The USA Today editorial board on Tuesday pilloried President Donald Trump for his sexually suggestive attack against Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY).
“With his latest tweet, clearly implying that a United States senator would trade sexual favors for campaign cash, President Trump has shown he is not fit for office,” the editorial read. “Rock bottom is no impediment for a president who can always find room for a new low.”
Trump had tweeted that Gillibrand — who is calling for him to resign over numerous allegations of sexual misconduct and assault — “would do anything” for political donations, including “begging,” which he wrote in quotation marks. “USED!” he exclaimed of New York’s junior senator.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday that Trump’s comment wasn’t sexist, and that it was meant to call attention to the administration’s commitment to ethics, a claim which doesn’t hold much water given the administration’s record on the matter.
“A president who would all but call Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand a whore is not fit to clean the toilets in the Barack Obama Presidential Library or to shine the shoes of George W. Bush,” USA Today’s editorial board wrote.
Presidents Bush and Obama each had their failures, the editorial asserted, but Trump is “uniquely awful.”
“His sickening behavior is corrosive to the enterprise of a shared governance based on common values and the consent of the governed.”
The editorial outlined Trump’s frequent tactic, during the 2016 presidential campaign, of asserting that the women accusing him of sexual assault weren’t attractive enough to be his victims, and listed a series of points which underlined, it said, the President’s “utter lack of morality, ethics and simple humanity”: supporting Roy Moore; habitually lying; stirring division along racial, ethnic and religious lines; and cozying up to white supremacists, to name a few of the paper’s examples.
“The nation doesn’t seek nor expect perfect presidents, and some have certainly been deeply flawed,” the editorial concluded. “But a president who shows such disrespect for the truth, for ethics, for the basic duties of the job and for decency toward others fails at the very essence of what has always made America great.”
