Many of Trump’s picks face sexual misconduct allegations. What’s that mean for #MeToo? : NPR

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

Matt Gaetz, President-elect Donald Trump’s first nominee for attorney general, is out. Before withdrawing from consideration, the former Florida congressman had been a controversial choice to lead the Justice Department. He is facing drug use and sex trafficking allegations, and he has limited legal experience. If you’re tracking Donald Trump’s other cabinet picks, you may have noticed some common threads – top jobs going to people fiercely loyal to Trump – also, people with experience appearing on TV but no experience directly relevant to the jobs they would be filling, and people who have been accused of sexual misconduct – secretary of defense nominee Pete Hegseth; HHS secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; Elon Musk, who Trump has picked to co-run the Department of Government Efficiency. All these men have faced some variation of accusations of sexual misconduct. All have denied it or claimed no memory.

I want to bring in New York Times investigative reporter Jodi Kantor. Her story about Harvey Weinstein, co-written with Megan Twohey, ignited the #MeToo movement back in 2017. So where does that movement stand now? Jodi Kantor, welcome.

JODI KANTOR: Great to be with you.

KELLY: What is your reaction to these appointments? There’s a list longer than the one that I just read.

KANTOR: Well, now it seems that President-elect Trump is trying to almost force a fight over #MeToo. Remember that, you know, the kind of great #MeToo reckoning was really about the workplace, right? There was some discussion of, you know, a guy meets a woman in a bar, does something inappropriate, but the heart of it was this kind of workplace accountability moment that was without precedent in American life. Hundreds of men lost their jobs over these kinds of allegations.

And now, what President-elect Trump is putting on the table are – he’s talking about jobs, right? He’s essentially trying to make a statement of – for the positions that require confirmation – these people can be confirmed despite these allegations. But also, he’s making a statement that they deserve to have these jobs despite the taint of these allegations.

KELLY: Mmm. Is this, on some level, a backlash against the backlash, or is this normalization of tolerance of sexual misconduct?

KANTOR: Well, one thing it is for sure, I think, is a return to an older time, where these fights were very political and what people believed depended on what side they were on politically. Just to flip things to the Democrats for a second – think of the situation with former President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. There were a lot of feminists who backed President Clinton. And years later, it was kind of embarrassing – right? – because it looked like they had chosen their own side politically instead of choosing the woman.

So first of all, I think we see this kind of reversion to those old rules that actually felt like they were sort of interrupted at the height of the #MeToo movement. And also, I think we just can’t ignore the number of allegations that have stacked up over the years against President Trump himself – the E. Jean Carroll case. And these selections look, to some extent, like his answer.

KELLY: Well, it’s interesting – just stay with Donald Trump for a second – because here is something that has changed since the #MeToo movement ignited. Since he was elected president, he has been held liable for sexual abuse in that case, and yet, collective shrug by voters. What’s your read on that?

KANTOR: Well, I don’t think that dynamic has changed since 2016 because that was the same thing, really, we saw the first time around. There were a lot of really well-reported allegations against President Trump before the 2016 election. There was the “Access Hollywood” tape in which he boasted about it in his own voice, and people chose to vote for him anyway.

KELLY: Yeah. Are there conversations unfolding now that you are tapped into – maybe, you know, women who you were interviewing in all of your original reporting – raising the question of, is there a necessary correction? Did #MeToo go too far, in that some men were canceled without enough evidence?

KANTOR: Oh, I think there’s a huge conversation about what fairness looks like with #MeToo cases, what kind of behavior should be included, what the level of evidence is necessary to believe one of these stories, what accountability should look like, what the future is of a man who’s acknowledged that he’s done something wrong. But what’s happening now with these appointments, I think, feels less like a searching conversation about – well, how do we do this right? – and more like a show of force.

KELLY: So big picture, where does this leave #MeToo – dead? Recalibrating?

KANTOR: Certainly not dead. I mean, truly, Mary Louise, since, you know, a few weeks into the #MeToo moment (ph), I have been hearing various obituaries for it, and it’s never happened. I mean, every few weeks there’s another powerful wave of allegations. Look at the recent allegations against Sean Combs. Those kinds of stories have really continued unabated for about seven years now.

But what I do think is that it’s becoming very politicized. You know, there was a comment that the president-elect made on the campaign trail a few weeks ago that was so telling. He said that he was very surprised that Harvey Weinstein went down in the #MeToo movement because, he said, Weinstein is a figure on the left. And, you know, he was kind of floating this thesis that #MeToo is a force of the left – that it’s a woke thing, that it’s about getting men on the right. And so what we’re seeing through his eyes is a more highly politicized definition of what’s really going on.

KELLY: Jodi Kantor is a New York Times investigative reporter. Along with Megan Twohey, she’s the author of “She Said.” Thank you.

KANTOR: Thank you.

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