« People want fame, they want money, whatever. »
W hy shouldn’t Americans believe the sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh? Well, don’t you remember when all those women made told similar lies against Donald Trump?
That was the line of argument the president took in his nominee’s defense at a Wednesday evening press conference at the United Nations in New York. For more than an hour, Trump answered questions and sparred with reporters on a number of topics, from whether he was planning to pull the United States out of NAFTA to how long he thought he’d keep Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein around at the Justice Department. But the bits most likely to inflame liberals and make conservative wince were all Kavanaugh-related.
Trump said the accusations of sexual assault that have bedeviled him since the 2016 election “absolutely” affect his view of Kavanaugh’s accusers: “It does impact my opinion. You know why? Because I’ve had a lot of charges made against me. I’m a very famous person, unfortunately. .. People want fame, they want money, whatever.”
“I was accused by four or five women who got paid a lot of money to make up stories about me,” Trump said. “We caught them, and the mainstream media refused to put it on television. They refused to even write about it. .. I never met them. I never met these people. And what did they do? They took money in order to say bad things.”
(Some of Trump’s accusers came forward in the aftermath of the October 2016 release of the Access Hollywood tape, the 2005 video in which Trump bragged about assaulting women because “when you’re a star, they let you do it.”)
So who’s to blame for this whole snafu? According to Trump, Senate Democrats, who he said would be attacking and opposing Kavanaugh even if the FBI had cleared his name.
“They’re obstructionists. They’re actually con artists, because they know how quality this man is, and they’ve destroyed a man’s reputation, and they want to destroy it even more,” Trump said. “And they go into a room, and I guarantee you, they laugh like hell at what they pulled off on you and on the public, they laugh like hell.”
At another point in Wednesday’s press conference, CNN’s Jim Acosta asked Trump why he so frequently sides with the accused rather than their accusers in cases of alleged sexual assault. The president protested that “As far as women [go], allegations can go the other way also. I could pick a woman and she could have charges made against her.”
Despite his repeated defenses of Kavanaugh, Trump said he would keep an open mind about Thursday’s Judiciary Committee hearing, where Kavanaugh’s first accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, is expected to testify.
“They’re giving the women a major chance to speak. Now, it’s possible I’ll hear that and say, ‘Hey, I’m changing my mind’,” Trump said. “I’m going to see what’s said. It’s possible they will be convincing.”
