Donald Trump Appoints Yet Another Alleged Domestic Abuser, Maybe this Means Something?

By Kylie Cheung | News Stories | January 11, 2017 |

By Kylie Cheung | News Stories | January 11, 2017 |

President-elect Donald Trump is a self-admitted nonconsensual grabber of pussies and unsurprisingly has a slew of sexual assault accusations against him. And he’s clearly appointing to his administration men he can relate to and identify with. Case in point: his pick for secretary of labor, who, aside from cheerfully promoting his fast food restaurant chain via commercials rooted in the sexual objectification of women, has actual domestic abuse charges against him by his ex-wife — hooray!

According to a new report by Politico, the ex-wife of Andy Puzder, Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as labor secretary and CEO of CKE Restaurants, the parent company of Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr., went on the Oprah Winfrey talkshow to open up about her experiences with her identity concealed. The report notes, however, that it’s unclear what year Puzder’s ex-wife Lisa Fierstein went on the show, since a tape of her interview has not been located. Politico reports that Fierstein went on the show specifically to talk about her then-husband’s abusive tendencies.

Worth noting is the fact that Puzder is hardly the first of Trump’s picks with a shady past in terms of treating women and female partners goes. Over the summer, Trump inspired outrage upon appointing former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes to be one of his advisers, since at the time, Ailes was fielding nearly innumerable charges of sexual harassment and attempted sexual assault by female employees. His apparent tolerance for the abuse of women was then only accentuated by his appointment of Breitbart News’ Steve Bannon to his Chief Adviser upon being elected, since Bannon himself previously faced domestic abuse charges in 1996, which were later dropped due to witness unavailability. And let’s not forget how just prior to being appointed attorney general by Trump, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions went on the record denying that nonconsensually grabbing women “by the pussy” is, indeed, sexual assault. God help us all.

If this were politics as usual, these men’s careers would be effectively over, and good riddance. But since this obviously is in no way politics as usual, and I don’t at all mean that in a good way, apparently these men will continue to qualify for some of the highest positions in the land because in the eyes of this presidential administration, what men say and do literally means nothing. If it did mean anything, we wouldn’t have elected Trump, that’s for sure.

Men are no longer being held accountable for their treatment of women, or for anything, really, and of all the very scary things that are being legitimized and put in place with the election of Trump, this definitely ranks among the scariest.

Much was made by “”“feminist”“” Trump sympathizers of how policies and actions speak louder than derogatory ~~locker room~~ banter about grabbing women “by the pussy” whether they consent or not. How these “”“feminists”“” manage to explain away Trump’s stances and policies incapacitating women of their basic human rights to bodily autonomy, sexual assault charges (seriously, how does sexual assault itself not speak louder than words?), and most recently, his tendency to appoint obvious and unapologetic misogynists with murky records of potential domestic abuse is, frankly, beyond me.