From “We Become What We Normalize: What We Owe Each Other in Worlds That Demand Our Silence” by David Dark
Consider this. In October 2016, the American public was made privy to an Access Hollywood audio recording of then candidate Donal Trump offering a detailed, gloating, and graphic description of his own act of sexual assault. “When you’re a star,” he explains, “they let you do it.”
For a day or two, his status as the standard-bearer of the Republican Party was in doubt. Paul Ryan disinvited Trump to a campaign rally. Mike and Karen Pence went radio silent. Difficult decisions confronted the cast of brand GOP. Surely this was a dealbreaker. How could the campaign, or anyone associated with it, continue under this dark cloud?
There were emerging indicators, however, of a power dynamic that seemed to counsel against decoupling. Paul Ryan discovered that, absent Trump, he was a thin stage presence at his own rally. In an impromptu news conference arranged by Steve Bannon on the night of the second debate, Trump seated to his left and to his right accusers of BIll Clinton: Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Kathy Shelton. Following Bannon’s lead Trump narrated the scene: “These four very courageous women have asked to be here, and it was our honor to help them.”
That was weird, right? It was an eye-rubbingly strange sight. Yes, Donald Trump stood accused and unrepentant as a sexual assailant, but behold these women who’d been treated like pariahs for years, whose allegations against Bill Clinton – we were made to visually recall – were never disproven. The people of the United States of America were being dramatically reminded of a certain sustained hypocrisy of predatory behavior in high places, which many Americans had, admittedly, made a kind of peace with, perhaps through repression, not long ago. After they shared statements of support for Donald Trump, reporters who tried to ask about the Access Hollywood tape were shouted down by Paula Jones: “Why don’t y’all go ask Bill Clinton that? Go ahead. Ask Hillary as well.”
And with that, the very pattern of moral evasiveness Steve Bannon sought to forcibly recall to our minds through public staging was set to repeat. The fact of what we’d heard and knew began to be somehow squared away by a set of conflict-avoidant high rollers. Within hours, everyone on Team Trump was by all appearances, back on board.