The Ingenue Accuser Strategy

My point in yesterday's post was that Trump, having somehow gotten this way through successful careers in salesmanship, the management of wealth and influence, and entertainment, has a deep and instinctive insight into subliminal cues. It reminds me of discussions I've seen of artists like Shakespere or Michelangelo that point out that critics can take paragraphs to explain the effect of specific scenes or vignettes, but the decisions the artists made in creating them must have been nearly instant.

These sorts of insights operate below a conscious or rational level. But some sort of underlying intent is clearly behind Trump's nominations of Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, and Matt Gaetz, because the reactions from his oppenents have been so over-the-top on one hand and predictable on the other. Trump must have had some sense that this would be the case, and I've got to assume he also has an instinctive sense of how an end game will play out, even if it's obscure to everyone else.

I'm going to leave the reactions to Tulsi Gabbard aside for now -- that she's a Russian agent -- because they're a little too transparent and banal. But I want to focus on the accusations against Hegseth and Gaetz, which are also predictable and transparent, because they seem to fit something more like a dreamlike archetype, the ingenue accuser. So far, the ingenues who've been marshaled against Hegseth and Gaetz are anonymous and speaking through attorneys, and the details of their accusations haven't been fully revealed, but they're starting to fit an existing pattern.

Past ingenue figures -- and of course, I'm using the term very loosely -- have included Anita Hill against Clarence Thomas, Christine Blasey Ford against Brett Kavanaugh, Cassidy Huthinson against Donald Trump, Stormy Daniels against Donald Trump, and E Jean Carroll, yet again against Donald Trump. The problem with the ingenue archetype is that figures like Carroll, an octogenarian sex columnist, and Daniels, a porn actress, hardly qualify as ingenues, and the credibility of all of them has collapsed under scrutiny. They simply turn out not to be ingenues, their stories are phony, and the whole affair turns into something like the punchline of a dirty joke.

But more important, what we've seen is that all these seemingly tawdry affairs wind up working to the benefit of the nominee. Clarence Thomas was confirmed, as was Brett Kavanaugh. Cassidy Hutchinson, Stormy Daniels, and E Jean Carroll somehow served as subliminal cues that helped bring about Trump's unprecedented political comeback and reelection; in particular, the trials involving non-ingenues Carroll and Daniels did nothing but boost Trump's rise in the polls.

What we have at the moment against Gaetz boils down to this:

A woman told the House Ethics Committee that she saw Matt Gaetz, who is President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for the U.S. attorney general, have sex with a minor, her lawyer said Friday.

“My client testified to the House Ethics Committee that she witnessed Rep. Gaetz having sex with a minor at a house party in Orlando in 2017,” Joel Leppard said.

This in itself raises puzzling questions. People normally have sex, underage or not, in private. How did this person find herself in a situation where she witnessed this act? Was it in some sort of orgy? How was she so sure the victim was 17 and not 18? What sort of substances had she ingested to wind up in this situation? If her judgment was so clouded simply as to be in the same room, how can her testimony not be impeachable? But the story goes on,

“Merrick Garland’s DOJ cleared Matt Gaetz and didn’t charge him. Are you alleging Garland is part of a cover-up?” a spokesperson for Gaetz said Friday.

Gaetz, 42, who represented Florida’s District 1 covering part of the Florida Panhandle, was investigated by the FBI on sex-trafficking allegations involving a 17-year-old and was not charged with any crime.

I suspect this story will fall apart pretty quickly as the witness turns out, like the others, not to be an ingenue. The same sort of narrative seems to be shaping up with Hegseth:

Trump Defense Secretary Nominee Pete Hegseth’s lawyer Tim Parlatore said in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News on Saturday that sexual assault allegations from seven years ago — in 2017 — were “completely investigated” at the time and that he is “completely and totally innocent.”

“He is completely and totally innocent. It was completely investigated. She was the aggressor,” Parlatore said in a phone interview, referring to the woman who claimed she was assaulted.

Parlatore said that in 2017, Hegseth, the host of Fox News’ Fox & Friends, was invited to speak at an event hosted by the California Federation of Republican Women conference in Monterey. After the event, he and event organizers were at a bar, where he had “too many drinks.”

The accuser, who was allegedly sober at the time, took him back to his room, Parlatore said.

“She took advantage of him. She led him. She was, by all accounts, both video and eyewitness, she was sober. He was drunk. She grabbed him. She took him to his room. She’s like walking arm in arm with him. And really putting it on, and she gets him into his room. And then the police honestly, when they looked at it, even though she was the one that reported it, when they looked at the video, they considered charging her,” he said.

Over the next several years, there were threats of lawsuits by both sides that eventually resulted in a settlement.

Parlatore said the settlement had confidentiality provisions that the accuser or others with knowledge of the case breached this week, when the allegations became public.

“The consequences for breaking it are essentially that the settlement is null and void, but beyond the settlement, obviously she’s going to owe us a little bit of money from that,” he said, adding that she did not get much in the first place.

“But now it opens her up to a lawsuit for defamation and because it’s in California, California has a simple extortion statute, so we could sue her for extortion, too,” he said.

If we look at the pattern here, all of the (not) ingenue accuser scenarios have played out in a consistent way, and it's been counterproductive to the intended effect. I can't imagine that Trump wasn't fully aware of the allegations against both Gaetz and Hegseth, and he fully factored them into his strategy when he nominated them, although, as with Shakespeare and Michelangelo, his decisons must have been nearly instant and inscrutable to the rest of us.

I don't know how they will play out, but I can only assume they're part of a strategy to render the RINO faction of the Republicans irrelevant, and so far, the RINO Republicans are acting as we might predict. If they're being predictable, this doesn't bode well for them at all.