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Vanity Fair: Donald Trump, Roger Ailes, and the Saddest Fact of 2016
Donald Trump, Roger Ailes, and the Saddest Fact of 2016Vanity Fair, Emily Jane Fox, 10/13/16
...
It’s (a complicated situation that Megyn) Kelly herself has been tangled up in. In July, Kelly’s former colleague Gretchen Carlson sued Fox News kingpin Roger Ailes for sexual harassment, claiming that he had accosted her with a series of innuendo-laden comments and fired her from the network in retaliation for rebuffing his advances. As the network’s parent company, 21st Century Fox, launched an internal investigation into Ailes’s behavior, more than two dozen women reportedly came forward within weeks with their own claims of harassment by Ailes. Among them was reportedly Kelly, Fox News’s brightest star, who, according to New York magazine, told investigators that Ailes made unwanted sexual advances towards her a decade ago. Ailes himself has denied all wrongdoing. He resigned from the network two days after revelations about Kelly’s reported admission.
This was just about a year after Kelly first tussled with Trump at the first Republican primary debate, during which Kelly pressed the candidate on his past comments about women. Trump responded with a months-long vendetta against the “unfair” way she treated him, which included blaming her question on her menstrual cycle, repeatedly attacking her on Twitter as a “bimbo,” and boycotting another G.O.P. debate that she moderated.
Kelly has not publicly commented on Ailes or her reported statements to investigators. But it was not hard to connect the dots with her comments on-air Wednesday night. Even if she was not referencing Ailes, that her words so easily could have applied to her former boss only underscores the similarity between what happened with Ailes earlier this summer and what’s happening with Trump in the final month of his general-election campaign. Both men, who wielded a great deal of power in their own domains, were swiftly cut off at the knees; in Ailes’s case, by Carlson coming forward with her lawsuit, and for Trump, with one hot mic. Both men swiftly denied any wrongdoing of the kind they were accused, though Trump did apologize for his remarks and vowed to be a better man. Like Ailes, Trump’s denials also led to a torrent of other women coming forward with stories of their own, emboldened by the discovery of other victims.
That Trump would reach out to a man as toxic as Ailes to advise his campaign, in spite of all conventional political logic, speaks to his total inability to understand the outrage that will likely sink his career. Trump is either so steeped in misogyny that he wouldn’t see the allegations about Ailes as problematic, or simply doesn’t care about how confiding in a man accused of such behavior could make women feel about him. More likely, he recognized in Ailes a fellow good old boy unfairly maligned by a social-justice-obsessed left.
It’s (a complicated situation that Megyn) Kelly herself has been tangled up in. In July, Kelly’s former colleague Gretchen Carlson sued Fox News kingpin Roger Ailes for sexual harassment, claiming that he had accosted her with a series of innuendo-laden comments and fired her from the network in retaliation for rebuffing his advances. As the network’s parent company, 21st Century Fox, launched an internal investigation into Ailes’s behavior, more than two dozen women reportedly came forward within weeks with their own claims of harassment by Ailes. Among them was reportedly Kelly, Fox News’s brightest star, who, according to New York magazine, told investigators that Ailes made unwanted sexual advances towards her a decade ago. Ailes himself has denied all wrongdoing. He resigned from the network two days after revelations about Kelly’s reported admission.
This was just about a year after Kelly first tussled with Trump at the first Republican primary debate, during which Kelly pressed the candidate on his past comments about women. Trump responded with a months-long vendetta against the “unfair” way she treated him, which included blaming her question on her menstrual cycle, repeatedly attacking her on Twitter as a “bimbo,” and boycotting another G.O.P. debate that she moderated.
Kelly has not publicly commented on Ailes or her reported statements to investigators. But it was not hard to connect the dots with her comments on-air Wednesday night. Even if she was not referencing Ailes, that her words so easily could have applied to her former boss only underscores the similarity between what happened with Ailes earlier this summer and what’s happening with Trump in the final month of his general-election campaign. Both men, who wielded a great deal of power in their own domains, were swiftly cut off at the knees; in Ailes’s case, by Carlson coming forward with her lawsuit, and for Trump, with one hot mic. Both men swiftly denied any wrongdoing of the kind they were accused, though Trump did apologize for his remarks and vowed to be a better man. Like Ailes, Trump’s denials also led to a torrent of other women coming forward with stories of their own, emboldened by the discovery of other victims.
That Trump would reach out to a man as toxic as Ailes to advise his campaign, in spite of all conventional political logic, speaks to his total inability to understand the outrage that will likely sink his career. Trump is either so steeped in misogyny that he wouldn’t see the allegations about Ailes as problematic, or simply doesn’t care about how confiding in a man accused of such behavior could make women feel about him. More likely, he recognized in Ailes a fellow good old boy unfairly maligned by a social-justice-obsessed left.
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