Sadly, we’ve reached the point where it’s no great shock to learn that another woman has accused Donald Trump of sexual assault.
Still, each journalist, secretary, or adult film star who alleges that she was subjected to Trump’s unwelcome advances deserves to be acknowledged and serves as a sad reminder of the patent absurdity of this election.
The Trump campaign has endured countless scandals that would have derailed any other American political campaign in history, and it looks like things won’t get any easier as the mogul-turned-troll and his increasingly uneasy handlers limp to the finish line.
The number of Trump accusers reached an even dozen today, as former beauty pageant contestant named Ninni Laaksonen shared an account of being fondled by the GOP nominee with UK newspaper The Telegraph.
Laaksonen, who won the title of Miss Finland and competed in Trump’s Miss Universe pageant in 2006, says the incident occurred when she and the other contestants appeared alongside Trump on The Late Show with David Letterman in July of that year:
“Before the show, we were photographed outside the building,” Laaksonen says.
“Trump stood right next to me and suddenly he squeezed my butt. He really grabbed my butt.”
She adds:
“I don’t think anybody saw it but I flinched and thought: ‘What is happening?’ Somebody told me there that Trump liked me because I looked like Melania when she was younger … It left me disgusted.”
Not surprisingly, the Trump campaign has yet to respond to this latest allegation.
Trump has made of point of refusing to acknowledge the individual allegations against him, instead lumping all of his accusers together as co-conspirators and portraying them as pawns in the elaborate anti-Trump scheme that he imagines has been designed to keep him out of the White House.
In rallies and in debates, Trump has called the women liars, accused them of working for the Clinton campaign, and threatened to sue them.
His favorite defense, of course, is to point out that Bill Clinton was also embroiled in infidelity scandals during his first presidential campaign.
While it’s true that politicians being accused of sexual impropriety is nothing new in this country, Trump seems to genuinely not understand why the allegations are so unimaginably heinous:
When he boasted about sexual assault in a recorded conversation with Billy Bush, it wasn’t Trump’s crude remarks that proved he’s unfit for public office.
It was the fact that he considers forcing himself upon unwilling women to be a laughing matter.
Trump’s lame “locker room talk” justification was roundly dismissed from the start, and now that twelve women have risked their reputations and, in some cases, their careers to share their horror stories with the world, a man who wants to be President of the United States of America thinks the appropriate response is to smear them and threaten them with financial ruin.
At a time when the importance of consent and the rampant nature of sexual abuse are finally being discussed in public forums, Donald Trump is a daily reminder of exactly why those conversations are so important.
In that sense, we suppose his campaign hasn’t been a total disaster, after all.