I can’t imagine, however, given how little interest our
President-elect has in history, that he will recall these nicknames. Nor do
they adequately convey the nature of his shameless
surrogates at the tail-end of the primary season and throughout the general election.
Historian Ken Burns has called the full assembly of
GOP officials who threw in their lot with Donald Trump “Vichy Republicans,” and
though this captures the sense of their collaboration with evil and madness, it
is neither pungent nor precise enough to describe the particular men (and it is all men) who came to cling to him as
a way of keeping their hand in the political game when their fortunes were on
the wane. No, only one name will do for this group: The Pig Sty.
That name evokes more than merely disgust over their
opportunistic loyalty to a reality-show star manifestly unsuited to the
Presidency. It also describes their treatment of women—starting with those in
their personal and professional orbits, and proceeding to the Democratic candidate.
No surprise in that: Like their candidate, they all belong (psychologically if
not chronologically) to the era of Mad
Men, when political and business leaders regarded women
as playthings rather than people.
You might notice that they all have developed a
noticeable stoop. This is not simply a function of their age (ranging from
middle age to senior citizen), but because they carried so much water for Trump
throughout his scorched-earth campaign.
Let’s examine what each brings to the table, shall
we?
Chris
Christie: Leading off with the governor of New Jersey was a
no-brainer, considering that his photo—of noticeably porcine proportions—embodies
literally, not just metaphorically, the inhabitants of this pig pen. Millions
of Americans watched him at the Republican Convention, inciting the rabid crowd
to chant “Lock her up!” against Ms. Clinton. More recently, many New Jerseyans
wanted to shout the same thing at him when
virtually the only point of agreement between prosecution and defense during
the Bridgegate trial was that he’d approved the mad scheme to close two of
three Fort Lee access lanes into the George Washington Bridge. Nor did it
escape the nearly 80% of his state’s residents who now disapproved of his
performance that he’d heaped all kinds of abuse on his former deputy chief of
staff, Bridget Anne Kelly—first (according to her uncontested testimony at
the trial) by hurling a water bottle and cursing her out on one occasion, then
by hiring—at state expense—a Republican-connected law firm that, before
exonerating Christie of wrongdoing, accused her of orchestrating the bridge
closures—and including the gratuitous
detail that the single mother of four had been involved in an affair with
former Christie campaign manager Bill Stepien. That last episode constitutes
what a Daily Beast article has slammed as “Slut-Shaming.”
Newt
Gingrich: The former Speaker of the House and GOP
Presidential candidate earned Trump’s gratitude toward the end of last month
when he angrily dismissed questions from Fox News' Megyn Kelly about multiple sexual misconduct charges against Trump by claiming
that she was “fascinated by sex.” More than a few viewers of the exchange
observed that it was Gingrich, not Kelly, who was “fascinated by sex.” How else
to explain how he married second wife Marianne only six months after divorcing
his high-school geometry teacher, amid acknowledgement from congressional
staffers that he’d been conducting an affair; or how, 19 years later—amid
impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton that Gingrich had initiated
related to the Monica Lewinsky affair—the now-ex-Speaker broke with wife #2 to
make way for a “breakfast companion” 23 years his junior. (See this Washington Post article about his messy marital history.)
Rudy
Giuliani: His descent since hooking up with Trump has been
the most frightening to behold of all these figures. Even close aides from his
days as a crusading U.S. District Attorney and Mayor of New York have admitted
to dismay over his vein-popping, bug-eyed appearances before the GOP convention and on cable
news shows, with one quoted in a New York Times article as finding his old boss to be "painful to watch." He ranted on and on about Clinton, so eager to wound her that he couldn’t see
the collateral damage to his own reputation. While stating that Mrs. Clinton
could only have been a fool not to have suspected her husband of cheating on her, he
never saw the natural rejoinder: Was his own ex-wife, Donna Hanover, also being
a “fool” for trusting him? Similarly,
in fanning rumors, offered up with only the flimsiest of evidence, that Ms.
Clinton might be suffering from Parkinson’s, he suggested that listeners Google
“Hillary Clinton” and “health”—totally oblivious to the idea that many were
finding far more substantiated information by searching for “Rudy Giuliani” and
health. Altogether, he seems to have dragged into the sunlight something
monstrous from the darkest recesses of his soul.
Roger
Ailes: He might have been forced out of his longtime
perch at Fox News, but not before performing significant service at the conservative
network. He created the echo chamber that would broadcast such dubious stories
as Clinton’s imminent indictment for violations
relating to the Clinton Foundation. The same network exec whose creation lashed
Bill Clinton in the 1990s for sexual harassment has himself now been accused of
the same offense by considerably more women (more than 20, if you’re keeping
count, according to this piece from the Huffington Post). Naturally, the candidate who talked about “grabbing p---y” made this
same disgraced TV executive part of the team preparing him for the debates
against Mrs. Clinton.
Roger
Stone: A political black arts operative par excellence, he “confirmed” Trump’s suggestion that Ted Cruz’s
father might have been involved in the assassination of JFK. He also peddled
the phony National Enquirer story
that the U.S. Senator from Texas had engaged in extramarital affairs. Of
course, this was the same operative fired from Bob Dole's 1996 Presidential campaign after news broke that Stone and his wife had placed ads seeking
swinging partners. (Elizabeth Preza's article from Alternet this past May had all the dirty details about this dirty trickster.)
Corey
Lewandowski: During primary season, Trump’s first
campaign manager ran into trouble because of a scuffle with a female reporter. This
was not the first time he got in-your-face with a woman: In one dispute while
he was at the Koch-funded super PAC “Americans for Prosperity,” he called one the “C” word. (See Francis Langum's article from the blog "Crooks and Liars" about this "big guy henchman" who's more than a little reminiscent of Richard Nixon's H.R. Haldeman.)
In a May 2016 article in The Atlantic that answered the question, “What Is
the Greatest Prank of All Time?”, Candid
Camera host Peter Funt nominated Trump’s Presidential campaign—“the 2016
reality-TV show that has convinced many people that Martians have taken over
the GOP.” The Trump Pig Sty befouled the atmosphere enough that, if Funt were
to consider it now, he’d have to write, “taken over America.”
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