cupidsbower:

cupidsbower:

cOMEY’S TESTIMONY THO. omg

So, having listened to the whole thing and read Comey’s statement, the thing that struck me most was how much the hearing sounded like the questioning of a sexual assault victim.

By which I mean:

• Comey was asked why he didn’t say, “No,” to Trump’s inappropriate requests.
• Comey was asked why he didn’t refuse Trump’s calls or invitations.
• He was asked if he instigated the private meetings.
• He was asked why he hadn’t told anyone or asked for help.

Frankly, it was amazing he wasn’t asked what he was wearing.

The conclusions I draw from this are that, yeah, I pretty much believe Comey’s account. It sounds legit. I think it’s realistic that Trump uses predatory intimidation techniques in his business and political dealings, as well as in his dealings with women.

Comey’s account makes it pretty clear that Trump relies on two things when trying to manipulate someone to get what he wants.

• First, he uses his power – in this case the office of President – as a deliberate intimidation technique. He silently uses his power to put less powerful people in situations where they cannot easily say no in the moment, because the potential harm to them seems too high to do so.
  Pretty much every woman in the world will know what I mean by that.

• Second, he relies on the expectation of the normal scripts of politeness in the people he targets, while already planning to break them himself. By which I mean, he deliberately puts people in a situation where not only does the power differential make it hard to say no, they also have to be deliberately rude in order to say no, and the resulting damage to their own reputation will likely be worse than to his.

It’s practically textbook sexual-predation technique, and we just got an eye-witness account of it on the stand by the then-head of the FBI. Scholars and historians are going to be chewing over this for decades. Wowser.

I have a swirling maelstrom of feelings about this. Obviously, it’s appalling that a sexual predator and bully is the President of the USA. It’s also just completely bizarre to hear a comparatively powerful white man express on the world stage the awkwardness and scriptlessness that’s felt in the moment of being targetted by a predator. It was practically word for word an echo of experiences I’ve had in sexually unwanted situations. I felt for Comey – no-one should have to deal with that anywhere, anytime, but particularly not in the workplace.

And perhaps the most astounding thing of all: I didn’t think any explanation could make me think Comey’s public announcements about the Clinton email-server investigation really were the lesser of two evils, but this testimony did offer a fairly compelling case for it. The larger implications of the context he found himself in, with the person he reported to either suspect or perceived to be so… ugh. He really did only have bad choices. The one he chose was still undoubtedly bad. But maybe silence really would have been worse. I’m glad I wasn’t the one in that hotseat.

American politics is such a fucking mess right now.