By Ruth Marcus
Associate editor|
March 11, 2024 at 1:47 p.m. EDT
“Disgusting.”
So says Sen. Katie Boyd Britt (R-Ala.) about criticisms that she misled viewers in her response to the State of the Union address when — in condemning President Biden’s border policies — she raised an episode of sex trafficking that occurred during the George W. Bush administration.
“To me, it is disgusting to try to silence the voice of telling the story of what it is like to be sex trafficked when we know that … is one of the things that the drug cartels are profiting most off,” Britt told Fox News’s Shannon Bream.
And “disgusting” was the word used by Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) to justify her endorsement of former president Donald Trump, given her experience as a rape survivor. “I live with shame, and you’re asking me a question about my political choices trying to shame me as a rape victim, and I find it disgusting,” Mace told ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos.
You know what I find disgusting? Women who have achieved such levels of political prominence stooping to play the gender card on a matter as important as sexual violence. It’s important to have women in positions of power, not least because they might be more focused on such issues — more inclined to take them up and more attuned to the imperative of dealing with them in a way that reflects the sensitivities of the situation.
This was not what Britt and Mace brought to the Sunday talk-show table. Instead, they used gender and the subject of sexual violence to shut down discussion — a shield intended to stifle perfectly reasonable criticism. It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that both women used that same charged word: disgusting. It is designed to preempt, not to convince.
Britt first. She deployed a powerful anecdote to underscore her point about how Biden “didn’t just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days.”
Britt then launched into the account of a woman she met at the border, who described having been sex-trafficked by the cartels starting at age 12. “She told me not just that she was raped every day but how many times a day she was raped. The cartels put her on a mattress in a shoe box of a room, and they sent men through that door, over and over again, for hours and hours on end,” Britt said. “We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it’s past time we start acting like it.”
And then, pointing fingers, she said, “President Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace. It’s despicable. And it’s almost entirely preventable.”
Here’s what Britt left out: This terrible episode didn’t happen under Biden — it took place between 2004 and 2008. It didn’t happen in the United States but in Mexico. There’s no indication that drug cartels were involved. Britt just hijacked the tragedy for her own partisan purposes, on the biggest political stage of her lifetime.
She’s certainly not the first politician to do that. Nor is she the first to insist that her obvious effort to mislead the audience didn’t reflect any such intent. But it takes some nerve — it takes a particular willingness to misuse the issue of sexual violence — to suggest that fact-checking her remarks constitutes a “disgusting” attempt “to silence the voice” of those telling the story. Seriously? The Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler awarded Britt a maximum score of four Pinocchios. Is there an extra available — one for chutzpah after you’ve been caught?
Mace made Britt look restrained. Mace made headlines as a state lawmaker in 2019, as the South Carolina legislature was debating an abortion ban without exceptions for rape and incest, when she shared her previously untold account of having been raped 25 years earlier. Good for her. That can’t have been easy.
But there was Mace on Sunday, being questioned — and reasonably so — about how she could square her experience as a survivor of sexual assault with her endorsement of Trump, who has been found liable for sexual abuse and defamation of E. Jean Carroll.
Mace went straight to the best defense: offense. She used the word “shame” 22 times, “offensive” 13, “disgusting” five. As in, “You’re trying to shame me this morning, and I find it offensive. And this is why women won’t come forward.”
Stephanopoulos persisted, for a good five minutes, a Sunday talk-show eternity. “Women won’t come forward because they’re defamed by those who perpetrate rape,” he replied.
Mace: “They are judged, and they’re shamed, and you’re trying to shame me this morning. I think it’s disgusting.”
Here’s another word: pathetic. It’s pathetic that Mace’s defense of Trump, such as it was, boiled down to that fact that he was held liable in a civil case brought by Carroll rather than found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal prosecution.
It’s pathetic that Mace — desperate to secure Trump’s backing in her own race in South Carolina — herself went after his victim, accusing Carroll of having been “offensive” when the writer joked about what she would buy with the money awarded.
It’s pathetic to see gender used this way, by women who ought to know better.
