Trump, Biden, Clinton, and the Politics of Presidential Sexual Misconduct: An Unfinished Draft

 This, or an earlier version thereof, was originally written in reaction to Trump’s Stormy Daniels scandal. It was largely in response to a self-righteous CNN article that was more interested in virtue signaling and in depicting Trump as a licentious and uncivilized sexual freak than criticizing his policies. I have no interest, obviously, in defending “Trump sexuality,” but I felt the attack on Trump’s (in this particular case consensual) sexual misconduct serves to cast, by contrast, mainstream American  and imperial (sexual and non-sexual) misconduct as normative. I particularly worry about the civilizational, and potentially racial, aspect of this discourse, and of course about how the discussion concerning the private misconduct of people in power can divert attention from their public crimes (crimes in which they are partners with others who lead normative private and sexual lives but are equally criminal when it comes to their exercise of public power). I was recently reminded of this piece when the allegations, some founded, some unfounded, about Biden’s sexual misconduct were easily dismissed or brushed under the carpet (whereas in another context the contestation of the most unsubstantiated allegation of sexual misconduct is labeled as anti-feminist and as victim-blaming).

Argument

When the Stormy Daniels scandal broke, I was preparing for my doctoral defense. The scandal and its coverage in the liberal media came to mind as I was thinking of ways to tackle the potential questions of “how is your conception of the licentious relevant to today’s world?” and “does it operate in contemporary Western culture the same way it did in the nineteenth century?” I thus try to elaborate on how US mainstream liberal (and not only conservative) discourse utilizes notions of licentiousness that implicitly operate on a civilizational grid and that create a dichotomy between normative and non-normative forms of misconduct.

Indeed there is a lot to criticize about the policies, incompetencies, rhetorics, and the very characteristics of Donald Trump. The liberal media, it seems to me, chose to put aside all the structural, ideological, and political due criticisms, and decided instead to focus on matters that can position Trump beyond the bounds of Western/American civilization; perverse, almost primitive, sexuality, was one of the convenient tropes. This is not only because of the sensationalism of the topic but also for how it absolves America by turning its (legal and semiotic) representative into its perverse other. Trump’s scandals therefore belong to the same trend that attempts to associate Trump’s authoritarianism with the West’s other: with Russian conspiracies, Chinese allegiances, Arab despotism (manifesting in close ties with Arab royal families and in memes that depict Trump in traditional Arab garbs), and so on.

The Licentious President?

 Early on in the 2018 presidential race, one thing that seemed to particularly trouble (and vindicate) liberal observers and commentators,  was Donald Trump’s alleged sexual desire towards his daughter, Ivanka (triumphantly marshaled by Trevor Noah as the one piece of information that would finally undermine Trump in the eyes of his supporters and America at large). In addition to trivializing the due criticism of the rising tide of US fascism (rising since 1776 if not 1492), this discourse produced Ivanka as the victim of her father’s patriarchal lust, rather than a complicit partner in his reactionary project. In addition, this kind of criticism, though directed against someone in power, is ultimately complicit with the voyeuristic mode of power that characterizes the modern state, and which empowers the state to scrutinize, sanction, or criminalize private patterns of behavior—but that’s a larger question that a big part of my dissertation was dedicated to, and I do not intend to spend time here in order to cast someone in power as the victim of that same power.

 Finally, the fixation on the president’s perversities serves to produce the despot as a primitive man who hasn’t approximated the civilized faculty of self (especially sexual) restraint and who has not successfully crossed the threshold between nature and culture, marked by the incest taboo. Liberal representations of Donald Trump did not stop at the figure of the primitive (sexual) savage, to it they added the  kin figure of the oriental/savage polygamist; indeed mainstream Americans are scandalized by the multiple marriages of their president and the  liberal media chose to also focus on his polygamous marital and extramarital affairs while questions of structural racism, imperial foreign policies, and even accusations of rape, urgently awaited (and continue to await) to be addressed.   

