Trump accusers intend to 'trigger him' by reminding voters of his past sexual misconduct
Two of the women who've accused Donald Trump of sexual assault have recalled their allegations in political ads that will air through the rest of the presidential campaign.
The ad campaign features two 60-second spots with stockbroker Jessica Leeds recounting her experience with the Republican nominee in one and former People Magazine journalist Natasha Stoynoff sharing hers in another, but they are part of a "strange sorority" of women who have accused the former president of abusing them, wrote New York Times columnist Jessica Bennett.
"Depending on how you count them, 19 or 26 or 67 women have accused Mr. Trump of sexual misconduct," Bennett wrote. "Women who have said he 'squeezed my butt,' 'eyed me like a piece of meat,' 'stuck his hand up my skirt,' 'thrust his genitals,' 'forced his tongue in my mouth,' was 'rummaging around my vagina,' and so on."
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Trump denies any misconduct and accuses the women of plotting a “conspiracy against you, the American people,” although he was found liable for sexual assault and defamation in a lawsuit filed by journalist E. Jean Carroll and ordered to pay tens of millions of dollars by a New York jury.
"The women are not looking for revenge, exactly," Bennett wrote. "They simply want an acknowledgment and an apology. An admission, from the man himself, that they aren’t crazy or hysterical or gold diggers or liars, that he really did what they say he did to them, even as he told the world they were too old, too ugly, too haggard to possibly be his type."
The women have been telling their stories since Trump first entered politics, but it seems the sheer number of accusers blurred into background noise, and they've been trying to find ways to remind voters of the former president's misdeeds.
"Enter George Conway," Bennett wrote. "Yes, that George Conway: professional Trump loather, ex of the Trump mouthpiece Kellyanne Conway and perhaps the most visible Never Trump conservative around. Mr. Conway wears many hats: attorney, political strategist, co-founder of the Lincoln Project. But he is also a man with a penchant for stirring up political trouble, particularly at the intersection of women, sex and power."
Conway worked behind the scenes in the 1990s on behalf of Bill Clinton accuser Paula Jones and helped set up Monica Lewinsky confidante Linda Tripp with a lawyer who leaked details of their affair to reporters, and he more recently introduced Carroll to lawyer Roberta Kaplan, who helped win her lawsuits against Trump.
"The goal is to get Mr. Trump to react, Mr. Conway said, to trigger him, so to speak, into lashing out — a tactic not dissimilar to what [Kamala] Harris did in the last debate," Bennett wrote in the Times piece. "There may indeed be political wisdom in that."