Donald Trump Would Do Anything to Undercut a Democrat

Donald+Trump+expressed+his+support+for+alleged+child+molester+Roy+Moore+via+Twitter.+%28DONALD+J.+TRUMP+VIA+TWITTER%29

Donald Trump expressed his support for alleged child molester Roy Moore via Twitter. (DONALD J. TRUMP VIA TWITTER)

By JORDAN MELTZER

Donald Trump, whom I have the misfortune of calling my president, keeps getting worse and worse with every tweet he sends. Now, he has endorsed serial pedophelia over liberalism.

In the special election for the Alabama Senate seat, candidate Roy Moore has been accused by eight women of sexual harassment and assault, including allegations from a woman who was 14 at the time. He also happens to be a Republican. Meanwhile, candidate Doug Jones is a fairly liberal Democrat with no allegations of sexual misconduct. And yet, somehow, using his own twisted logic, the 45th president of the United States said this of the open Senate seat: “We don’t need a liberal person in there, a Democrat.”

There are so many problems with the liar-in-chief’s repudiation of Jones and defense of Moore, several of them based on facets of basic human decency that I assumed everyone knew. I’ll start at square one: believe survivors. When expressing support for Moore, Trump blatantly dismissed all accusations against him, saying, “Look, he denies it.” I was nauseous reading this, but not surprised. Trump did—and is doing—the exact same thing with the 14 accusations against him. He calls them all liars and expects us just to move on. At least one other member of his administration is also guilty of this: Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. She recently changed a law about sexual assault on college campuses, effectively removing the legal support system for survivors. It is a Trumpian pattern to dismiss victims of sexual assault, but this needs to change. Let me be perfectly clear on this vital philosophy Trump must learn: believe survivors.

Secondly—and again, what I thought was obvious but apparently is not—Republicans and Democrats have to tolerate each other sometimes. Trump endorsed Moore and overtly disavowed Jones. An accused sexual predator over a Democrat…because the Democrat is a Democrat. May I remind you that he initially refused to disavow David Duke, the former “Grand Wizard” of the Ku Klux Klan, and the Klan itself? Why is he so quick to write off a liberal for being a liberal but has to think twice about a man that denies that the Holocaust happened or a group that employs terrorism to prove how much it hates anyone who isn’t a white Christian? It is because he is a self-absorbed narcissist who only supports people who share his extremist conservative ideologies. He often turns on Republicans who publicly criticize one thing he says; forget Democrats.

I feel like I say this a lot, but Trump has reached a moral breaking point this time. He has shown that he would rather make a fool of himself in front of the entire world than agree with a leftist. He would rather tolerate a potential child molester than a liberal in a position of power in his country. He is willing to sacrifice the well-being of a child as long as his guy gets the Senate seat in Alabama. What happened to compromise? What happened to respectful, bipartisan politics in the White House? And will it return before 2020 rolls around?