I do understand how extra marital affairs can be scandalizing even beyond a puritanical/civilizational paradigm of sexuality; after all polygamy is one thing, unfaithfulness is another. What seems to concern the liberal media most, however, is not the spousal infidelity (for which they were more than willing not only to forgive their poster-child Bill Clinton, but also to turn into credit for his war-mongering wife and her fascistic project). Instead they focus on the non-normative elements of the affairs: the age gap between Trump and his mistresses, how they allegedly reminded him of his daughter, and (the horror), how he failed to use protection in at least some of the encounters (perhaps betraying a liberal disgust at raw intercourse, at the tactile, and at genitalia as such, lurking behind the medical and ethical discourse surrounding safe-sex, but in all cases producing Trump as removed from civilization and from proper, modern, and healthy sexual norms).

Creating Diversion?        

 In addition to generating a discourse on the normative versus the perverse, on the civilized versus the savage, this focus on Trump’s non-normative sexuality has in the past served to eclipse and obfuscate his actual sexual misconduct; during the electoral race the liberals and their media were too disturbed by the obscene phrasing Trump used to describe how  certain women consented to him grabbing their privates as a result of his wealth and fame (perhaps because he said in public what they think and say in private). The fixation on the obscenity of Trump’s statement served to obscure rather than highlight more serious incidents of sexual misconduct and outright assault, like for example the story, corroborated by Trump himself,  that, when he owned Miss Universe and Miss America, he developed the habit of walking in uninvited into the contestants’ dressing rooms— but also outright accusations of unwanted touching and aggressive non-consensual sexual advances. None of these accusations received as much coverage in the liberal media as the “grab them by the pussy” statement.

The sexism of the statement was vehemently criticized, but never connected to the nexus of sexual and military violence, practiced not only by US armies overseas but also domestically through a militarized police force. Whereas the statement could have been dealt with as emblematic of dominant global and American sexism and violence, and the colonization of the body (domestically and overseas), the statement was treated as singular and served to divert the attention from the actual policies of the current US president as well as from those of the various US administrations, republican or democratic.

Presidential Sexual Misconduct: Republican and Democrat

Trump here can be contrasted to Bill Clinton. Equally guilty of sexual misconduct (worse, in fact: he used the presidency as leverage to pressure women who worked for him into sexual situations) Clinton did not act haphazardly like the savage, but like a civilized man in power (ab)used his power to make sexual advances towards subordinate women. Clinton exercises his prerogative as a white male boss and seduces/sexually harasses his interns, a type of sexual misconduct decried by law and by mainstream political correctness, but accepted as part of the white man’s exercise of his dominance—after all, the Monica Lewinsky affair was associated with Clinton’s bombing campaigns, not only the ones he ordered against Iraq and Sudan to divert attention after the scandal broke, but also the ones against former Yugoslavia which he reportedly ordered on the phone while Ms. Lewinsky was orally performing on the presidential sex organ. Ultimately, and bear with me the graphic details if you please, opposed to Trump who failed to use protection (which according to the CNN article was a sign of irresponsibility that disqualifies Trump as a president), Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky affair did the responsible thing and practiced the civilized faculty of self-restraint, limiting himself to oral sex, which also allowed him to equivocate on the kind of relationship he had with “that woman” during his testimony.

In a similar fashion, the videos (admittedly manipulated to serve far right propaganda), in which children— predominantly but not exclusively female- are visibly uncomfortable with Biden’s touch, are written off as out-of-context or dismissed as fabrications, simply because the treatment of little girls as potential or latent objects of sexual desire is widespread in Western culture (here I am not arguing for the veracity of the allegations, nor am I arguing that the visible discomfort of the children necessarily conveys or proves a malicious or sexual intent on the part of Biden. I am just saying that, true or not, had the acts been any more dissonant with mainstream Western patriarchy— whether its sexualizing of little girls or its hold over the bodies, over the agency, and over the consent of children— the allegations wouldn't have been so easily dismissed). 

This, obviously, is not an apology for Trump, his policies, or his behavior; I think all critical tools should be mobilized to criticize the empire and the people who have been running it. As we criticize the people in power, however, we must be careful not to lend support to the very discourses and modes of power the empire is predicated on (the voyeuristic state, the civilizational discourse on sexuality, the figure of the primitive sexual savage, etc.). Nor should we tolerate the exoneration one strain of emperors, war criminals, and imperialists as a side effect of denouncing the other strain.