Trump Is Showing Everyone Exactly Who He Is (a Sexual Predator)

On October 7, 2016, the infamous Access Hollywood tape was revealed, showing Trump, who is now on trial for rape, talking about how he approaches women.

“I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything,” he said on tape.

Now, footage from Trump’s deposition during his rape and defamation trial brought by E. Jean Carroll shows the twice-impeached criminally indicted former president doubling down on the idea.

“Historically, that’s true with stars,” Trump said when asked about his past comments. “If you look over the last million years, I guess that’s been largely true. Not always, but largely true. Unfortunately or fortunately.”

“Do you consider yourself to be a star?” the interviewer asked.

“I think you could say that, yeah,” Trump mused.

May as well spell it out: Trump—while standing trial for rape—says that it is “largely true” that stars (like himself) can get away with sexually assaulting women.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas hasn’t just lied about his own finances. He also lied about his own sister for political gain.

Thomas is under fire for hiding multiple major financial dealings, primarily that Republican billionaire megadonor Harlan Crow paid for Thomas and his wife to go on decades’ worth of luxury vacations. Crow also bought Thomas’s childhood home, where his mother still lives, and paid the private boarding-school tuition for Thomas’s grandnephew.

The Washington Post also reported Friday that longtime Federalist Society executive Leonard Leo secretly paid Thomas’s wife, Ginni, thousands of dollars for consulting work she did a decade ago.

But lying about money is nothing new for Thomas.

Speaking to a conference of Black conservatives in 1980, Thomas described his sister as “dependent” on welfare—and accused her of making her children feel “entitled” to welfare payments instead of being motivated to work. His comments reinforced a negative stereotype popular among conservatives that Black people are lazy and count on welfare instead of their own work, an attempt to set himself apart and advance his career.

But when a reporter tracked down Thomas’s sister, Emma Mae Martin, in the early 1990s, he found that nothing could be further from the truth.

Martin was on welfare for four or five years—after she’d had to stop working two minimum-wage jobs to take care of an aunt who had suffered a stroke, the Chicago Tribune reported. Her husband had abandoned her in 1973, her father had abandoned the family nearly three decades earlier, and her brother was busy at law school.

When the Tribune story came out in July 1991, Martin was working as a hospital cook. Her oldest son—named after his uncle—was in the Navy, her second-oldest child was a carpenter, and the third-oldest had just been laid off from a bakery. The youngest was still in school.

Martin seemed unbothered by her brother, who has always made himself out as a modest everyman who pulled himself out of poverty by his own wits and work. But “the realities of Thomas’ sister’s life are closer to the realities of most poor people,” the Tribune said.

It is a story of male abandonment, female sacrifice, and a turning to welfare only temporarily and only as a last resort. It also is a story of an inadequate government safety net for those who struggle at the bottom of society—no day care, no health insurance, no subsidy for the “working poor” whose wages are not enough to lift their families above the federal poverty line.

Thomas’s lie about his sister is particularly hypocritical, considering how often he has claimed to be against government aid and welfare. But Thomas and his family have spent decades enjoying free travel, housing, and school that are only offered because he holds a powerful position in the government.

Neera Tanden is back in the mix.

Less than two weeks ago, Susan Rice, who some have called “one of the most anti-immigrant folks in the administration,” was pushed out of her role as White House domestic policy chief.

Just as Rice famously cleansed her office with burning sage in the weeks after January 6, President Joe Biden could have used the newfound vacancy as an opportunity to signal a new, fresh start on the policy front. Perhaps elevate someone similar to former White House chief of staff Ron Klain, who was able to manage the post-primary Sanders-Biden coalition that led Biden to oversee one of the most historic midterm performances in recent history.

Instead, he’s elevating Tanden, who has made enemies not just with the right, as any likely candidate may have, but with much of the left as well.

Tanden has been involved in politics for years, beginning by volunteering on Michael Dukakis’s presidential campaign in 1988 and most recently serving as Biden’s staff secretary, reporting to former chief of staff Ron Klain (whose departure and replacement with Jeff Zients has marked a significant rightward shift within the Biden administration). Between then and now, Tanden has been heavily immersed in liberal spheres, in numerous campaigns, on Capitol Hill, and even by helping lead the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, or CAP.

In her illustrious career Tanden, a longtime Hillary Clinton loyalist once regarded as the former presidential candidate’s closest policy adviser, has certainly garnered years of experience in politics but has also left behind a questionable legacy.

In 2008, while serving as an aide to Clinton during her first presidential campaign, Tanden pushed—in some accounts punched—then-editor of ThinkProgress Faiz Shakir for asking Clinton about the Iraq War. Tanden once welcomed the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, calling him “the agent of a proto fascist state, Russia, to undermine democracy.” Under her leadership, CAP reportedly censored staff from criticizing the Israeli government; the think tank also allegedly censored a report on Islamophobia to maintain its relationship with billionaire Michael Bloomberg. And this does not include all her infamous tweets against both the left and right.

