Donald Trump's loud mouth got him into trouble, and it will get him out

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/28/donald-trump-loud-mouth-trouble

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At this point, we’d save time by running a headline when Donald Trump doesn’t provoke an outrage. Like the old joke about being able to tell a politician is lying because his lips are moving, it’s just a safe bet that, if Trump is conscious, something gross is happening. And if his campaign so far is any indication, it won’t matter – the Trump machine will slough it off like water off a Duck Dynasty.

Related: Trump thinks immigrants are rapists. What about married American men? | Jessica Valenti

This time, the awful thing comes from 1989. The Daily Beast asked the Trump campaign about a story from Harry Hurt III’s 1993 book The Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump, in which Trump allegedly tore out clumps of then-wife Ivana Trump’s hair before allegedly sexually assaulting her in a way that, according to Hurt, she characterized to friends as “rape,” later clarifying that she felt “violated” but not in “a literal or criminal sense.”

It’s depressing to consider how little difference this might make in the GOP race. One hopes, of course, that this assumption is wrong. If nothing else, a woman who may have been victimized by her husband deserves to be vindicated, if only by public belief. That vindication took a decade for Bill Cosby’s alleged victims, but now that the public and the media are confronting their own inaction, they might as well use the momentum of self-examination to give Ivana Trump a fair hearing.

In theory, this revelation could stop the Trump juggernaut. Stranger things have happened, and Trump spokesman Michael Cohen isn’t helping by claiming that, “by the very definition, you can’t rape your spouse.” That’s untrue. The bulk of spousal rape laws were passed in the 1980s – the Reagan years, the Republican Party’s perpetual day before. Nobody in the party wants to give TV time to the issue and risk revealing people who didn’t know about these laws, think they’re new and have an opinion other than 100% support for them.

Talking about rape is a slippery slope for the GOP already. Too many members have made too many statements or enacted too many policies that are all well and good when candidates are addressing a like-minded base, but go any broader, and the rhetoric can quickly spin out of their grasp. A fellow candidate expressing a forceful opinion on Trump’s behavior might then demand something other than waffling opinions on fellow legislators’ policies. Where do they stand on 2012 Senate candidate Todd Akin’s claims that women who are victims of “legitimate rape” can biologically prevent becoming pregnant? And how do they define “legitimate rape”? And where do they stand on 2012 vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s co-sponsoring a bill with Akin that only allowed abortion exemptions for “forcible” rape? And what is or isn’t forcible?

Yes, 2012 feels like a long time ago, but current candidate Mike Huckabee defended Akin at the time and accused Republicans of throwing him under the bus. Rand Paul’s PAC ran ads for Akin after the statements about legitimate rape, and Paul has advocated total abortion bans. Just eight days ago, Scott Walker trumpeted his signing of a 20-week abortion ban that contained no exemptions for rape victims. As governor of Texas, Rick Perry refused to sign a letter of compliance with federal anti-rape guidelines for prisons. Jeb Bush tried to appoint a legal guardian for the fetus of a developmentally disabled rape victim. Ted Cruz opposes all abortions, including in cases of rape and incest. You can imagine what Rick Santorum thinks.

So the rest of the Republican field will probably let Trump avoid substantively confronting the story, and his response to others who do will likely be the same as theirs when pressed on the issue: he’ll make it a part of liberals’ ginned-up “War on Women,” then demonize the media. The Daily Beast report quotes a comment from Trump responding to this story in Newsday in 1993: “It’s incorrect and done by a guy without much talent… He is a guy that is an unattractive guy who is a vindictive and jealous person.” Expect to hear it again and hear it applied to anyone who amplifies Harry Hurt’s 1993 story. The questions will become yet more evidence of a left-wing media conspiracy to stop Trump as part of the conspiracy to stop conservatives in general. His primary opponents will have a hard time calling him out for ducking the issue when he sounds like them.

With a Republican field that wants nothing to do with the topic, Trump can probably write off any threats to his campaign. If anything, the danger to Trump’s ambitions is coming from inside the house, with his frothingly deranged spokesperson Michael Cohen, a man 30 years out-of-date on spousal rape laws who sounds like a Queens mook in a tracksuit who traps a mom in her car in the Stop & Shop parking lot because he thinks she took his space, beats on the hood and screams, Do you know who my uncle is? He’s connected!

And even then, that might not be a liability. Because tomorrow is another day, and Donald Trump will be awake, and he will say or do something else newer and just as awful.