When he takes the oath of office in January, Donald J. Trump will make history as the first court-adjudicated sexual abuser to assume the presidency. But if he gets the team of his choice, he will not be the only one in the room whose conduct has been called into question.
Mr. Trump, who was found liable in a civil trial last year of accosting a woman, has selected a defense secretary, an attorney general, a secretary of health and human services and an efficiency czar, all of whom have been accused of variations of sexual misconduct and, like the president-elect, deny them.
The rise of the accused to positions of power raises new questions about the future of the #MeToo movement that swept through the country and upended societal expectations in recent years. The kind of accusations that took down titans of Hollywood, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Washington, the news media, sports and state capitals have proved no obstacle in Mr. Trump’s selection process.
Rather than be deterred by such allegations, Mr. Trump seems determined to force a fight over them. He knew that Matt Gaetz, the renegade Republican congressman, had been accused of all manner of sordid conduct, including sex with an underage girl, but tapped him to run the Justice Department anyway. He may not have known that Pete Hegseth, the Fox News weekend host he named to preside over the Pentagon, had paid a woman who accused him of sexual assault, but has indicated that he will stand by him.
Likewise, Mr. Trump has expressed no concern about accusations that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his choice for the health department, groped a family babysitter, or that Elon Musk, tasked with reinventing government, created a sexually charged workplace that treated women as objects. All of his nominees have denied intentional wrongdoing, and Mr. Trump, who has made a career of denying wrongdoing himself, appears to take them at their word.
He still denies sexually assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room in the 1990s even though she has won two civil court judgments against him for $83.3 million. And he has said that more than two dozen other women who have accused him of sexual misconduct were all lying.
“It really feels like that’s part of what makes this cabinet appealing” to him, said Leigh Gilmore, the author of “The #MeToo Effect: What Happens When We Believe Women” and a professor emeritus at the Ohio State University. “Credible accusations of sexual assault aren’t a red line, because those are a feature of Trump’s own biography.”
Indeed, she said, Mr. Trump may be seeking out those who have been accused so he does not stand out. “The more people he can surround himself with that are not in any way slowed down by their rise to power by these kinds of allegations, it normalizes his own behavior,” Ms. Gilmore said. “He’s creating a worldview. He’s shifting norms as he moves.”
Karoline Leavitt, the president-elect’s pick for White House press secretary, defended Mr. Trump’s selections. “The nominees accused of sexual misconduct have vehemently denied the allegations,” she said. Mr. Trump, she added, was elected to change the status quo and chose “brilliant” outsiders to help him. “He will continue to stand behind them as they fight against all those who seek to derail the MAGA agenda.”
Mr. Trump’s election and appointments come at a delicate moment for the movement against sexual harassment. He ran a campaign aimed at tapping into male grievance, punctuated by expressions of machismo and disdain for “woke” sensitivity. Hulk Hogan roared and ripped off his shirt at the Republican National Convention while other surrogates mocked Democrats for not being able to define what a woman is in an era of transgender rights.
Pro-Trump ads attacked Vice President Kamala Harris by declaring that “Kamala’s agenda is they/them, not you.” JD Vance, Mr. Trump’s running mate, defended comments he made denigrating “childless cat ladies.” Mr. Trump, who appointed three conservative justices critical to overturning Roe v. Wade, said he would protect women “whether the women like it or not.”
In this month’s election, Mr. Trump won 55 percent of men, including 60 percent of white men, according to network exit polls. Ms. Harris won 53 percent of women overall, although 53 percent of white women voted for Mr. Trump.
Some far-right voices have been emboldened by Mr. Trump’s victory and sexist attacks on women have proliferated online in the last couple weeks, according to one study. On election night, Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who once had dinner with Mr. Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, posted a message, “Your body, my choice. Forever,” that trended in the so-called manosphere, a takeoff of the abortion rights slogan “My body, my choice.”
The change in tone underscores the evolution of the #MeToo movement since it took off in 2017. At the start, it was not particularly political or partisan. Those who fell from grace included liberals like Harvey Weinstein, the movie mogul, and conservatives like Roy Moore, the Republican Senate candidate in Alabama. One count of accused state politicians was close to evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats.