Tanden had been elevated to serve as a Biden senior adviser, and then staff secretary, only after having her nomination to head the Office of Management and Budget withdrawn. Republicans presented a unified front in their opposition to Tanden, criticizing her for her disparaging tweets about various Republican elected officials (many of which, to be fair, were not far off).

Republicans’ opposition was surely much more high-grade given their knowledge that Tanden’s prolific posting came for all. Senator John Kennedy famously remarked that Tanden had “called Senator Sanders everything but an ignorant slut.” Senator Joe Manchin announced his opposition, saying that Tanden’s “overtly partisan statements” against Republicans and Sanders would “have a toxic and detrimental impact” on the relationship between Congress and the OMB.

Such opposition led to potential Republican swing votes like Mitt Romney and Susan Collins announcing their own opposition. Sanders and other progressive senators did not announce opposition to Tanden.

Given Biden’s recent rightward shift, it is reasonable to scrutinize every personnel decision he makes from here on out. Tanden is no exception. But the experienced D.C. operator herself has reflected, in TNR’s pages, on past shortcomings and growing and evolving from them. May we hope that that spirit is sincere and that she strives to genuinely bring Biden back to the kind of message that has both won politically and remotely resembles the progressive politics needed to meet a moment crying out for fundamental change.

Fox Corporation has asked Media Matters to please stop publishing all these videos that show what a creep Tucker Carlson is.

Nonprofit media watchdog Media Matters has published at least one behind-the-scenes video of erstwhile Fox News star Carlson a day since the start of the month. The videos show Carlson being sexist, creepy, and generally gross.

The latest video, released Thursday, shows Carlson asking an on-set makeup artist if “pillow fights ever break out” in the women’s bathroom. When she says no, he says, “OK. Not in the bathroom. That’d be more [of] a dorm activity.”

Fox is now begging Media Matters to stop exposing Carlson and, by extension, the network. Fox Corporation lawyers sent Media Matters a letter Friday saying the videos are “confidential intellectual property” and that Fox “does not consent” to their being released.

“Reporting on newsworthy leaked material is a cornerstone of journalism. For Fox to argue otherwise is absurd and further dispels any pretense that they’re a news operation,” Media Matters president Angelo Carusone said in a statement. “Perhaps if I tell them that the footage came from a combination of WikiLeaks and Hunter Biden’s laptop, it will alleviate their concerns.”

Carusone also tweeted that Fox lawyers had originally sent a letter saying the network “does consent” to the videos being published, but corrected their typo an hour later.

These videos may very well be the reason Carlson was canned, amid a sex discrimination lawsuit accusing him of creating a hostile workplace. It’s possible he was let go before the videos could start surfacing to help Fox fend off the (clearly true) accusations.

Wisconsin Republicans are trying to keep state abortion laws exactly as they were almost 200 years ago, when Zachary Taylor was president.

After Roe v. Wade was overturned, Wisconsin reverted back to its original abortion law, which was implemented in 1849. Under the law, abortions are banned entirely except to save the life of a pregnant person. However, three doctors must agree that the abortion is medically necessary, imposing an unbelievable burden on anyone in a life or death situation seeking the procedure.

Democratic state Attorney General Josh Kaul argued in front of a judge Thursday that Wisconsin should void that law because it has gone unused for so long. He and his team also said the law conflicts with other abortion rules that were implemented much later, such as a 1985 law that only criminalizes abortion post–fetal viability—an already mushy window of time that decreases as neonatal care improves—but with an exception after that to save the life of the pregnant person.

“Women in the state of Wisconsin are not currently able to receive critical health care … because of the very lack of clarity in the law,” said assistant Attorney General Hannah Jurss.

Kaul filed the lawsuit just days after the Supreme Court issued the Dobbs ruling last summer. It is only now making it to the courtroom.

But one of the three Republican district attorneys named as defendants in the case, Joel Urmanski, argued that Kaul doesn’t have legal standing to challenge the ban because it does not affect him personally or his ability to do his job as attorney general. Urmanski had filed a motion to dismiss the suit in December. His lead attorney said Thursday the ban has been able to coexist in “harmony” with newer abortion laws.

Jurss hit back, saying that Kaul needs to know what laws apply in Wisconsin in order to act as the state’s top law enforcement official. “It can’t be that the law says something is illegal and legal at the same time,” she said.

The judge gave few indications of how she was leaning, but the case is widely expected to go to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Liberals will hold a majority on the court once Justice-elect Janet Protasiewicz is sworn in in August.

Protasiewicz was elected in early April, beating her Republican opponent by a whopping 11 percentage points and flipping the court for the first time in 15 years. She campaigned heavily on her support for abortion rights.