BIRDS OF A FEATHER

Why Trump’s Worst Scandal Is About to Haunt Him: Political Guru

The president can’t escape his past, political guru David Rothkopf says.

President Donald Trump’s nasty habit of sticking up for men accused of sexual assault illuminates his fears about facing discipline for his own alleged misdeeds, argues political expert David Rothkopf.

Rothkopf explained on The Daily Beast Podcast that Trump, 80, frequently defends people accused of sexual abuse, which Rothkopf argued serves to bolster Trump’s own response to allegations about his past associations with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

“I just think Trump is the most dependably pro-sexual abuse president America has ever had,” Rothkopf told host Joanna Coles. “Every single time he has the opportunity to speak out on behalf of people accused of sexual abuse, he does.”

Coles had mentioned Trump’s bizarre response to the reopening of a case at Cornell University where seven men were accused of drugging and gang-raping a classmate at a fraternity house.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul appointed Attorney General Letitia James, a major foe of Trump’s, to oversee the criminal case, much to the president’s dismay.

“Letitia James is a corrupt person,” Trump told reporters in a press gaggle on Friday before expressing sympathy for the accused. “She’s totally corrupt, and I can’t imagine it. And I feel badly for whoever she’s looking at because they won’t get a fair shake. Letitia James is a corrupt person.”

The woman at the center of the case, identified only as Jane Doe, alleged that she had become incapacitated after she was given drugs and alcohol before being sexually assaulted by multiple fraternity members over several hours.

Play Video

“Here is this Cornell case where a bunch of privileged Cornell students [wrote] essays as a way of getting out of attacking and abusing women. And Trump’s like, ‘Well, that’s not fair,’” Rothkopf explained. “Because Trump actually, as we’ve said here before, believes that men should be able to abuse women—that that’s the natural order of things. He believes that people in power should be able to take whatever they want.”

The foreign policy expert said that the president’s behavior can be traced back to one particular thing.

“All of this connects to Epstein,” Rothkopf said. “Donald Trump’s defense of the Cornell kids is because the accusations against them sound like the accusations against Trump that have been made in multiple cases, but are particularly still out there associated with the Epstein files.”

The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.

One accusation included in the documents as a result of the Epstein Files Transparency Act was from a woman who claimed that when she was 13, Trump forced her to perform oral sex on him.

“No matter what Donald Trump tries to do, he can’t turn the page in his own mind,” Rothkopf continued. “He knows there are victims out there that are gonna someday testify in front of Congress in one situation or another. He knows that these accusations are going to come out again. He knows that he and Melania were part of a demimonde in the world of Jeffrey Epstein, which is repugnant to most Americans.”

“Anytime he has a chance to say, ‘Well, this is really a political thing,’ or, ‘This is unfair,’ or, ‘This is people abusing the law,’ he does it because he’s laying the groundwork for his own ongoing defense in this Epstein thing, which will be at the center of everything,” he added.

New episodes of The Daily Beast Podcast are released every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday on YouTube, and on other podcast platforms the next morning. Follow our new feed on your favorite podcast platform at beast.pub/dailybeastpod and subscribe on YouTube to watch full episodes.

See more of our coverage in your search results.

ADD THE DAILY BEAST ON GOOGLE

Vic VerbalaitisNight Breaking News Reporter

The Daily Beast PodcastPodcast

Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here.