The Dark Irony of the Trump-Biden Man-Off
Welcome to the White House, where anger, aggression, and the complex art of amour are intimately entangled. Some (weak) men might grapple with romance. Not Donald Trump. He’s had it sorted since 1992, when he imparted his fail-safe statute of seduction to New York magazine: “You have to treat ’em like shit.” Why did supermodel Heidi Klum go weak at the knees when Trump announced she was “no longer a 10,” Meryl Streep lustfully nurse her battered ego when she was dubbed “overrated,” and Mika Brzezinski feel an illicit thrill when she was described as “bleeding badly from a face-lift”? Because the president, Neil Strauss’s spiritual predecessor, knows What Women Want. For any females temporarily distracted by the #MeToo movement, this morning Trump served up a timely reminder as to the rules of his Game, with a pheromone-laced tweet directed at one of his chief political rivals. “Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy,” he wrote, after the potential 2020 challenger assured at an anti-sexual assault rally in Miami that he’d “beat the hell” out of the president if they were at high school, in response to the leaked Access Hollywood tape. “He doesn’t know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way,” continued Trump. “Don’t threaten people Joe!”
Readers who aren’t gingerly flushing and anemically swooning at the prospect of two septuagenarians—10 Vietnam War deferments between them—clashing over the treatment of women might spare a thought for Melania Trump, who has just launched her long-awaited campaign to curb cyberbullying. The First Lady announced her intention towards the end of the presidential campaign, when the international community was still not entirely inoculated to her husband’s Twitter habit, and some even thought that the raft of sexual assault allegations against him might obstruct his path to the Oval Office. “Technology has changed our universe,” she said. “But like anything that is powerful it can have a bad side. Our culture has gotten too mean and too rough, especially to children and to teenagers.” Melania’s speech, delivered at the White House before a clutch of executives from various technology concerns, opened by acknowledging the absurdity of her situation. “I am well aware that people are skeptical of me discussing this topic,” she said. “I have been criticized for my commitment to tackling this issue, and I know that will continue. But it will not stop me from doing what I know is right.” You’d be mistaken, then, in interpreting the Donald’s early-morning tweet as a move to undermine his wife’s efforts and stoke this skepticism: subconsciously, it’s what she wants.
Trump and Biden’s locker-room banter came during a week that saw the president battered by a stream of legal troubles involving women who allege to have had an affair with or been sexually assaulted by Trump. Tuesday, New York Supreme Court Judge Jennifer Schecter ruled that a defamation suit filed by former Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos can go ahead, and there was “absolutely no authority” to dismiss the suit because Trump is president. (Trump has denied claims that he kissed Zervos twice on the lips during a lunch meeting in 2007, and kissed her and touched her breast while in Beverly Hills.) On the same day, Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who claims to have had an affair with Trump, sued to be released from a 2016 agreement binding her to silence. Meanwhile, the lawyer for Stormy Daniels, the adult-film actress who also alleges she had an affair with Trump, is locked in a legal battle with the president and his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, and is due to appear on CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday night. “We have a lot of information, a lot of evidence, a lot of documents that haven’t come to light yet,” her lawyer Michael Avenatti told MSNBC on Tuesday.
Of course, it’s perfectly plausible that Trump’s decision to cyber-circle Biden around the issue of sexual assault is a tactic to distract the public from the important, pithier issues currently coloring his administration—remember, all of his accusers are liars. “Total dysfunction,” tweeted G.O.P. Senator Ben Sasse in frustration. “D.C. is about to add 1.3 TRILLION $ to your debt like it’s no big deal—and meanwhile both of our crazy uncles are fist-fighting in the backyard. Happy Thanksgiving, America.” It’s not just the omnibus spending bill that needs skirting over. Diverting attention from staffing problems would also help the administration, which is fielding criticism for the unceremonious dumping of Rex Tillerson at State and the promotion of Gina Haspel, who previously ran a torture “black site” in Thailand, to the role of C.I.A. director. While Trump recently heralded deputy F.B.I. director Andrew McCabe’s dismissal as a “great day for democracy,” some interpreted it as a cynical attempt to discredit Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Then there’s the swelling Cambridge Analytica-Facebook scandal. The majority of the fire is currently falling on Mark Zuckerberg, but that’s not to say it won’t edge closer to the president, whose campaign paid the data-mining firm millions.
There are more profound depths to the Trump-Biden man-off, too, as we round the first corner of 2018 and head toward November’s elections. Biden, who is currently campaigning for the Democrats in the impending midterms, has kept up criticism of Trump since 2016, stoking speculation that he might launch a 2020 White House bid. Trump has scoffed at the prospect of a Biden run, calling him “Sleepy Joe” and, in the characteristic patois of the Queens-bred billionaire, threatening to “kick his ass.” (It plays in Shelby County, and in Clarksville, or so we are told.) If Biden does run, both men can bask in the knowledge that women the world over will welcome the thought of another political battle where they become a useful launchpad for two clashing forms of masculinity: one espousing a violent, Chaucer-era chivalry; the other, the impotent fury of a pick-up artist past his prime.
