The Misogyny Plot

When Justice Anthony Kennedy retired two years into Donald Trump’s term, the Republican president saw an opportunity. He’d promised Evangelical voters that he would appoint anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court, and he had one in mind: Brett Kavanaugh, then a judge on the prestigious D.C. Circuit. Soon, though, Trump and Kavanaugh would have a problem. A psychology professor came forward to accuse Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her while they were both in high school. Christine Blasey Ford said that Kavanaugh and a friend pushed her into a bedroom, where Kavanaugh clamped his hand over her mouth and tried to remove her clothes. During her Senate testimony, she was composed, measured, and hard to dismiss. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter, the uproarious laughter between the two and having fun at my expense,” she said at the time.

The alleged assault was indelible. Her story, it seemed, was not. The Republican-led Senate confirmed Kavanaugh, and the country moved on; Ford’s story faded inexorably from public consciousness. A new report suggests that disappearance wasn’t an entirely organic process. The Trump administration throttled a promised FBI investigation into Ford’s claim, according to a new report produced by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island and a member of the Judiciary Committee. The Whitehouse report “notes that the FBI was instructed by the White House to talk to 10 potential witnesses and was not given the leeway to pursue corroborating evidence,” the Washington Post said this week, adding that senators had cited the absence of corroboration as a reason to confirm Kavanaugh and hand the conservative legal movement a major victory.

There was a plot against Ford, then, and though it operated at a high level, it might be familiar to any woman who’s experienced sexual violence. Call it misogyny. Misogyny runs throughout Ford’s story, linking her alleged assault to the Trump cover-up effort to everything that happened next. In 2022, Kavanaugh would join other conservative justices to overturn Roe v. Wade. In reaching its apex, the plot also revealed how deeply it runs; it targeted not only Ford, but all American women. No woman is truly safe in a country that is controlled by right-wing clerics — a country that elevated Trump before the Senate elevated Kavanaugh. The Access Hollywood tape should have disqualified Trump with voters, as should have allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct from dozens of women, as should have his unrepentant racism, but MAGA loved every transgression.

In the eyes of Trump’s base, Kavanaugh is an innocent man, as is Trump himself. We cannot grasp the extent of the misogyny plot without reckoning with the former president and the anti-feminist backlash that helped put him into power. MAGA revolves around Trump’s strongman appeal, an image he is only too keen to foster. Our aspiring patriarch has promised women that he will be our “protector,” and that we will “no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared” under his rule. Trump assumes that women are weak; that we need a protector, and that he is equipped to serve if we empower him again.

To put it politely, this is bullshit, and the Ford story is proof. Trump’s White House not only throttled the investigation into her assault, he chose Kavanaugh on the very basis of his anti-abortion views. The former president had pledged to kill Roe, and Kavanaugh was a means to an end. The misogyny plot did not stop with Ford, then, and it won’t end with Dobbs; its goals are much too broad. If given the opportunity, it will force us into perpetual subservience. It’s already partway there. There was fear, once, that Me Too would go too far, but for so many women, justice remains a fantasy. We can talk about the abortions we needed and couldn’t get. We can talk about our rapes. We can talk about whatever we please, at least for now, but no story, however truthful, will sway the plot or its architects. They are bent on our destruction.

Reality is at odds with the rhetoric of Trump and his circle, which includes Kavanaugh. During Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing, he and his defenders made much of his ties to women — his daughters, the girls’ basketball team he coached, the women he’d hired to be clerks. But a man’s proximity to a woman or girl tells us nothing; men with daughters abuse women every day. That’s how the misogyny plot works. It is embedded so deeply in American life that it affects every woman in some respect. The plot follows us, stealing our rights as it gathers strength. The country may have moved on from Christine Blasey Ford, but we can’t escape the scheme that she uncovered.