Ignoring Donald Trump’s Sex Assault Sins Takes Forgiveness Too Far

Plenty of us are old enough to remember when a politician not just credibly accused of rape, but actually found to be a rapist, would see his political career implode and would quickly fade into justified oblivion. And no wonder.

And yet here we are, in another elections season with former President Donald Trump, for all intents and purposes, the GOP presidential nominee, despite being found in a civil trial to have raped the writer E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room in 1996.

(After that May 2023 trial, presiding Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote that, despite Carroll’s failure “to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the [extremely narrow] meaning of New York Penal Law,” the evidence made clear “that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”)

We’ve known for years that millions of Americans enthusiastically support an insurrectionist, grifter, fanboy of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and hero to anti-democracy extremists everywhere. But even in our current grisly political landscape, one could perhaps hope that Republicans would stop short of embracing an adjudged rapist as their standard-bearer. But nope. Evidently, Donald Trump could sexually assault someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, before or after shooting them, and the MAGA faithful would cheer him on.

Strikingly, though, it’s not just Trump’s documented history of sexual assault—including accusations from more than a dozen women over the years—that elicits shrugs from self-proclaimed “family values” conservatives.

In the post-Roe era, for instance, anti-choice Republicans have grown increasingly bold in their calls for banning abortion nationwide, without exceptions—including pregnancies, even in pre-teens, that are the result of rape, including incest.

As James Bopp, general counsel for National Right to Life phrased it in 2022, if he and those who share his beliefs had their way, a pregnant 10-year-old rape victim would be forced to carry the pregnancy to term, and “we would hope that she would understand the reason and ultimately the benefit of having the child.”

Missouri Republican state Sen. Sandy Crawford had a similar take when she recently argued that rape (while perhaps “mentally taxing” for the victim) does not justify abortion. “God is perfect,” Crawford helpfully explained. “God does not make mistakes. And for some reason he allows [rape] to happen.”

Like it says in the Book of Matthew: “Not a single sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it. And the very hairs on your head are all numbered. And rape sucks, but whaddya gonna do?”

Or consider Republican judge Robert Adrian, recently removed from the bench by the Illinois Courts Commission after he reversed the guilty verdict of a man convicted of raping a 16-year-old—because, the judge said, the defendant had already served five months in county jail and that was “plenty of punishment.” Granted, Adrian’s removal from the bench was due to all sorts of misconduct, including abuse of power, lying under oath, and other boyish hijinks. But his cavalier attitude toward the rape of a teen was, by all accounts, the proverbial straw that broke the commission’s back.

Look. No sane person believes that every Republican in the U.S. is indifferent to rape or its enduring trauma. Rapists, after all, attack individuals, not political parties, and far, far too many survivors, friends, and families across the political divide have had to deal with the special horrors that attend sexual assault. And it’s not as if Democrats have not had prominent figures, from the Kennedys to Bill Clinton to Anthony Weiner, et al., accused of—and occasionally convicted of—sexual assault, harassment, and plain old repugnant lechery.

Still, it bears repeating, again and again, that Donald Trump has been found liable for rape, he might very well have raped more than once, and yet his iron grip on the Republican cult … uh, Party … has only strengthened since 2016.

Ultimately, those who applaud and, in some cases, literally worship Trump do so despite every indication that he is not only uniquely unfit for the White House, but generally speaking is wholly unfit for society.

Those avid Trumpists—and Republicans who remain, somehow, on the fence about the man—might do well to seek out a November 2019 Washington Post op-ed written by former People magazine writer Natasha Stoynoff, who has long maintained that Trump sexually assaulted her at Mar-a-Lago in 2005 when she was there to interview him and “a very pregnant Melania.”

“After the [2016] election,” Stoynoff wrote, “I told myself [Trump’s] supporters hadn’t believed” the women who had publicly accused him of sexual assault.

“How else could they have voted for such a man?” she wondered. The conclusion she drew shook and angered her, just as it should shake and anger us all. “It took months before the cruel truth dawned on me—Trump supporters knew we were telling the truth. They just didn’t care.”

Benedict Cosgrove is a librarian, former editor at LIFE.com, and freelance writer who has contributed to the New York Times, Washington Post, Smithsonian, and other outlets. He lives in New York City.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.