He called Democrats who are against Kavanaugh "evil people" who want to "destroy people."
He reiterated his earlier claims Tuesday that nowadays you are "guilty until proven innocent," and stepped up his line of argument that men are under attack in America, without mentioning survivors of sexual assault.
"Think of your son. Think of your husband," Trump told the rally, noting he has had "many false allegations" against him.
He launched into a hypothetical riff about a young man who got a job at IBM or General Motors but is falsely accused of sexual assault. "What do I do, Mom? What do I do, Mom?" Trump said, role-playing a conversation between a son and mother.
"It's a damn sad situation, OK? And we better start as a country getting smart and getting tough."
.@SandraSmithFox brought @RepSwalwell on her show so she could smear sexual assault victims as being crisis actors who are really just fronts for George Soros. Shameful stuff. pic.twitter.com/fmdyvZb4ef
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 3, 2018
The first time Kristi was ever arrested was a week ago, she told me.
It happened outside of Sen. Chuck Grassley’s (R-IA) office. She and a group of other protesters had gone there to demand that Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination be withdrawn. After they refused to move, Capitol Hill police officers placed them in plastic handcuffs and did the moving for them.
Kristi, who refuses to give her last name lest she become targeted by Kavanaugh’s supporters, was held for three hours. Before she was taken away, she had the foresight to tell a fellow activist to call her daughter, who’d need to pick up her brother from school since mom would be, well, indisposed.
Such acts of civil disobedience are not part of Kristi’s normal routine. She’s 55 years old and can only recall ever attending two rallies in her life: one in the 1980s to support the pro-choice movement, and the women’s march last year in protest at Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Kavanaugh changed her, she says. His nomination didn’t compel her to come to D.C. so much as it overwhelmed her into doing so. She is a survivor who remains, to this day, incapable of telling her story. She would only tell me how old she was when it happened and on condition that I didn’t print even that detail. She begs off organizers who ask if she will confront lawmakers by recounting that horror for them. But she knew, in a single moment, that she had to come to Washington to lobby lawmakers.
“Ford did not want to come forward. She did it because she had to. And I wasn’t going to let her do it alone.”
“It wasn’t even a decision,” she said. “I couldn’t not come. I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I came and found the activists leaders and I said to them: What do you want me to do, I’ll do it?’”
By mid-afternoon Tuesday, Kristi had found her way to the basement of the Russell Senate office building, waiting to confront senators going through the tunnels to the Capitol building for caucus lunches. It’s the location she’d been assigned by the UltraViolet—the progressive women’s group organizing the bird-dogging of lawmakers. She was wearing New Balance shoes and a small satchel travel bag with pins on it that say “I believe Christine,” in reference to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, Kavanaugh’s accuser. Her short-cropped hair and black-rimmed glasses belie the notion that she’s some sort of hardened liberal activist. She doesn’t bother to play the part either. As lawmakers pass through, she yells from a distance.
When they’re not there, she nervously looks around the corner to see who might be coming down the hall. The anxiety oozes from her.
“I was so scared when my daughter was growing up,” Kristi tells me. “People told me it was because of my own history. But it wasn’t. I was scared because of this culture. Women are collateral damage. We are not believed. I’m here because this woman, Christine Ford, did not want to come forward... She did not want this. She did it because she had to. And I wasn’t going to let her do it alone.”
There is a remarkable paradox to the Kavanaugh confirmation battle. Women across the country have been moved to come forward with their own stories of sexual assault. They’ve called into CSPAN, confronted lawmakers in elevators, and shared moments with each other on the floors of Senate office atriums.
And yet, for these same women, the fight over Kavanaugh is a frightening case study of the perils of stepping forward in the first place. Dr. Ford, to them, is at once a hero and a cautionary tale. And how the Senate ultimately chooses to vote in the coming days will be seen not just as a referendum on Kavanaugh but on the notion that women will ever truly be believed in the first place; that their own stories actually matter.
If you keep waiting for Republican women to break from supporting Kavanaugh then this chart is for you. Republican women score nearly as high in hostile sexism as Republican men. And their sexism has increased since Trump's election. pic.twitter.com/mORDAQM5wx
— Brian Schaffner (@b_schaffner) October 1, 2018
Inside Trumpworld, the reaction was one of near glee that Trump had gone aggressively at Kavanaugh’s primary accuser.
“What’s more fun than a Trump rally?” Katrina Pierson, a senior adviser on Trump's re-election campaign, told The Daily Beast on Tuesday evening. When asked if she thought it was appropriate for the president to attack or mock the accuser, she replied, “He didn’t ‘go after her.’ He recapped her testimony.”
Indeed several White House officials reached by The Daily Beast quickly rejected even the mere characterization that President Trump had “mocked” or “attacked” Dr. Ford, in spite of the president’s open mocking of her.
“The president is pointing out factual inconsistencies. By Ford’s own testimony, there are gaps in her memory, there are facts that she cannot remember,” Kellyanne Conway, White House counselor to President Trump, spun on Fox News Wednesday morning. During a press briefing that afternoon, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters the president was just “stating the facts” with his monologue. (Trump, of course, had made several factual errors in his description of Ford’s account.)
“We’re pointing out the hypocrisy” of Democrats who “exploited Dr. Ford,” Sanders insisted.