Anonymous wrote:As a reminder, here's how the "Trump Rule" at beauty pageants worked.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/a-timeline-of-donald-trumps-creepiness-while-he-owned-miss-universe-191860/

Her recollection was boosted by an audio recording from the same year, obtained by TMZ, on which Trump can be heard asking the contestants for help picking out some of the best-looking women before the contest itself took place. “We get to choose a certain number [of contestants who will be guaranteed to make it through the first round]. You know why we do that? Because years ago when I first bought it, we chose ten people, I chose none and I get here and the most beautiful people were not chosen. And I went nuts. So we call it the Trump Rule.”

Her recollection was boosted by an audio recording from the same year, obtained by TMZ, on which Trump can be heard asking the contestants for help picking out some of the best-looking women before the contest itself took place. “We get to choose a certain number [of contestants who will be guaranteed to make it through the first round]. You know why we do that? Because years ago when I first bought it, we chose ten people, I chose none and I get here and the most beautiful people were not chosen. And I went nuts. So we call it the Trump Rule.”

He also said he was compulsively drawn to kissing beautiful women “like a magnet” — “I don’t even wait” — and talked about plotting to seduce the married woman by taking her furniture shopping. Mr. Trump, who was 59 at the time he made the remarks, went on to disparage the woman, whom he did not name, saying, “I did try and ### her ....”

Anonymous wrote:Allegations:

Two women have said Trump kissed them without their consent, but that they weren't offended by it at the time.

Juliet Huddy, a former Fox News anchor, said on the "Mornin!!! With Bill Schulz" podcast in December 2017 that Trump kissed her on the lips without her consent after a meeting in Trump Tower in Manhattan in 2005 or 2006.

"He went to say goodbye and he, rather than kiss me on the cheek, he leaned in on the lips," she said. Huddy added that she was surprised by the kiss, but "didn't feel threatened" or "offended" at the time.

"Now that I've matured, I would've said, 'Nope.' At that time, I was making excuses," she said in December.

Jennifer Murphy, a former contestant both in Miss USA and Trump's reality TV show "The Apprentice," told Grazia magazine in December 2016 that Trump kissed her unexpectedly following a job interview in Trump Tower in 2005.

Although Murphy said she was "very taken aback at the time," she later told CNN that she "wasn't offended" by the kiss. She said she voted for him for president, and even created a Katy Perry parody video in which she sang, "I was kissed by Trump and I liked it."

Trump's response:

The White House denied Huddy's account, according to the New York Daily News.

Cheat Sheat: two more pageant contestants. The difference with these two is that they weren’t shocked at the time Trump kissed them without consent, but one is now.

Years after the alleged elevator incident, Trump came on Huddy's Fox News show and made light of what he called, "hitting on her."
"But she blew me off," Trump said at the time.

Anonymous wrote:Here's a bonus for today: Susan Faludi's New York Times opinion piece, "Believe All Women is a Right-Wing Trap."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/18/opinion/tara-reade-believe-all-women.html?searchResultPosition=2

The original For the next time a Con tries to argue that (1) the "all" was always a part of it, instead of "Believe women" or "Listen to all women," and (2) this somehow means we must discuss Kavanaugh instead of Trump's own victims.

In fact, “Believe All Women” does have an asterisk: *It’s never been feminist “boilerplate.” What we are witnessing is another instance of the right decrying what it imagines the American women’s movement to be.

Spend some mind-numbing hours tracking the origins of “Believe All Women” on social media sites and news databases — as I did — and you’ll discover how language, like a virus, can mutate overnight. All of a sudden, yesterday’s quotes suffer the insertion of some foreign DNA that makes them easy to weaponize. In this case, that foreign intrusion is a word: “all.”
...
“It’s a very interesting rabbit hole,” Pablo Morales Henry, digital archivist at Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library, which maintains a collection of more than 30 million MeToo-related tweets, told me.
...
Type in #BelieveAllWomen for 2017, when the #MeToo movement took off in October, and you get several dozen references, followed in 2018 (the year of the Kavanaugh hearings) by many more. But here’s the thing: I found that the hashtag is, by a wide margin, used mostly by its detractors.
...
This is why “Believe All Women” is not an amplification of “Believe Women,” but its negation. As Mr. Morales Henry at the Schlesinger Library told me, after several days of analyzing the use of the two hashtags, “It looks like #BelieveAllWomen, especially recently, is being used in opposition to #BelieveWomen.” Its use spikes on occasions when allegations are made against a liberal politician — often with companion hashtags decrying a double standard.
The double-standard purity test operates in one direction only. Conservatives are unfazed by their own brazen hypocrisies; that’s not the game they’re playing. Kellyanne Conway claiming it’s “pro-woman” to “believe all women,” before walking back into that White House? Conservatives have been oddly immunized by their shamelessness.

I like to think of this thread as serving several purposes, including as a repository for useful stuff. This is good stuff!