Predators’ Ball

Whether You Want it or Not

If Trump’s election in 2016 was a slap in the face to American women, 2024 is a closed-fist punch. Have you lately totted up the number of men in and around Donald Trump’s circle accused of trafficking, domestic violence, or sexually abusing or assaulting women? That is, besides Orange himself, with his two dozen-plus, on-the-record accusers, and one whopping nearly $100 million judgment for E. Jean Carroll.

Here’s a short list of Trumpland’s not very exclusive predatory creep club, off the top of my head: Jeffrey Epstein (no ID necessary); Steve Bannon (domestic violence); Matt Gaetz (trafficking); Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (groping); Elon Musk (sued by eight women for sexual harassment); Jason Miller (abortifacient slipped into a smoothie); Rob Porter (domestic violence); Roy Moore (underage sex predator); Brad Parscale (domestic violence). Corey Lewandowski shoved a female reporter. And just beyond the perimeter, the junkyard dog fan club, led by neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, who made the meme of the moment celebrating Trump’s election with the menacing X-post “Your Body, My Choice. Forever.” 

Trump, in the last crazy days of his sane-washed campaign, issued a menacing promise of his own, to “protect — whether the women like it or not.” It didn’t take long to see him back that up with deeds. Under him, the presidential motto has gone from the audacity of hope to the audacity of sexual violence in a decade. 

Mistreating women (or if female, making alliances with predators) is a job qualification in Trumpland. It is no real surprise Trump tried to make alleged sex trafficker Florida Man Matt Gaetz his Attorney General, and is pushing Fox-bot golden-boy Pete Hegseth for Defense Secretary — a man trailing a 22-page police report accusation of rape. 

Hegseth denies the allegations — his lawyer says he only paid the “Jane Doe” for her silence because he was afraid the allegation would cost him his job at Fox. The details of the police report here suggest Hegseth is at the very least a sex pest of the worst sort — belligerent and handsy. And at worst, a man who has sex with unconscious women.

Hegseth’s nomination was twinned with accused sex trafficker Gaetz  - a manosphere dream team, ensuring that both domestic law enforcement and the military would be headed by men with predatory inclinations toward women. But Gaetz didn’t have an NDA on women who testified at the House Ethics Committee, and so, couldn’t be shielded from the consequences of publicity.

There’s a lot of theorizing about whether Trump nominated Gaetz as some kind of strategic feint, an extremist bargaining chip meant to soften up the Senate for confirming the SecDef nominee who they really do want to be installed, but who carries a 22-page police report rape accusation. 

I don’t think Trump is being strategic in this, although I wouldn't put it past some of his scheming Project 2025 chums. Gaetz is a MAGA loyalist and the allegations against him are exactly the sort of activities enjoyed by men Trump feels most comfortable around. 

The commodification of women is the essence of the Trump brand. To recap briefly: The 1980s and early 90s, wingman with Jeffrey Epstein, trading models, competing to see whose arm candy was more expensive. The Look of the Year model contests brought cornfed teens from the sticks to the Plaza and the Trump yacht for greasy, coked-up late 20th Century real estate and finance bros to grope and leer at. Then the years of the Trump pageants — Teen USA, Miss USA, Miss Universe — which Donald oversaw with demands for “smaller bikinis, higher heels” and a pit stop in any dressing room with a half-dressed young woman whenever his flaccid junk twitched.

One step away from Trumpy commodification of women is what I’d call the meatification of the female — the reduction of women’s bodies to total pliancy — via drugs, alcohol, or simply violence — before sex. 

There is a case in France right now in which a man, Dominique Pelicot  — apparently happily married for decades — turns out to have been drugging his wife into unconsciousness and then inviting other men over to “have their way” as the euphemism goes. The fantasy of completely pliant female flesh is apparently alluring enough that dozens of men from all walks of life dropped in to take a poke at the inert form of Madame Pelicot.

The case of Monster Monsieur Pelicot and his copains is shocking, but hardly unheard of. Date rape drugging is widely practiced. Civil cases against millionaire rap star Sean “Diddy” Combs, sitting in a Manhattan federal holding pen awaiting a trafficking trial, are piling up — with claimants ranging in age from nine to their 40s at the time of the alleged incidents — many describing an eerily similar sequence involving a single glass of champagne, a sudden rush of extreme debilitation, and waking up to being or remembering, being raped. 

