Disturbing Cabinet picks

The not-so-subtle message of Trump's disturbing Cabinet picks

An alarming number of those poised to be in the president-elect’s inner circle are accused of sexual misconduct.

by Constance Grady

On Thursday, former Rep. Matt Gaetz announced he would be withdrawing his candidacy to serve as President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general after facing a furor over accusations of sexual misconduct, including having sex with a 17-year-old minor.

The accusations against Gaetz, who was the subject of a years-long investigation by the House Ethics Committee, as well as a separate, prior FBI probe over sex trafficking allegations that never resulted in criminal charges, proved to be too much for the Florida Republican’s nomination. (Gaetz has denied all wrongdoing.)

But Gaetz is hardly the only one of Trump’s Cabinet picks to face such allegations. Indeed, a remarkable number of the people Trump is eager to position in his inner circle have been accused of some sort of sexual misconduct, ranging from harassment to sexual assault to enabling a culture of exploitation.

In addition to Gaetz, there’s also:

• Former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, who was accused of sexually assaulting a woman in 2017 in his hotel room after an event for the California Federation of Republican Women. He later reportedly paid for her to stay silent as part of a confidential legal settlement. A recently released police report about the incident says the accuser believes Hegseth may have drugged her. Hegseth maintains the encounter was consensual and was never criminally charged.
• Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who Trump has tapped for secretary of Health and Human Services, has been accused of groping his teenage babysitter. Kennedy sent a text apology to the accuser in which he said he had “no memory” of the incident.
• Elon Musk, who Trump has charged with making the government more efficient, was sued by former SpaceX employees who say he fired them when they protested the company’s culture of rampant sexual harassment. Musk does not appear to have publicly addressed the lawsuit.
• Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick for education secretary, who is the target of a recent lawsuit that alleges she knowingly enabled the sexual exploitation of children at World Wrestling Entertainment by another employee when she and her husband, Vince McMahon, were at its helm, beginning in the 1980s. McMahon has denied the allegations through an attorney.

Trump himself, of course, has his own decades-long history of sexual misconduct. Just last year he was found civilly liable of sexual assault. He was caught on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women. He has been accused of sexual assault by at least 21 other women, including his ex-wife Ivana Trump in a divorce deposition.

Trump has long seemed to have an affinity for those who, like him, have been accused of sexual misdeeds. Before he became president, he was close friends with notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. One of his Supreme Court picks, Brett Kavanaugh, was accused of sexual assault by multiple women (Kavanaugh denied all the claims), but Trump stood by him throughout his tempestuous confirmation hearings. Kavanaugh later went on to help topple Roe v. Wade, setting back reproductive rights in the country for a generation.

We know about Trump’s own cavalier attitude toward sexual assault in part because of the infamous Access Hollywood tape, in which he can be heard bragging about sexually assaulting women for the benefit of a giggling Billy Bush. Trump talks about the assault as if it should hardly matter during their conversation: its primary importance seems to be the social capital it will grant him with another man.

We can’t know exactly why Trump is surrounding himself with fellow accused sexual predators and those alleged to enable them, or why he’s chosen to pick these particular people for some of the most prestigious positions in the nation. Regardless of Trump’s intentions, though, his nominations are sending a clear message: that being credibly accused of sexual assault is not a serious impediment to ascending to the highest ranks of American government, nor to being granted authority over the bodies of millions of people. In short, your body, my choice.

Gaetz ultimately had to withdraw his nomination, though it’s not clear how much that’s due to his alleged sexual misdeeds and how much it’s due to his longstanding penchant for conflict with his Republican colleagues. The line for Cabinet members under Trump appears to be: Your colleagues can’t threaten to release a detailed report allegedly showing that you had sex with a minor, and you also cannot have personally feuded with the people whose votes you need to be confirmed. Otherwise, very little is off the table. After all, a credible accusation of sexual assault hasn’t doomed all of Trump’s picks: Republican senators appear to be rallying around Hegseth, even after the release of the graphic police report, although the confirmation process is still in its early days.

Trump’s Cabinet picks are a sort of crowing of victory, a proof of the concept he already demonstrated when he was successfully elected president. The concept is: You can be accused of sexual violence — you can be found civilly liable of sexual violence — and still hold some of the highest and most powerful offices in the land. And you can use that power to strip away women’s rights to control their own bodies, repeating the individual violation on a massive scale.

Hegseth, if confirmed, would be in charge of the Pentagon, which has for years publicly battled a culture of rampant sexual violence. Gaetz, if his nomination had gone through, would’ve overseen a Justice Department charged with investigating and prosecuting federal sex crimes.

In a country that frequently and fervently announces that feminism is going too far, our newly elected president appears determined to demonstrate that it’s not the case.