Liberals like to allege that Donald Trump turns the bigoted subtext of longstanding Republican ideas into text that’s about as subtle as a whoopee cushion. As New York’s Rebecca Traister put it in a Monday article, the GOP traditionally has been “covert” about “the very biases that [Trump] makes coarse and plain.”
Traister contended that Republicans’ harsh criticism of the Access Hollywood audio is a case of style over substance, since “Trump’s attitudes about women are not different from the attitudes that have been supported by the contemporary Republican Party via their legislative agenda. Many of the very politicians who led the stampede away from Trump [last] weekend…have dedicated themselves in recent years to shutting down Planned Parenthood…These are politicians who regularly vote against the Paycheck Fairness Act and oppose paid-family-leave legislation and the raising of the minimum wage that would make millions of women more economically stable.”
According to Traister, “The view of women as yours to control via political power, star power, or simply patriarchal power, is what Republicans -- not just Trump, but lots of Republicans -- have been doing for years as they work to reduce reproductive-rights access and reinstall women in early marriage and traditional hetero homes where their competitive, independent, threatening power might be better contained…In other words, the party’s policies are built on the same frame that Trump’s words and personal actions are: a fundamental lack of recognition of women as full human beings.”
Traister suggested that Trump is such a brazen BSer that he drags his party down with him (bolding added):
Trump…is not distinct from Republican nature or motivation; he is its slightly more unruly twin. At the debate on Sunday, two days after being revealed talking about grabbing pussies, he claimed that “nobody has more respect for women than I do.” And there it was: the giant Republican lie about an interest in gender equality exposed as pure snake oil by their front man…
This is what was on display these last 72 hours: hate. The hate for the other that emanates from his scowling face and undergirds his words, and that has thrummed lightly beneath Republican policy goals for some time, now exposed for the world to see.
