Cross posted from Pruning Shears.
So the floodgates have opened, and women are coming forward left and right with stories of Donald Trump sexually assaulting them. As he lashes out from his glitzy Trump bunker, Lyndon Johnson's quote comes to mind: "I feel like a hitchhiker on a Texas highway in the middle of a hailstorm; I can't run, I can't hide, and I can't make it go away."
The right wing is now claiming it's a conspiracy, with Ben Shapiro calling it at Sunday's debate: "This exchange is the set-up. The next week is going to be the punch line." To his credit, he understood the dynamic that had just been put in play. Trump's tape bragging about sexually assaulting women was released, he said it was just words, Anderson Cooper asked if Trump had actually done those things, and he flatly denied it. But Shapiro confused an orchestrated campaign with the ordinary workings of a news organization.
It's very simple: Trump unequivocally said he'd never assaulted any women, so a woman going on record as having been assaulted by him is news. It challenges the veracity of Trump's claim, and that is exactly the kind of conflict that makes for an actual story. But instead of saying, hm, here is a crystal clear statement that we can follow up on, he took to mean that multiple outlets had anti-Trump messaging in the cannon and were just waiting for Hillary's word to fire.
This all requires a certain willful amnesia. During the primaries, Democrats were openly astonished at the unwillingness of the Republican field to go after Trump. Since the political and media establishments often have a mutually reinforcing feedback loop for constructing narratives, the GOP failure to push meant the stories never got off the ground.
Here's how it works much of the time, maybe even most of it. Political operatives dig, then pass along tidbits to (often friendly) media. The story gets reported, other political actors pick it up and make noise, and that in turn drives additional coverage. Think about how it worked with, say ACORN or Benghazi. Story comes out, political hay gets made, which creates demand for more stories like it, and so on.
Yes the press will report stories independently of that, but if there's no political appetite for the story it will just fade away. In the Republican primaries, no one went hard after Trump, and his closest competitor actively flattered him until it was too late. To the extent any oppo got dumped it was over labor or business practices. But everyone knew the stories of sexual impropriety were out there. The GOP establishment was either too afraid to pursue them for fear of The Donald's wrath, or they (probably correctly) perceived that aggressively pursuing stories of sexual assault wouldn't tarnish him in any significant way - indeed may have been likely to backfire.
The party had its chance, and completely whiffed. Then the general election rolls around and the Democrats say, hey maybe the rest of the electorate will find this noteworthy. Turns out it did. And the explosion of new allegations right now is happening for a simple reason. It's analogous to Bill Cosby - a famous man abuses power for decades, his victims feel isolated and powerless, they knew they will be trashed in the vilest possible terms if they come forward, and arrive at the sensible conclusion that they'd rather not endure an avalanche of grief in exchange for watching their abuser shrug it off.
But courage is contagious. Once a couple women were willing to openly take that risk, it emboldened others to do the same. The abuser's aura of impunity was shattered, and seemingly overnight corroborating stories tumbled out from all corners. That's not a conspiracy, it's safety in numbers.
Republicans were either cowards in the primary or they thought so little of sexual assault that they decided to pussyfoot around it. That was their calculation. The media that covered the primary - and during primaries the more partisan outlets are more influential - either did the same or let it go when it failed to get traction. I'm sure Democrats had their own Trump oppo that they collected at that time (as I'm sure Republicans did for Clinton), but it would be nonsensical to use it before the general election. So they sat on it.
Republicans made the calculation no one would care. Democrats calculated otherwise. It's looking like the Democrats were right. That doesn't make it a grand, elaborate and secret plot between the left and the MSM to wait until just the right moment to plunge the knife into Donald's back. It's simply the result of political ineptitude combined with native sexism on the right. Too bad, so sad conservatives. You brought all this on yourselves. Deal with it.