“Our Incompetence Is Your Fault,” An Endless Republican Series

Jazz Shaw is VERY USPET about the timing of the latest revelations about Donald Trump, and why not since they’ve reduced his chances of winning from “very poor” to “76ers winning 5 straight NBA championships starting in 2016-7.” Certainly, nobody could possibly have known that he was a gross misogynist with many potential skeletons in his closet until October 2016:

People want me to [run for president] all the time … I don’t like it. Can you imagine how controversial I’d be? You think about [Bill Clinton] and the women. How about me with the women? Can you imagine?

Oh, sorry, that was Donald Trump in 1999. Here’s Jazz:

John already broke down the claims being made by several women regarding unwanted sexual advances by Donald Trump anywhere from ten to thirty years ago, and the hounds have been loosed in the usual media sources. But now that the headlines have had twelve hours or so to percolate, can we talk about the real elephant in the room here? Are we simply going to ignore the awfully convenient timing of this batch of accusations in defiance of reason and the normal rules of engagement in political warfare?

This comes down to a fairly basic case of Occam’s Razor. The two explanations can be defined without much effort by anyone without a vested interest in the outcome of the race. On the one hand we have the possibility that these women are innocent of any subterfuge and are seeking justice for alleged misdeeds. That would also mean that for anywhere from ten to thirty years they somehow found reason to not make much of a big deal out of the incidents. All that time Trump was a nationally known figure and a wealthy person who would be an obvious target for some sort of civil suit if not an outright criminal prosecution. Even if they had “put it all behind them” for some reason, but were reminded of the offenses when they noticed that Trump was running for President, this could have been done as early as the fall of 2014. Or any time in 2015 when Trump was rising in the polls after officially launching his campaign. Or any time during the primary when he was closing the deal. Or even after the convention when he was the official candidate and climbing in the polls.

In the light of Cosby, Savile, etc. etc. the idea that it’s somehow unusual that revelations of even serial sexual assault have taken a long time to surface, and that it takes a certain tipping point for victims to feel comfortable coming forward, is absurd. The floodgates that were set in motion by the Alicia Machado trap that Trump predictably blundered right into are a fairly predictable pattern.  (Nor is it true that Trump hadn’t been subject to civil suits for his behavior prior to the last week.) So, sure, the campaign is not incidental to the timing — but that’s politics, and Clinton’s baiting only worked because Trump was in fact guilty as well as being undisciplined and incompetent.

In fairness to the Republican Party, it’s not as if he had to participate in a nominating contest with 16 other candidates who were free to perform opposition research and make their findings public. Actually, come to think of it, he did have to. So the interesting question is how this particularly rich target for oppo research managed to emerge unscathed from the primaries. The first factor is the laziness and incompetence of his opponents. Not just the flat-out grifters/griftees like Carson but putatively serious candidates like Rubio ran comically inept campaigns that couldn’t be bothered with serious opposition research any more than they could be bothered constructing more than threadbare state organizations. The second was a sort of collective action problem, in which the people who thought they would win (including Cruz) played kid gloves with Trump expected to be the last opponent standing when Trump inevitably imploded.  Not even necessarily a bad idea at the time, but it failed miserably. Still, I don’t think the latter is a full explanation — Jeb!, for example, couldn’t pretend to play nice with Trump, and yet the Bush who ended up inadvertently taking Trump down for good was Billy.

Anyway, to Republicans who think it’s unfair that this stuff is coming out now, LOL, and LOL again. It’s your problem on every level.