulgar, does not present a shock. His supporters have, perhaps, known all along what Trump represents. Not every follower would consider themselves prejudiced, and some may even constitute a “silent majority” that feels discomfort toward his bigotry. It is their silence in pursuit of party loyalty that is so troubling; these voters, who allow Trump to run rampant in the space of their apathy, are almost more concerning than those who feel comfortable releasing their inner bigot in support of the nominee. That extremists support Trump is, at this point, undeniable. We ought to direct more of our concern toward their enablers: the self-proclaimed “moderate” GOP members who have seen what Trump advocates, felt unmoved to protest his racism and xenophobia despite any personal discomfort, and walked back their only forceful condemnations of him after the tape surfaced.
Ultimately, Trump’s campaign has appealed to the darkest leanings of the electorate, but reactions to his latest scandal at both the establishment and grassroots level demonstrate that he did not create these sentiments. The apathy with which conventional conservatives have treated the unprecedented bigotry of Trump’s campaign is not only cowardly, but also illustrative of the lengths to which the GOP will go to avoid alienating racists and sexists and their votes. Trump has pushed these conversations into the mainstream, but a much broader constituency has tolerated or outright championed them, and this, more than Trump’s latest exhibition of misogyny, is the most frightening aspect of his campaign’s devolution.