OPINION: All the president’s problematic men

Here they come, the best and the brightest, intoxicated by the “Y.M.C.A.” chorus blasting from Donald Trump’s playlist and accepting the call to join his Cabinet.

Who do we have? At the time I wrote this column Trump had nominated 11, including a dog assassin from South Dakota and a former “Real World” star. But we’ll leave those two be for now and talk instead about the fact that three of his appointments — a rather high percentage for any office job? — have been accused of some form of sexual misconduct.

Let’s start with the latest Matt Gaetz-related news. Over the years the House Ethics Committee has investigated claims that the Florida congressman, as the BBC summarized, “had sex with an underage girl, used illicit drugs, accepted bribes, misused campaign funds and shared inappropriate images on the House floor.”

After Gaetz resigned from the House of Representatives last week, the committee no longer had jurisdiction to continue its investigation. But a lawyer representing two women who had testified before the committee told ABC News on Monday that, according to his client’s testimony, Gaetz had paid his clients for sex using Venmo and that his clients witnessed Gaetz having sex with a 17-year-old. (Gaetz has denied the allegations.)

If you read all this and immediately think, “There’s only one spot for a man like that — heading the Department of Justice!” then, good — because that is the job to which he has been nominated. Until last year, Gaetz had also been embroiled in a DOJ investigation related to sex trafficking, and it is truly a triumph to go, in a matter of months, from being investigated by a federal agency to leading the agency that was once investigating you.

Fox News’s Pete Hegseth has been accused of sexually assaulting a 30-year-old staffer with the California Federation of Republican Women in a hotel room in 2017. The woman filed a complaint with police. Hegseth paid the alleged victim as part of a nondisclosure agreement, though he says the encounter was consensual.

If you read that and thought, “These are precisely the optics we need from a future secretary of Defense, especially considering the military’s notorious and troubling history related to investigating sexual assaults and making the armed forces a safe space for women” — correct! That is what the president-elect thought, too.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has most recently been in the news for his opposition to vaccines, his alleged intimate relationship with a journalist nearly 40 years his junior, and for eating a dog, and planting a dead bear in a park and strapping a decaying whale head to the roof of his car. But let us not forget that his former family babysitter also says he groped her several times against her will in the 1990s. Kennedy sent her a text saying that he had “no memory of this incident” but that he apologized “for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable.”

If you thought, wow, in a country of more than 330 million people, the only person to lead the Department of Health and Human Services is definitely the person who dumped a dead bear in Central Park and was accused of groping the babysitter — exactly.

(Elon Musk is not an official cabinet member — the Department of Government Efficiency, which he’s apparently heading with Vivek Ramaswamy, looks less like a government agency and more like the world’s worst buddy comedy. But I would be remiss in not giving him a nod here. He hasn’t been accused of any sexual assaults, but a man who has sired 12 children with three different women, is preoccupied with raising birth rates and seems to be trying to solve the problem with his own seed — is there something weird about that?)

Why do I bring any of this up? Because elections have consequences, as we’re going to be hearing for the next four or 40 years. Voters elect presidents, but they also elect mindsets, worldviews and a tone for the country. They elect the person who appoints the people who shape the policies that create the country.

Earlier this year, a jury of Trump’s peers ordered him to pay E. Jean Carroll more than $80 million, finding him legally liable for sexually abusing her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in late 1995 or early 1996.

And we now have reelected the man who is appointing the people who will build a country and who apparently does not see misconduct allegations as disqualifying.

Better people exist. Better people could have been appointed. The point isn’t that a president these days simply cannot find a Cabinet member who hasn’t been accused of sexual misconduct. The point is that this president doesn’t think it’s necessary to try.

Monica Hesse is a columnist for The Washington Post’s Style section, who frequently writes about gender and its impact on society. In 2022 she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in the field of commentary. She’s the author of several novels, most recently, “They Went Left.”

The views expressed here are the writer’s and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for letters and commentaries here.