Sunday morning’s State of the Union episode was a fruitful one. Jake Tapper took Rudy Giuliani to task over his assertion that all men talk like Donald Trump. This was Giuliani’s attempt to justify Trump’s 2005 hot mic lewd statements about women, which Trump tried to excuse as “locker room banter” with Billy Bush. The Republican nominee had revealed how he doesn’t wait for consent when kissing a woman (because he’s famous), and he prefers to just “grab them by the p*ssy.” Van Jones also appeared as part of a panel with a damning assessment of Trump’s hypocrisy as the “law and order candidate,” which he says was easily repudiated by Friday’s developments.
Indeed, Friday timing of the footage’s release was ironic, since a federal judge had just ordered a hearing in the underage rape case that has been detailed here and by Snopes. In addition, Trump had just repeated his insistence that the exonerated Central Park 5 are guilty (and in doing so, he evoked his late 1989 crusade where he took out a full-page newspaper ad to call for the death penalty for the defendants). Van Jones seized upon this last tidbit, but first, he pointed out how Trump calls himself the “law and order” candidate:
“Let’s not forget, this is Mr. Law and Order, who is now on tape confessing to a crime. He’s confessing to sexual assault. The problem isn’t the talk, the problem isn’t the bad words, the problem is the bad deeds. He’s saying he feels he has the right as a star to sexually assault women.”
Next, Jones discussed the irony of Trump’s Central Park 5 stance:
“This man came on to the scene politically in New York City attacking five innocent black boys accusing them of what? Sexual assault. He comes on the scene. He says these five boys committed sexual assault — and they were innocent. He never apologized! He said Mexican immigrants are rapists, sexual assaulters. It turns out the sexual assaulter, the superpredator is the man running for president!”
Jones then asked the media to tell America who the real “thug” happens to be. He also told the SOTU panel that it’s too late for the Republican party to have a “late-term abortion” on their candidate, and they’re stuck with Trump. All of this is going down on cable news hours before the next presidential debate, which will surely (maybe?) involve a question about the Trump footage.
