Bill Maher
Last week, HBO comedian Bill Maher waxed effusive about Trump’s graciousness and charm at a White House dinner the president hosted for him, Kid Rock, and UFC head Dana White. On his Real Time show, Maher said: “You can hate me for it, but I’m not a liar. Trump was gracious and measured. And why isn’t that in other settings? I don’t know, and I can’t answer, and it’s not my place to answer. I’m just telling you what I saw, and I wasn’t high.”
I’m usually a Bill fan. I was on his show once, and I like that he brings together opposing views but also pushes back on lies and bullshit –unlike Joe Rogan, for example. Communicating with people whose politics differ from ours is good for a healthy democracy: D.C. dinner society once included people from most of the political spectrum – I wrote a book about it.
That Washington waned and then disappeared roughly around the time Newt Gingrich rolled into town on the coattails of the long game the right had been playing to foment public distrust and loathing toward the entire government. Now, while one side still plays by the old rules, the other mounts a fascist insurrection and hangs “Fuck Biden” flags on the lawn for school children to see.
But all the vileness Trump and the MAGA cult have unleashed in American political discourse pales compared with the damage done to women. The dreadful things happening to American women and girls in the abortion ban states are some of the most dramatic stories in the country today. Women are getting sepsis and losing their reproductive organs. Some are dying.
Every one of those individual horrors was caused by one man: The leader of the greatest misogynistic backlash in modern U.S. history is Donald Trump – yes, that gracious dinner companion.
This is the man who crafted a Supreme Court that has set women’s health back into the Stone Age. This convicted sexual abuser and famous public denigrator of females packs his cabinet with accused predators and sex pests. Accused rapist Russell Brand recently posed with White House officials Peter Navarro and RFK Jr. at some tropical hideaway. The Trump regime just invited into America – and granted safe haven, literally – to the rape-accused domestic abuse propagandists that are the Tate brothers.
More than any single man or woman in my lifetime, Trump ushered in the ongoing and vicious legal and cultural assault on women and girls. Banning abortion was only the beginning. The fanatic MAGA misogynists who engineered this situation want the Jezebels to suffer more. A lot more.
States are passing “fetal personhood” laws giving embryos more rights than the women carrying them and enabling hundreds of arrests already. States are considering and passing laws to make abortion data public. Many are considering and some are passing laws to imprison women and doctors over abortion. A few are even trying to institute the death penalty.
Feminist journalist Jessica Valenti publishes a phenomenal compendium of the maniacal proposals and new woman-hating laws, Abortion, Everyday. I consult it for my daily dose of rage. Here you will learn, for example, that state legislators in Texas want to start testing the water for birth control hormones because they might be harmful. These are the same legislators, of course, who seem to be opposed to federal clean water regulations).
Remember, this is not just a legal assault, it is cultural: Peter Thiel’s conservative women’s magazine Evie routinely spews nonsense about the dangers of hormonal birth control. Anti-abortion propaganda (in the form of a movie called “Baby Olivia” produced by anti-abortion fanatics) is now mandatory in North Dakota, Tennessee, and Idahoschools and is being considered in Florida, Kentucky, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and West Virginia.
And the Trump administration recently yanked NIH funding for the MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" recipient behind a major longitudinal study that examined the effects of unwanted pregnancy on women’s lives. The research found that abortion does not harm women’s health and well-being, in contrast to points made by anti-choice fanatics, but being denied an abortion results in worse financial, health, and family outcomes for women.
We are living through a time of truly crazy cultural assault on women’s agency rights, in addition to the violations of our bodily autonomy. Trump’s first election made misogyny cool again. His second regime is cementing that success into law and culture. Ideas that once festered in the incel basement chatrooms are now common currency in the mainstream. Maybe divorce is too easy for women. Maybe women shouldn’t vote (since they overwhelmingly do not prefer Trump).
The House recently passed a law that potentially disenfranchises 80 percent of married women by requiring voter IDs to have birth names, not married names. And states have been considering laws to repeal no-fault divorce, which has repeatedly been shown to reduce domestic violence.
Bill Maher was charmed by Trump, a disgusting oaf and abuser, who spent a full decade pal-ing around with sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein per Michael Wolff’s tapes, competing for sexual access to pretty women before falling out, not over Epstein’s predations, as the deluded QAnon cult believes, but a real estate deal.
There’s a good reason why Maher is charm-able. Predations against women don’t trouble him too much. Like many left-ish cads, he’s not too bothered by “the woman stuff.” In fact, as Sophie Gilbert writes in her essay on women and porn in The Atlantic today, liberal - libertine - men in entertainment always promoted the hard-core sexualization of women and girls that preceded this Trumpy-Tate bro era.
Last week I heard Clara Bingham read from her best-selling new oral history, The Movement, on women behind the so-called “second wave” of the fight for women’s equality in America between 1963 and 1973. The changes those women were able to effect are nothing short of epochal. In 1963, American women couldn’t open bank accounts or get credit cards without men, couldn't serve on juries, and were generally limited to work in nursing, teaching, or, until the wizened age of 32 or earlier if pregnant or married, flight attendants. Women earned 59 cents for every dollar men earned. Contraception was hard to get, limited to married women and secret terrifying back alley abortions were the norm.
The women in that generation who fought for equality were subject to endless public ridicule - from men on the left and the right. But, by 1973, everything had changed. The lives of those women’s daughters and granddaughters are unrecognizable. Their achievement was epochal, making women and girls first-class citizens for the first time in history.
That didn’t sit well with many men, who spent the following decades relentlessly denigrating these heroines and downplaying their success. Men like Bill Maher -- nominally left-center but well-known habitué of strip clubs and serial dater of young women -- belong to the great cohort of American men who, while not MAGA, are simply not as horrified as they should be by what Trump has inflicted on half the American population.
Reprinted with permission from COURIER's American Freakshow.
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