Jennifer Rubin considers the views of Colbie Holderness, a domestic abuse survivor during her marriage to Rob Porter, an accused serial abuser:
Her hope that women would be better than that may be well-founded in the aggregate. Trump is hemorrhaging support from women, both college- and non-college-educated ones.
Yet Rubin reflects on human nature, and acknowledges a dark truth:
However, in the particular case of those women — Conway, Sanders, Concerned Women for America, Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel, the Fox News female hosts — who work for, rationalize and sacrifice integrity to defend the indefensible, we should expect them to be just as clueless, disingenuous and morally vacant as the men who have chosen to tie themselves to Trump’s mast.
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The same is true of Trump’s Jewish advisers. We realize in retrospect that we should not have expected Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and senior adviser Gary Cohn to behave any more admirably in the context of Trump’s responses to Charlottesville neo-Nazis than Trump’s non-Jewish advisers. Sure, as a group American Jews are overwhelmingly Democratic and anti-Trump, but if you’ve gone to work for a man who called Mexican immigrants murderers, bragged about sexually assaulting women, sought to demonize an entire religion and ridiculed Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for being a POW during the Vietnam War, you probably don’t place social justice and Torah-based values at the top of your concerns. You have rejected or been oblivious to a slew of principles in order to go work for him in the first place.
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It’s human nature to think that those from the same groups whom Trump insults and abuses would identify with the victims, or that members of any minority group with a history of persecution would feel the sting of bigotry and spot the dangers of destroying democratic norms. And in general, that is true. But lest we think all women, Jews and minorities are angels, one need only look at the cringe-worthy, daily performances of press secretary Sanders, the toadyism of Mnuchin and the presence of Ben Carson in Trump’s Cabinet. What we should expect is that anyone who has sacrificed principle, integrity and humanity to defend this president will keep on defending him, no matter how horrendous his rhetoric and his actions.
Via Don’t expect the women who enable Trump to be better than the men.
Among all groups there are those who will betray others, including – and sometimes especially – their own. If there should be a group with not a single quisling, then one has never heard of it.
Most people are not like this, of course, but no group is free of those who support the victimization of people like themselves. That support is sometimes implicit and soft, but at other times explicit and hard.
Washington, Whitewater, and countless other places are, sadly, no different in this regard: a nearness to an unprincipled authority sometimes wrongly requires the mistreatment of one’s own kind situated farther from that authority.
Cooperation is humiliation, collaboration is degradation.