Considering Donald Trump’s long, ugly record of behavior towards women, it’s apparent real men support Harris

It’s almost Election Day, so let’s cut to the chase! I have a terrific wife of 45 years, I have daughters, sisters, nieces, dear friends and so many other amazing females who are important to me. We can agree to disagree on issues of policy and governance, but surely there is a moral-turpitude line that we cannot allow our elected leaders to cross.

Those of you who share your life with women and girls about whom you care and for whom you may be responsible must carry that caring and responsibility with you into the voting booth. Donald Trump (seen above holding his Bible in a public domain image posted on wikimedia commons) has crossed that line hundreds of times, but it is his lifelong sexually deviant behavior and attitude toward women generally that concerns me most.

In the E. Jean Carroll case, Trump was found by a jury of his peers and a preponderance of the evidence to have sexually assaulted his victim. This was a civil case, of course, so while he was held liable for millions in damages, he escaped a quite-likely rape conviction and a long prison term due to the criminal statute of limitations.

This case was not an outlier. At least 24, and as many as 45, women over the years have made credible allegations of inappropriate sexual behavior by Trump, including touching, assault and rape.

Of course, Trump denies every allegation and for decades has intimidated his accusers into dropping their pursuit of justice and accountability. He is an expert at using our system of jurisprudence for his various nefarious ends, having been involved in nearly 5,000 lawsuits and adjudications. E. Jean Carroll was one Trump victim who was undaunted!

Trump is his own worst enemy, discrediting his own denials as he has been prone to bragging about his assaults on women. You can listen to his braggadocio on YouTube at the risk of making yourself physically ill. There is the “Access Hollywood” tape on which Trump runs through his detailed sexual-assault technique, which concludes with his grabbing women by their genitals.

That recording was supposed to torpedo his presidential run in 2016, but his Republican cohort, after hoisting a wet finger to the political winds, elected to cross the aforementioned morality line and continue its support.

Then there was the Howard Stern interview during which Trump bragged about routinely sneaking into the Miss Teen USA dressing room (a franchise he owned) to try to catch a lecherous look at the naked 15- and 16-year-old girls. 

And, of course, we cannot forget his reported parties with his buddy Jeffrey Epstein with girls around the same age as those Miss Teen USA contestants.

I suppose you could argue that all of this is ancient history, but we ignore Trump’s “morality problem” at our peril. I mean, do you really want a president who would have unprotected sex with a porn star while his third wife was at home with their 4-month-old baby?

Seems to me that this 78-year-old is losing it, if he ever had it in the first place. After all, this is the guy who spent more than 10 minutes at one of his recent rallies talking about Arnold Palmer’s penis! Is this the model of moral behavior for your children that you want in the White House?

I would not be comfortable leaving any female I care about in a room alone with this guy for 10 minutes, much less having him in a position to make life-and-death decisions that affect them. Unfortunately, he has already done the latter. He routinely brags about how he is responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade, one of the few truthful statements ever to come out of his mouth. It’s noteworthy that this was the first time in our history that a constitutional right was taken away from the American people.

He is directly responsible for the results of that action, be it a 10-year-old rape victim having to be taken to another state to get abortion care, or the women dying of sepsis or bleeding out in a hospital parking lot because the medical staff was afraid to treat them for fear of prosecution. He also bears responsibility for millions of people being robbed of their potential, particularly young men and women because an unwanted or unaffordable pregnancy is forced to be carried to term.

Trump does not care about the unborn: He is not “pro-life,” he is transactional. You give him the power to pursue his own nefarious ends, and he will give you control of womens bodies. If any of the actors in this ongoing abortion melodrama were “pro-life,” they would also address, for example, our nation’s maternal death rate, which is by far the highest among wealthy, industrialized nations, or our society’s stingy support of our children after they are born, or perhaps address the causes of the other millions of annual premature deaths in our nation from preventable causes. (We are ranked 48th among nations in longevity by the World Health Organization.)

Getting back to those rape accusations against Trump, there is broad consensus among mental health professionals that rape is not about sex but about power and control. It will flourish in societies in which misogyny is rampant, in places where draconian curtailment of abortion access and other political restrictions on female sexuality are the law of the land.

The Dobbs decision by the U.S. Supreme Court has moved our country well down the road toward the dystopian nightmare depicted in Margaret Atwood’s novel “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

Women have pretty much figured out that a line has been crossed and they cannot and will not relinquish control of their bodies and their very lives to misogynist pigs such as Donald Trump and his sycophants. It is simple, really: Kamala Harris will protect the women and girls you love, Trump and Vance will be their nemesis!

In this presidential election, real men will vote for the woman.

Jim Petersen was a Marine Corps officer during the Vietnam era for eight years, served 10 years in the USCG mostly as director of federal law enforcement at USCG Air Station Miami, and retired from the 1085th Medical Company, Air Ambulance, South Dakota National Guard.