For Once, I’m Grateful for Trump

In the president, one big bully stands up to others.

By Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist

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President Trump on the South Lawn of the White House on Monday.CreditCreditAl Drago for The New York Times

For the first time since Donald Trump entered the political fray, I find myself grateful that he’s in it. I’m reluctant to admit it and astonished to say it, especially since the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford in his ugly and gratuitous way at a rally on Tuesday. Perhaps it’s worth unpacking this admission for those who might be equally astonished to read it.

I’m grateful because Trump has not backed down in the face of the slipperiness, hypocrisy and dangerous standard-setting deployed by opponents of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. I’m grateful because ferocious and even crass obstinacy has its uses in life, and never more so than in the face of sly moral bullying. I’m grateful because he’s a big fat hammer fending off a razor-sharp dagger.

A few moments have crystallized my view over the past few days.

The first moment was a remark by a friend. “I’d rather be accused of murder,” he said, “than of sexual assault.” I feel the same way. One can think of excuses for killing a man; none for assaulting a woman. But if that’s true, so is this: Falsely accusing a person of sexual assault is nearly as despicable as sexual assault itself. It inflicts psychic, familial, reputational and professional harms that can last a lifetime. This is nothing to sneer at.

The second moment, connected to the first: “Boo hoo hoo. Brett Kavanaugh is not a victim.” That’s the title of a column in the Los Angeles Times, which suggests that the possibility of Kavanaugh’s innocence is “infinitesimal.” Yet false allegations of rape, while relatively rare, are at least five times as common as false accusations of other types of crime, according to academic literature.

Since when did the possibility of innocence become, for today’s liberals, something to wave off with an archly unfeeling “boo hoo”?

A third moment, connected to the second: Listening to Cory Booker explain on Tuesday that “ultimately” it doesn’t matter if Kavanaugh is “guilty or innocent,” because “enough questions” had been raised that it was time to “move on to another candidate.”

This is a rhetorical sleight of hand in three acts: Elide the one question that really matters; raise a secondary set of “questions” that are wholly the result of the question you’ve decided to ignore; call for “another candidate” because it will push confirmation hearings past the midterms, which was the Democratic objective long before most anyone had ever heard of Blasey’s allegation.

Fourth moment: Watching Julie Swetnick, the woman who accused Kavanaugh of attending parties decades earlier where women were gang raped, change key details of her story in an interview with NBC News.

Swetnick’s claims border on the preposterous. They are wholly uncorroborated. But that didn’t keep Kavanaugh’s opponents, in politics and the press, from seizing them as evidence of corroboration with Blasey’s allegation, which is not preposterous but is also largely uncorroborated, and with the allegation of Kavanaugh’s Yale classmate Deborah Ramirez — uncorroborated again