My email inbox over the weekend was flooded with stories about the appointments of Pete Hegseth to Secretary of Defense and Matt Gaetz to Attorney General. Most of them were what might be called nuts and bolts pieces about the process. One of the biggest was a story reporting that Senator Mitch McConnell told someone at a D.C. party that the Senate won’t be forced into recess so that newly-installed President Donald Trump could push through his nominees as recess appointments. Apparently, Senator McConnell found it necessary to make this statement because several of Trump’s nominees, including Hegseth and Gaetz, are so execrable they face what is referred to as “stiff opposition” to confirmation by the GOP-controlled Senate. Some pundits even went so far as to opine that McConnell was drawing a line in the sand to protect the prerogatives of the legislative body to which he has devoted much of his adult life.

The #MeToo movement shouldn’t be over because Donald Trump was elected president. It should be just getting started.

Do you know what I noticed about the flood of stories about Trump’s Cabinet picks in my inbox? How none of them talked about what kind of small, weak man it takes to sexually assault a woman or pay for sex with an underage girl. Let’s step back for a moment and get into what we are talking about here. We just went through a presidential election in which the winning candidate, Donald Trump, is a man who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by no fewer than 25 women. That man received the votes of some 76 million of his fellow Americans. He took a few days off to celebrate – numerous photos of a big post-election party at Mar-a-Lago hit the internet during the past week or so – and then he got down to business appointing candidates for 12 Cabinet positions in 12 days. Two of those appointments went to men who face the same kind of charges of sexual crimes that Donald Trump has been accused of.

What has happened here with Trump’s election and his appointments of Hegseth and Gaetz is that more than half the voters in the United States have said that sexual assault and trafficking in underage girls for the purposes of sex is okay. Go ahead, guys. Do what you want with women. The newly elected President of the United States has nominated a sexual predator to be in charge of the Department of Justice. Gaetz is not going to spend a lot of time in office going after men for committing the same kinds of crimes he or Trump has been accused of.

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Do you want to know how bad this is? There are credible figures that show at least one in four women in this country has been the victim of some form of sexual abuse or assault. That means there probably is a woman living on your street or in your apartment building or working in the same building you work in who has suffered sexual violation of some kind. What was made clear to these women, who must walk around every day of their lives reliving the trauma they survived, is that their terrible experiences don’t matter to at least 76 million Americans.

What was said on Nov. 5, 2024, is that a majority of American voters don’t........

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