Mr. Trump, though, always publicly sympathized with the accused, not the accusers. His 2018 nomination of Brett M. Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court, who was accused of sexually assaulting a girl during high school, turned the question of sexual misconduct into a partisan debate in the Senate and subsequent midterm elections.
The concern over sexual harassment has nonetheless continued to reshape American society, with 23 states passing laws to protect women while workplaces across the country changed rules to focus more attention on the issue.
But Mr. Trump’s election and the nominations “show that the work of the movement is woefully incomplete,” said Deborah Tuerkheimer, the author of “Credible: Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers” and a former prosecutor who is now at Northwestern University’s law school.
“The electorate shrugged aside a finding of civil liability for sexual assault, so it comes as no surprise that the president-elect feels entitled to nominate men who have also been accused of sexual misconduct,” she added. “For victims of abuse and those who care about them, this is yet another sign of a collective willingness to elevate the interests of accused men over their accusers.”
Mr. Trump’s allies have pointed to high-profile women who support or advise him as evidence of his support for strong women. He has designated Susie Wiles, who ran his campaign, to be his White House chief of staff, the first woman ever to hold that post. But cabinet nominations and other top appointments he has announced so far include just five women compared with 23 men.
So far, that is an even lower rate than during his first term. In his first 300 days in office, according to the Brookings Institution, just 23 percent of Senate-confirmed officials appointed by Mr. Trump were women, compared with 50 percent of those later appointed by President Biden in the same time frame. With weeks to go, 64 percent of the judges nominated by Mr. Biden have been women, according to the White House, compared with 24 percent under Mr. Trump.
Of all Mr. Trump’s selections so far, Mr. Gaetz has drawn the most fire. The Justice Department investigated him for underage sex trafficking but did not charge him. The House Ethics Committee took testimony from two women who said he paid them for sex, including one who said she witnessed him having sex with an underage girl at a party, according to her lawyer. Mr. Gaetz has denied the allegations.
Mr. Hegseth was accused of raping a woman he met at a Republican conference in Monterey, Calif., in 2017. A complaint was filed with the police four days later, but no charges were brought. Mr. Hegseth insisted the encounter was consensual. Two years later, he reached an undisclosed financial settlement with her “knowing that it was the height of the #MeToo movement and any public accusation would result in his immediate termination from Fox,” according to his lawyer.
While Washington has focused on Mr. Gaetz and Mr. Hegseth, Mr. Kennedy, the president-elect’s choice for secretary of health and human services, was also accused last summer of groping a family babysitter in the late 1990s.
After she went public in Vanity Fair magazine in July, Mr. Kennedy, then an independent candidate for president, sent her a text message saying he did not remember the incident and “never intended you any harm” but apologized, saying, “if I hurt you, it was inadvertent.”
Mr. Kennedy, who is married to the actor Cheryl Hines, was also accused this fall of having a yearlong “personal relationship” with a reporter, Olivia Nuzzi. Ms. Nuzzi’s former fiancée, the reporter Ryan Lizza, said in a court filing that Ms. Nuzzi told him that Mr. Kennedy wanted to “possess,” “control” and “impregnate her.” Mr. Kennedy has denied those assertions and said he met Ms. Nuzzi only once for an interview.
Mr. Musk, who has been empowered by Mr. Trump to help head a Department of Government Efficiency with an expansive mandate to transform the federal government, was sued in June along with his company SpaceX by eight former employees who criticized the company’s “Animal House” environment. The lawsuit accused Mr. Musk of “treating women as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size” and “bombarding the workplace with lewd sexual banter.”
Ms. Gilmore said the appointments were part of a broader “testing period” for the #MeToo movement seven years after it got underway.
“There’s going to be plenty of people who will say this is terrible for the #MeToo movement, this is the death of the #MeToo movement,” she said. “But I don’t think that’s true. Many more people after 2017 believe that women are telling the truth about sexual assault. We have set down a marker, and that has changed.”
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