The Slap Not Heard Round the World

When the New York Times asked professional women if they’d ever been sexually assaulted, I answered them, and my story appeared just before the Harvey Weinstein allegations broke. It was Trump’s Access Hollywood tape that turned our world upside down. We’d convinced ourselves that America had just elected a “racist” and a “rapist.”

As a Democrat, you have to be willing to lie. Elections can be won if everyone is on board with the same lie. We lie about our candidates. We lie about the opposition. We lie about ourselves. Otherwise, we’d show weakness. We’d be thrust back into the era of disunity, feckless candidates, and elections we could not win. Oh, but the new Democratic Party knows better.

I lived those lies for years, pretending inwardly that even if it wasn’t the whole truth, it was for the greater good, so it was okay.

When the story broke with a credible accusation that Doug Emhoff, the “wife guy” of Kamala Harris, slapped a woman so hard she turned around, it might have become the kind of story that dominated the headlines for weeks. Only in ordinary times would the press chase a story like that. These are not ordinary times.

If I were still a party loyalist, I, too, would be dismissing and debunking the serious allegation that Doug Emhoff went to a glitzy event at the Hotel du Cap, drank too much, and assaulted his girlfriend of three months because he thought she was flirting with another man.

I would have cheered Jen Psaki on as she helped prop up the image of Emhoff as the shining example of men who stand behind women and support them, not as the guy who allegedly paid off the nanny he knocked up to keep her quiet.

And maybe that’s why the Republicans can’t win elections. They aren’t willing to do what it takes to win. They aren’t willing to come together as one unbreakable chain that goes along with every lie.

If only those who dissent at the National Review or the Wall Street Journal were fully on board with pretending Trump wasn’t who he is - a deeply flawed candidate who happens to be tough enough to go up against the machine. Ah, but the machine didn’t get there by accident. It got there because everyone agreed that lying was the better path forward.

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