Today, Donald Trump finally broke his silence on the controversy of Roy Moore’s apparent pedophilia, giving him a green light to head to the United States Senate.
Donald Trump has now normalized pedophilia.
One might have hoped that the mere prospect of Judge Roy Moore being elected to the US Senate was the proverbial “bottom of the barrel” in American politics, but it was not to be.
Once again, Donald Trump — the acting President of the United States — has managed to sink America to new depths of disgrace. Today, he officially endorsed Roy Moore for the Alabama Senate seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.This is what happened:
You can watch the entire encounter above, but I do want to single out a couple of Trump’s most important remarks:
“I can tell you, I can tell you one thing for sure: We don’t need a liberal person in there, a Democrat. Jones, I’ve looked at his record, it’s terrible on crime, it’s terrible on the border, terrible on the military. I can tell you for a fact: We do not need somebody that’s gonna be bad on crime, bad on borders, bad with the military, bad with the Second Amendment.”
When asked about Roy Moore by a reporter on-site, Trump added:
“Well, he denies it. Look, he denies it. I mean, if you look at what, what is really going on, if you look at all the things that have happened over the last 48 hours, he totally denies it. He says it didn’t happen. And, you know, you have to listen to him also. You’re talking about, he said 40 years ago, this did not happen, so, you know.”
“So, you know” is Trump’s ultimate response to pedophilia. “You have to listen to him also.” Granted, in the eyes of the law, everyone gets the right to mount a defense when criminally prosecuted, and I’m not going to sit here and say that even Roy Moore does not have the right to state his case for why he believes the allegations against him are inaccurate. But we also need to look at it like the Bill Cosby sex scandal: One or two people can certainly get together and plan to fleece someone, and the legal system, by making up a story. But when you have multiple accusers with the same or very similar stories and specific details, something is going on. We have seen it with Cosby, we’ve seen it with Weinstein, and we are now seeing it with Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K., Roy Moore, and now even Charlie Rose. We have multiple sexual harassment and assault allegations against all of these very public figures; how are we going to say that every single one of these victims is making up the allegations? And how is Donald Trump — who, as we know, is himself very guilty of bragging about sexual assault — going to write off the allegations of Moore’s victims just because he says he didn’t do it?
The answer is because Donald Trump is an amoral figurehead, seemingly immune from all forms of shame, empathy, and humility. We’ve seen it with the response to the devastation in Puerto Rico, with Trump’s Twitter feuds with Gold Star families, with his unstable and dangerous comments about North Korea, and now with his response to actual sexual assault against children. This is a “president” with no moral character to speak of, throwing his support to a US Senatorial candidate with no moral character of his own to speak of. Now that the President of the United States has formally chosen to place the Republican Party and his tax cut for the wealthy over the welfare of the United States, of the government, and even over our children, he has demonstrated an absolute and undeniable repudiation of morality. It’s time that we as a country ask ourselves: Are we prepared to sacrifice the moral character of our entire nation just for the sake of one man’s sadistic political agenda? The answer will determine the fate of the United States of America for years — perhaps generations — to come.