Donald Trump has made sexual assault a core motif of his campaign rhetoric, but he’s not interested in women’s safety. Instead, he exploits rape imagery to tap into our fear even as he promotes social policies that endanger women. The sexual anxiety he calls up in his speeches is part of the conservative tradition that was the basis for the Republican 2016 platform, a stark rightward lurch into gender traditionalism. If Trump becomes president and the platform is made into law, it could ruin lives.
On June 16, 2015, Trump glided down the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his presidential campaign. Three minutes into his speech he said, “When Mexico sends its people… they’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Later The Washington Post fact checked him and found it was blatantly false. In the months ahead, he continued to use rape as warning and metaphor.
On October 4, 2015, Trump told George Stephanopoulos on This Week that he had reservations about Syrian refugees: “The migration was strange to me because it seems like so many men. It looked like mostly men and they looked like strong men.” In January 2016, he called them a Trojan horse and read a bad poem where a kind woman took in a half-dead snake and nursed it to life but it bit her and she died.
In essence, he described Syrian refugees as snakes and America as a naïve woman. Again, it’s the framing of foreign men as a sexual threat and the damsel-in-distress imagery for the nation. He capped it off in a May 2016 speech when he said, “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country.”
Rape is a central motif in Trump’s rhetoric but it has nothing to do with women’s safety. He never talks about rape culture. Nor of funding to get the backlog of rape kits tested. He never talks about the terrifying frequency of sexual assault in the US. The US Office of Justice reports that one out of two transgender people faces sexual violence. Male victims of rape are nearly invisible but an article in Slate exposed that it happens, a lot, and not just in prison. And the Washington Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs reports that a woman is raped every two minutes. In effect, during Trump’s 50 minute speech to start his presidential campaign, 25 women were raped in the US but he never said anything about it.
Published in Truthout
July 30, 2016
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Photo credit: Donald Trump speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at the South Point Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada, February 22, 2016. (Photo: Gage Skidmore / Flickr)
NICHOLAS POWERS 