Associate editor|
March 11, 2024 at 1:47 p.m. EDT
“Disgusting.”
So says Sen. Katie Boyd Britt (R-Ala.) about criticisms that she misled viewers in her response to the State of the Union address when — in condemning President Biden’s border policies — she raised an episode of sex trafficking that occurred during the George W. Bush administration.
“To me, it is disgusting to try to silence the voice of telling the story of what it is like to be sex trafficked when we know that … is one of the things that the drug cartels are profiting most off,” Britt told Fox News’s Shannon Bream.
And “disgusting” was the word used by Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) to justify her endorsement of former president Donald Trump, given her experience as a rape survivor. “I live with shame, and you’re asking me a question about my political choices trying to shame me as a rape victim, and I find it disgusting,” Mace told ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos.
You know what I find disgusting? Women who have achieved such levels of political prominence stooping to play the gender card on a matter as important as sexual violence. It’s important to have women in positions of power, not least because they might be more focused on such issues — more inclined to take them up and more attuned to the imperative of dealing with them in a way that reflects the sensitivities of the situation.
This was not what Britt and Mace brought to the Sunday talk-show table. Instead, they used gender and the subject of sexual violence to shut down discussion — a shield intended to stifle perfectly reasonable criticism. It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that both women used that same charged word: disgusting. It is designed to preempt, not to convince.
Britt first. She deployed a powerful anecdote to underscore her point about how Biden “didn’t just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days.”
Britt then launched into the account of a woman she met at the border, who described having been sex-trafficked by the cartels starting at age 12. “She told me not just that she was raped every day but how many times a day she was raped. The cartels put her on a mattress in a shoe box of a room, and they sent men through that door, over and over again, for hours and hours on end,” Britt said. “We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it’s past time we start acting like it.”
And then, pointing fingers, she said, “President Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace. It’s despicable. And it’s almost entirely preventable.”
Here’s what Britt left out: This terrible episode didn’t happen under Biden — it took place between 2004 and 2008. It didn’t happen in the United States but in Mexico. There’s no indication that drug cartels were involved. Britt just hijacked the tragedy for her own partisan purposes, on the biggest political stage of her lifetime.
She’s certainly not the first politician to do that. Nor is she the first to insist that her obvious effort to mislead the audience didn’t reflect any such intent. But it takes some nerve — it takes a particular willingness to misuse the issue of sexual violence — to suggest that fact-checking her remarks constitutes a “disgusting” attempt “to silence the voice” of those telling the story. Seriously? The Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler awarded Britt a maximum score of four Pinocchios. Is there an extra available — one for chutzpah after you’ve been caught?
Mace made Britt look restrained. Mace made headlines as a state lawmaker in 2019, as the South Carolina legislature was debating an abortion ban without exceptions for rape and incest, when she shared her previously untold account of having been raped 25 years earlier. Good for her. That can’t have been easy.
But there was Mace on Sunday, being questioned — and reasonably so — about how she could square her experience as a survivor of sexual assault with her endorsement of Trump, who has been found liable for sexual abuse and defamation of E. Jean Carroll.
Mace went straight to the best defense: offense. She used the word “shame” 22 times, “offensive” 13, “disgusting” five. As in, “You’re trying to shame me this morning, and I find it offensive. And this is why women won’t come forward.”
Stephanopoulos persisted, for a good five minutes, a Sunday talk-show eternity. “Women won’t come forward because they’re defamed by those who perpetrate rape,” he replied.
Mace: “They are judged, and they’re shamed, and you’re trying to shame me this morning. I think it’s disgusting.”
Here’s another word: pathetic. It’s pathetic that Mace’s defense of Trump, such as it was, boiled down to that fact that he was held liable in a civil case brought by Carroll rather than found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal prosecution.
It’s pathetic that Mace — desperate to secure Trump’s backing in her own race in South Carolina — herself went after his victim, accusing Carroll of having been “offensive” when the writer joked about what she would buy with the money awarded.
It’s pathetic to see gender used this way, by women who ought to know better.
