The Selective Empathy of #MeToo Backlash
The tweet, as so often happens, was at once shocking and deeply predictable.
Peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation. Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new. There is no recovery for someone falsely accused—life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 10, 2018
That was President Trump, on Saturday, ostensibly reacting to the fact that, this week, allegations of domestic abuse . He was also, obliquely, weighing in on #MeToo. The president’s 48-word assessment of the reckoning so many Americans are painfully but productively engaged in made for rich (but thoroughly unsurprising) irony: Trump, of course, has been —and has also been bragging about sexual assault, and has also boasted, , about advising friends to “” toward their wives, and has also[sic],” in the plural; , in the singular. The meaning the “men’s”; the —though in its context, the diminishing adjective is redundant—being a “mere” one.
