On the night after the election, I led a writing workshop. The intended subject, absurdly, was How to Write Sex Scenes, which I figured would be a reprieve from the psychic weight of the election. But Trump’s victory, and the distress I assumed it would stir within the sort of person who enrolls in a writing workshop, led me to settle on a more appropriate subject: the artistic uses of wrath.
Midway through class, I asked the students to write about a moment of rage in their lives. The most striking response came from a woman I’ll call Rachel. She recounted an episode in which she arrived at college, still reeling from the divorce of her parents. A glamorous older classmate sensed her insecurity and took advantage of her in a manner that sounded, at the very least, coercive. He then told a buddy, who mocked her about this liaison in front of a large group. Nearly three decades later, merely uttering the name of the young man who had humiliated her brought a flush to Rachel’s cheeks.
After class, I found myself talking with Rachel and another student when, apropos of nothing, she made this declaration: “The one I’ve never cared for is Michelle Obama.”
I’d made several references in class to the seductive power of Trump’s rage. But I should emphasize that our post-class chat had not been about the election. Indeed, Rachel’s comment seemed to arise from some private conversation she was conducting in her head.
“Michelle Obama?” I said, rather confused. “What did she do?”
“It’s her whole approach. I don’t want my First Lady showing her arms in public.”
I paused, troubled by Rachel’s use of the possessive pronoun. “Why shouldn’t she show her arms?” I said.
“I just—I believe in modesty. I’d like my First Lady to show some modesty.”
My mind flashed, for a confusingly erotic moment, to the nude photos of Melania Trump that had leaked during the campaign. But I didn’t say anything, because I could sense an argument in the offing. Like most of the students in class, I was still trying to take in the bleak enormity of the election.
But Rachel wasn’t done. She went on to criticize President Obama and to express a generalized, if vague, contempt for the status quo. “What is it you’re so afraid of when it comes to Trump anyway?” she demanded. It was at this point that the situation came into focus: Rachel had voted for Trump.
I don’t know that for a fact. I didn’t ask, because I didn’t want to know.
I want to be careful not to flatten Rachel into a caricature. She had a college degree in literature. She was, from what I could discern, a loving mother whose own daughter was now in college. She had launched a successful business. As I listened to her story in class, I’d admired her insight and courage.
This was what made her comments after class so mystifying. What had happened to that woman? Where had she gone?
As absurd and grandiose as this will sound, her disappearance struck me as one of the central mysteries at the heart of the 2016 election—and, to some more obscure degree, the moral erosion of the American experiment. I mean by this that some essential synapse within Rachel had corroded. She could no longer draw a connection between the trauma she had described an hour earlier and the ascension of a man who routinely and publicly humiliated women, and who bragged about sexually assaulting them.
I’ve spent more hours than I care to admit replaying this episode in my head, trying to make it add up. How did a candidate who uttered the words Grab them by the pussy compel 42 percent of his potential victims to vote for him, including more than half of the white female voters in America?
I’ve read hundreds of interviews with female Trump voters setting out their rationale: business acumen, mistrust of Hillary, resentment of immigrants, etc. There’s almost never any specific citation of policy, but that’s not surprising. What all these women had in common was a willingness to dismiss or tolerate his words and behaviors and attitudes toward other women.
Trump didn’t just drag misogyny out of the shadows; he cast it in neon, touting his endowment and his stamina, demonstrating his dominion over women. His private conduct was merely an extension of what we saw in public as he stalked Clinton or lashed out at uppity female anchors. But Trumpism activated something more visceral: the hidden power of ingrained patriarchal thought. The most potent weapon in the Trump arsenal wasn’t virility, but feminine complicity.
It took me a few weeks to get it through my skull, but Rachel was trying to teach me something about the nature of trauma: that sometimes it’s psychologically safer to enable the abuser than to acknowledge the abuse.
Of all the students in that workshop, Rachel was probably the one who knew best the pain caused by men who believe they can do anything to women. The story she told in class had awakened that vulnerability. This is precisely why she had felt it necessary to issue her belligerent challenge after class: What is it you’re so afraid of when it comes to Trump?
She wasn’t talking to me. She was talking to herself.
A few days before the election, I was invited to give a brief presentation at a conference on female empowerment. At the opening night party, I sat down next to a fellow speaker who turned out to be the vice president in charge of hiring at a major entertainment media company in the Bay Area.
I immediately asked her about the election because I wanted to hear what a female executive in charge of hiring had to say about the unprecedented and extreme gender dynamics of the race.
“I don’t trust Hillary, if that’s what you mean,” the woman replied curtly. “She’s too corrupt. Her email server. The Clinton Foundation. Benghazi.”
So much for my smug liberal assumptions.
When I asked about Trump, my interlocutor said this: “I’m not crazy about him either. But at least he never laughed at a rape victim.”
“A rape victim?” I said, somewhat dazedly.
“Yeah, she defended a rapist and got him acquitted then she laughed at the victim. There’s a tape of the whole thing.”
I had only a hazy recollection of Trump lobbing this accusation, as a frantic effort to deflect attention from his pussy grabbing outburst. So later that night I went online to find the story about Hillary Clinton and the rape victim. Clinton had defended a rapist, some 40 years ago, after a judge ordered her to take the case. Her client wasn’t acquitted. He was ruled guilty and accepted a plea bargain, under pressure from the victim’s mother.
