Almost two years after Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, making Donald Trump the 45th president of the United States, a former senior speechwriter for President Barack Obama claims the reason Clinton lost has nothing to do with an email scandal but because she is a woman.
Saranda Peri believes that Clinton not only did nothing wrong but, in fact, Americans voted for Trump and not Hillary because they incorrectly “imagined” her to be an untrustworthy and dishonest person.
Peri starts her commentary by noting an event in 1848 where a group of women declared they were not treated as equals to men and that “for 170 years, that grievance has persisted—metastasized into something more poisonous than our foremothers could have imagined. It enabled a morally degenerate man to fashion himself as more palatable than a woman for the nation’s highest office.”
Peri equates Michael Cohen’s and Paul Manafort’s legal troubles to Trump, who she claims has had “questionable business dealings” for decades and has always been “walking around like Pigpen in a cloud of filth.”
Peri’s column continues:
But Trump’s record of unethical behavior did not stop him from successfully painting Hillary as the more corrupt candidate. We were so primed to think ill of her that he may have actually benefited from the comparison. He still does it today, embracing “lock her up chants” at his various rallies.
It is not new to suggest that women in general—and Hillary Clinton in particular—are held to a double standard. But as we salivate over the latest scandal before refreshing Twitter for the next one, it is still, again, worth reflecting on how gender colors the lens through which we see this.
Peri makes the claim in the commentary that even people in the Trump administration regularly breach security protocol, including Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, who “use private email in the White House.”
“It was never about her emails,” Peri wrote. “But during the campaign, they were treated as more disqualifying than Trump’s unprecedented refusal to disclose his tax returns.”
(Note: Presidential candidates are not required to release their tax returns.)
“At every twist and turn of the 2016 election, we convinced ourselves that Trump’s behavior was garden-variety sleazy while Clinton’s was unforgivably immoral,” Peri said.
Peri claims in her column — with no link to document her claim — that Trump has lied 4,000 times since being elected president.
Peri then surmised: “In other words, Clinton’s real crime was daring to run for president.”
Peri even sees Clinton as a victim when it comes to her husband, President Bill Clinton’s, serial infidelity.
“And, let us not forget, it was Hillary who paid, time and again, for her husband’s infidelity,” Peri wrote without including any of the claims from numerous women who say they were sexually assaulted by Clinton’s husband.
“A percentage of Americans simply cannot stomach a woman president,” Peri wrote. “We knew that.”
Then she concludes that blatant sexism is not as much an issue as “the daily microaggressions aimed at women, no matter their background, calcify into a set of norms—a latent sensibility that allowed people to suspend logic, reality, and their own sense of right and wrong, to convince themselves that the Donald Trump they saw was somehow better than the Hillary Clinton they imagined.”
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