The woman who brought the rape claim against Hegseth also spoke of a single glass of champagne and a blackout. If the charges are true — and we will never know since he paid her for an NDA — Mr. Hegseth’s predilection for pliancy is of a piece with his specific brand of Christianity. The Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, CREC, is a sect whose notorious leader Pastor Douglas Wilson has stated that married women cannot claim rape, as they gave consent when they said I Do. Wilson is also on record suggesting that women’s right to vote destroyed the God-ordained daddy-knows-best family hierarchy.

As a student at Princeton, Hegseth edited the conservative student paper, the Princeton Tory. He published an article arguing that unconscious women cannot technically be raped, as they cannot offer consent. He wrote a screed against a campus performance of The Vagina Monologues headlined “Vaginas Around Campus Whether You Like It Or Not.” 

The police report, the legally sanctioned hush money/NDA, and the membership in Doug Wilson’s sect are not the only bad omens about the Trump 2.0 SecDef. Mr. Hegseth’s other disqualifying attributes include his cheerleading and lobbying for war criminals, and his affiliation with white Christian nationalism, a symbol of which he has tattooed on his testosterone-engorged bicep. That affiliation got him branded “a possible insider threat” by a fellow DC National Guardsman and booted from duty protecting Joe Biden’s January 2021 inauguration. 

A few hours after Trump gave up on Gaetz, the Trump transition team blasted out an email of Senators’ enthusiasm for Mr, Hegseth. 

"I think he is going to be a very strong secretary of defense." - Sen. Joni Ernst. IA. 

"Pete is a warrior, an advocate for veterans, and a well-qualified nominee. He will put our enemies on notice and make our military great again." - Sen. Marsha Blackburn, TN.

"I think he's perfect. He's a decorated combat veteran. He's got two Bronze Stars, 20 years in service ... The guy is a solid, solid individual. He's the right man for the job." - Sen Merkwayne Mullen, OK.

"I think he's great." - Sen Kevin Cramer, ND.

Remember that they are talking about a man credibly accused not only of rape but roofie rape — he is “perfect” and “great” and “strong” and “well qualified” to lead the nation’s warfighters. 

Trumpnation rewards women who willingly hobble themselves to protect the fragility of toxic men. You can see them tottering around Mar-a-Lago, or with their locks styled identically on the right wing cables. The religious nuts and manospheroids believe in a natural or God-given order of power between men and women. 

The domination of females by males may well be natural in some of the subspecies — the lion with his pride of females, and pronatalist tech bros with multiple baby mamas. But it was also natural to die of an abscessed tooth before antibiotics, to croak at around age 48 before biologists understood pathogens, and to perish in childbirth before hygienic birth practices were understood. It was also natural for cavemen to drag cavewomen off and rape them. No doubt every living human has a rape in our ancestry, somewhere. 

What can we do about our disastrous slide into pre-modernity? In a New Yorker article last week, Jia Tolentino reported that nearly half a million social media posts picked up on the “Your Body My Choice” meme. Boys started shouting it at girls on junior high playgrounds. TikTok influencer females posted videos of themselves crying. 

There’s not much we can do about the political situation, it is a fact of life we will have to live with for the next two years. BUT: it’s no time for tears, grieving, and retreating to safe spaces. Women and girls, buck up, please! Muster, form cells, take and send your daughters to self-defense courses, and give aid to women in ban states. 

Always remember to laugh at these ridiculous fragile weirdos, so terrified of female agency, so desperate for domination. They hate it. And laughing at them is good for the spirit. Remember the words of the great Italian leftist Antonio Gramsci, imprisoned by the fascists, in his Letter from Prison: "I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.”

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Troubled times demand both awareness and laughter. If you’re looking for something short and clever to divert you from our real-life dystopia for a few hours, click here and order a copy of my new (and first) novel, Zero Visibility Possible. The book is a funny dark satire about American gun violence, the media and disinformation, and the political uses of public trauma. Early readers called the book “a stick of dynamite” (Greg Olear) and “dark, witty and obsessively readable” (Rick Wilson). Buy one and I will gift you a one-year PAID subscription to the American Freakshow. Just DM or email me the receipt.