There was audio of Clinton discussing the case years later with a journalist. She did snicker a few times, recalling the troubling events. But this laughter was plainly directed at the incompetence of the prosecution, whom she felt had mishandled the case. She never discussed the victim or laughed at her. Her basic assessment was that the criminal justice system had failed the victim. None of this was a matter of opinion.
My mind kept circling back to the VP at the party. I imagined two job candidates walking into her office. The first was a verbally belligerent male with no experience and a documented record of bigoted statements, racial discrimination, bankruptcy, fraud, multiple allegations of sexual harassment, a man who bragged, while at work and on tape, of sexually assaulting women. The second was an ambitious woman with vast experience who had been accused of corruption repeatedly, without evidence. This executive had breezily announced to me, on the eve of the hire date, that she saw no difference between the two.
I understood why so many men resented Hillary Clinton, how she became a psychic punching bag for men bedeviled by self-doubt and angry, in particular, at ambitious women in the workplace. What I didn’t get was why a woman specifically focused on female professional empowerment—as signaled by speaking at a huge conference about the need for female professional empowerment—would treat Clinton and Trump as moral equivalents.
Maybe the VP wanted to see her industry deregulated, or her tax bill cut. Maybe she was raised a loyal Republican, or believed abortion was murder. I’d never know her political motives. But her underlying psychic strategy was painfully apparent. The only way she could dismiss the behaviors of a self-professed sexual predator was to accept, with no effort at verification, a libelous fantasy in which Clinton used her professional power to protect a rapist and sadistically shame his girl victim. She projected her outlandish complicity onto Clinton.
Every woman who supported Trump had to find ways to contend with these feelings, whether or not they cared to acknowledge them. I thought about the ways in which abuse often operates within a family system, how the sins of the father get displaced onto the women who threaten him. And this led me back to a series of in-depth articles I’d written in Miami, about a Cuban-American family in which a teenage daughter accused her stepfather of sexual abuse and the state took custody of her and six younger siblings.
Police spent months investigating and concluded that there was no evidence of abuse. The accuser herself renounced her claims. My pieces focused on the plight of the parents, both physicians, who had been denied access to their children for years. Eventually, a juvenile court judge held an evidentiary hearing and ordered the family reunited. Prosecutors initiated a criminal investigation of the social workers in the case. Justice served.
And then one day an anonymous envelope showed up in my mailbox at work, with a cassette inside. It was immediately (and nauseatingly) clear to me that the voices on the tape belonged to the stepfather and his teenage accuser. She had secretly recorded a recent car trip. “I can’t wait to have sex,” the stepfather announced, after some banter. “I’m talking about a good-time fuck.” The girl’s infant son, also somewhere in that car, could be heard throughout the recording.
Looking back, what I find most remarkable about this saga is how the women in the family conspired to cover up the stepfather’s sins. Rather than banding together to cast out the abuser, the mother and her two eldest daughters became sworn enemies. Not even the tape of the stepfather’s sexual advances—eventually made public—changed this dynamic. He insisted it was fake, and his wife believed him. She was a powerful woman, a prominent neurologist. But her need to protect herself from the monstrous implications of his sins turned her into a monster.
I keep thinking, too, of a strange episode from my years as a reporter down in El Paso. I was profiling an aging cattleman and spent a week on his West Texas ranch, stumbling around in my wingtips. The rancher was gelding his herd and he had a bunch of local teenagers working for him. They ran the steer into chutes and locked them in place while the old man castrated them with a scalpel, then cauterized the wound with a branding iron.
The smell of the burnt flesh and the shuddering of the animals turned my stomach, but I pretended it was no big deal. I wanted to be accepted by these young guys, to somehow ingratiate myself to them, or at least get one of them to grant me an interview. I hovered around as they ate lunch, and affected a drawl borrowed from every country music song I’d ever heard. They wanted nothing to do with me, naturally. They could tell I hailed from some place they would never visit willingly, where guys in vintage bowling shirts got paid for asking stupid questions.
On my last day, one of the young guys unexpectedly called out to me. “Hey, reporter man,” he said. It was maybe 90 degrees and they were sitting in the shade of a mesquite, sipping cans of Pepsi. One of his comrades got up and began sauntering toward me.
The ranch hand walked right up to me. He was taller than the rest, with soft round cheeks. “Got you something,” he said, in a husky tenor. He extended a cupped hand and gestured for me to do the same.
Oh my, I thought, a gift.
I looked into his eyes, hoping to convey my gratitude, and realized, with a start, that this young guy was, in fact, a young woman, her dirty blond hair tucked up into her Stetson. Her face flickered with a bashful misery as she set a warm, slippery egg-shaped thing into my hand.
I glanced down at the bull testicle, the pale blue membrane threaded with veins, the blood brushed from her palm onto mine, and together we listened to the snickering of the ranch hands behind her. I could see that she’d been enlisted to carry out this ruse because she was an interloper, too, trying to negotiate a world ruled by men and she had figured out that the best way to do so, maybe the only way, was to ape the cruelty of this realm, to pass her shame along to someone even more vulnerable.
Crazy as this will sound, I now see this scene as Trumpism in vitro, the cruel gift bestowed upon us wimpy city slickers by rustic America, the prank engineered by smirking men but carried out by women who felt they had no choice.