Sexual misconduct allegations are playing out just like they did in 2016—even after the #MeToo movement

A mere six weeks before the 2020 presidential election, an allegation of sexual assault against the sitting President has barely registered in the national consciousness.

Last week, Amy Dorris joined a list of at least 25 women to have accused President Donald Trump of sexual misconduct.

Speaking to the Guardian, Dorris, a former model, recalled how Trump forced himself on her outside the bathroom of his luxury box at the 1997 U.S. Open tennis tournament in New York. Some 23 years later, Dorris said she was finally going public with the allegation to set an example for her twin daughters. The Guardian said it was able to corroborate her account with several people in whom she had confided about the alleged incident.

As they have in every instance in which the President has been accused of such misconduct, lawyers for Trump vehemently denied the accusations. They cast doubts over Dorris’s story, asking why she would have continued to spend time around Trump—at the U.S. Open and at a memorial for the then-recently slain fashion designer Gianni Versace—in the wake of the alleged incident. (Dorris was visiting New York with her boyfriend at the time, a friend of Trump’s.)

It is a strategy that evokes the advice of “deny, deny, deny,” that Trump’s onetime mentor, the late attorney Roy Cohn, is said to have given him in his younger days—counsel that he has deployed time and time again, through the myriad scandals that have plagued his presidency. And it is a tactic that appears to have worked in delegitimizing the more than two dozen allegations of sexual misconduct levied against the President, from admittedly walking in on undressed beauty pageant contestants to allegedly raping the writer E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room.

Because while Dorris’s allegations briefly managed to make headlines around the world, they were quickly relegated to an afterthought—even before the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday put Dorris firmly on the back burner as far as the news cycle was concerned. A mere six weeks before the 2020 presidential election, an allegation of sexual assault against the sitting President of the United States has barely registered in the national consciousness.

Trump, as his detractors would note, has shattered no shortage of norms during his time in office, from government ethics standards to questioning the legitimacy of the very election in which he now stands. But perhaps no set of standards have been cast aside so ruthlessly as those around elected officials accused of sexual misconduct—the kind of behavior that, through the decades, has cost scores of politicians their positions in public life.

To many observers, the pivotal moment that solidified Trump’s ability to insulate himself from the myriad accusations against him was the release of the Access Hollywood tape in October 2016, one month before that fall’s presidential election. The revelation of Trump boasting, in exceptionally lewd terms, about his ability to sexually impose himself on women sent his campaign scrambling and prompted calls from some in his own party for Trump to withdraw from the race. As the feminist writer Jill Filipovic noted last week, the behavior that Trump boasted about engaging in on the tape starkly corroborates the grabbing, groping, and forced sexual contact that numerous women, including Dorris, have accused him of.

But Trump didn’t withdraw. As he has throughout the course of his political career, he doubled down and struck back at his opponents with equal if not greater fury. Two days after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, he showed up to the second debate with his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, accompanied by Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Juanita Broaddrick—women who have all accused Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, of sexual assault or harassment.

That maneuver undoubtedly put Hillary Clinton in an awkward position, and she was never able to make Trump’s alleged misconduct the hot-button campaign issue it arguably warranted becoming. Despite all of the allegations against him and the vulgar spectacle captured on the Access Hollywood tape, Trump was able to overcome it all: He won the election, and in the process beat Clinton among the white women demographic that made up 41% of the electorate, according to Pew Research Center.

Even as society faced a massive public reckoning with sexual assault and misconduct in the wake of the #MeToo movement—one that cost plenty of other public officials their jobs—the Trump camp held its line. Sarah Huckabee Sanders was explicit about it in October 2017, when the former White House press secretary was asked whether it was “the official White House position” that all of the President’s roughly two dozen accusers were lying. “Yeah, we’ve been clear on that from the beginning,” she replied.

In 2020, it appears a somewhat similar dynamic to 2016 is playing out. There are no shortage of issues on which former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign is willing to scrutinize the President in the harshest possible terms, from his handling of the coronavirus pandemic to his abrasive tone on the race-related issues that have shaken up American society this year. But on the subject of allegations like Dorris’s, Biden has remained silent.

Like Hillary Clinton in 2016, Biden has his own baggage in this regard: the allegations levied against him by Tara Reade, who claims Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993, when she worked as a staffer in his Senate office. While Reade’s account has been beset by inconsistencies and credibility issues, it’s also one of several allegations by women who have accused the former vice president of no less than inappropriate physical contact.

While some would deny equivalencies between the allegations against Biden and the numerous women who have accused President Trump of sexual misconduct, the fact remains that Biden has proved reluctant to hit Trump with attacks related to his alleged past mistreatment of women. The Biden campaign has not commented on Dorris’s allegations, and neither campaigns returned requests for comment.

In turn, the President—perhaps wary of his own track record in that regard and a prolific denier of sexual assault accusers in his own right—has been more inclined to criticize Biden as a conduit for the “radical left” and question his cognitive capabilities than to broach the allegations against Biden.

And so, at a pivotal stage in the lead-up to one of the most consequential presidential elections of our time, allegations like Dorris’s are allowed to flicker in and out of the public consciousness with barely any acknowledgement. In an era when the issue of sexual assault is supposed to be confronted and destigmatized more than ever in society, it instead lingers over the 2020 election unspoken and unrecognized—effectively off the ballot.

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