Trump’s Cabinet Picks Are Revenge for Me Too

Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images

President-elect Donald Trump, who’s been accused by more than 28 women of sexual assault and harassment, has been working at a record pace to assemble the most unapologetically rape-y Cabinet in American history. Less than two weeks into his team announcements, the pattern has grown so obvious that it would be reasonable to assume his new administration exists entirely to erase the Me Too movement.

So far, five of Trump’s picks to help him run the country have either been accused of rape or sexual misconduct or embroiled in a related scandal. His choice for attorney general, newly retired congressman Matt Gaetz, has been under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for allegedly having sex with a 17-year-old — which is statutory rape in Florida, where the alleged incident occurred — and sharing women’s nudes with his colleagues on the House floor. According to her lawyer, one of the witnesses who testified before the House Ethics Committee claims that she personally saw Gaetz raping a minor at a “drug-fueled” party in 2017, while he was still a congressman. And the Washington Post reported this week that Gaetz used the PayPal account of his “adopted son,” Nestor, to pay two women for sex at parties. Gaetz, we already knew, is such a virulent misogynist that he once told a room full of students in Tampa that women who support abortion rights are too ugly for men to have sex with. “Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb,” he said in July 2022, the month after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Gaetz pulled himself out of consideration on Thursday, an hour before CNN published a story on a second alleged “sexual encounter” he had with a teenager, saying his scandal-ridden confirmation had become a “distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition.” He didn’t admit any wrongdoing, and this withdrawal came after every Republican on the House Ethics Committee voted to bury their reportedly damaging report on him and a slew of the nation’s most powerful men signaled their support for him as AG. Evangelical House Speaker Mike Johnson, who once admitted that he and his son monitor each other’s porn intake, forbade House Republicans from releasing the report on Gaetz’s alleged sex crimes. Elon Musk, whom Trump tapped to run a made-up “Department of Government Efficiency,” tweeted that Gaetz will be our “Hammer of Justice” and that the sexual misconduct allegations are worth “less than nothing.”

Perhaps Trump and his advisers had planned all along to let Gaetz be the fall guy to distract from the sexual misconduct scandals plaguing the rest of the Cabinet picks. Musk had his own: A flight attendant for his company SpaceX claimed in 2022 that Musk exposed his penis to her during a massage, rubbed her leg sexually, and offered to buy her a horse in exchange for sex. The company paid her a quarter of a million dollars as a “severance.” Musk bought Twitter later that year, immediately began suspending journalists from the platform and sowing distrust in the mainstream media, and later used his massive reach and bank account to help buy the election for Trump.

Then there’s Pete Hegseth, a suave-looking Fox News personality and Army veteran whom Trump tapped for Defense Secretary, who reportedly paid off a woman who accused him of raping her at a 2017 conference for the California Federation of Republican Women. (Hegseth says their encounter was consensual.) The woman went to the emergency room the next morning, did a rape kit, and reported the incident to local police before eventually accepting the hush money. According to a police report, the woman claimed Hegseth had blocked her from leaving a hotel room, confiscated her phone, and sexually assaulted her, though she “remembered saying ‘no’ a lot.” When CNN asked the woman about the incident last week, they reported that she broke into tears.

We also have Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Trump tapped for secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy’s former nanny claims that when she was 23 and he was 45, he groped her in the pantry and made a series of other unwanted sexual advances. Kennedy apologized to the woman in a text message two days after Vanity Fair reported the allegations, saying, “If I hurt you, it was inadvertent.” And Trump nominated Linda McMahon for Education secretary, who, with her estranged husband, WWE mogul Vince McMahon, is accused in a lawsuit of allowing the “open, rampant abuse” of “ring boys” as young as 12. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of five alleged victims, claims that the McMahons knew about a ringside announcer who “lured and manipulated” young boys in order to film himself sexually abusing and exploiting them and ignored it. Linda McMahon “helped run a testosterone-fueled business that was seen as very sleazy for a long time,” Dave Meltzer, who’s covered the pro wrestling industry for decades, told the Washington Post. “That could be an issue for her, but Trump has so much baggage himself, and it seems that in politics these days, everything goes.”

Indeed, Trump’s reelection just months after he was found civilly liable for the rape and defamation of E. Jean Carroll appears to be an inflection point in the Me Too era. The movement sprouted up in the immediate wake of Trump’s first election, and the allegations against him are too many to list in full. (The president-elect, of course, denies all these accounts.) His ex-wife Ivana accused him of pulling out fistfuls of her hair while raping her before recanting that claim; Carroll says he raped her in a dressing room; Jessica Leeds says he groped her on an airplane; and a model who met Trump through Jeffrey Epstein, the prolific child sex trafficker who said Trump was his “closest friend” for a decade, came forward before this election to accuse him of groping her at Trump Tower in a “twisted game” between the two men.

After the first swath of these accusations, Trump wanted revenge. He vowed in 2016 that his first move as president would be to sue the many women who’d accused him of sexual misconduct while he was campaigning. He never followed through on that, and voters kicked him out of the White House in 2020. But this time around, even after Stormy Daniels humiliated him in court and Carroll took him to the cleaners in back-to-back defamation trials, the American people chose to restore Trump to office. Our society has reconditioned itself to tolerate alleged sexual predators at the highest echelons of power, just seven years after women poured out their long-buried stories of rape and abuse at the hands of prominent men. And younger generations are watching: Trump’s win already emboldened young boys to chant, “Your body, my choice,” in their classrooms, secure in the knowledge that nearly half of voters are willing to overlook all sorts of improper behavior in exchange for the hope of cheaper eggs. Trump now appears to be waging an even bigger, more systemic revenge campaign. He is shamelessly packing his government with fellow accused men who have an ax to grind, including putting one of those men in charge of “women’s health.”

Gaetz’s decision to drop out of consideration, while mildly encouraging on its face, does not change the fact that the party America just handed total control of Washington to sends a message through these appointments that women’s bodies now belong to them. It’s certainly a setback for feminism writ large and perhaps the apex of the backlash to the Me Too movement. But Trump and his Cabinet picks are only guaranteed four years in power. If it looked like women were pissed off eight years ago, when they knitted pussy hats and marched to the Capitol and finally put Harvey Weinstein behind bars, it’s possible that we haven’t seen anything like the backlash to the backlash that may already be brewing.