By Francis Wilkinson / Bloomberg Opinion
John Odom, a Donald Trump supporter and big Republican donor, has taken the extraordinary step of requesting that a GOP candidate return Odom’s $100,000 donation.
The reason for Odom’s demand is even more unusual: Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, who is running for governor, hired former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski as a political adviser. Odom believes that hiring Lewandowski is a moral outrage, so he wants his money back.
Lewandowski isn’t the former Trump campaign chairman, a convicted felon who shared confidential 2016 polling data with his business partner, a Russian intelligence officer. That’s Paul Manafort, another member of the MAGA elite, who was pardoned by Trump in his final, lawless days as president. Lewandowski, you may recall, is the guy who grabbed a young female reporter for the right-wing propaganda website Breitbart, lied about it, and then was exposed by video evidence. He was subsequently accused by another Trump supporter of spanking her at a party at the Washington hotel where Trump processed what look very much like bribes.
However, what upset Odom, chief executive of an Idaho construction company, wasn’t the full-scale assault on law and decency by Trumpism writ large. It was something very personal. At a 2021 fundraising event in Las Vegas, a visibly intoxicated Lewandowski stalked and sexually harassed Odom’s then-wife, Trashelle Odom. Here’s how she described it.
“On the evening of September 26 in Las Vegas, Nevada, I attended a dinner to support a charity and spend time with wonderful friends,” Odom said in a statement to Politico. “He repeatedly touched me inappropriately, said vile and disgusting things to me, stalked me, and made me feel violated and fearful,” she said, referring to Lewandowski.
According to a statement provided by an Odom family attorney, “Lewandowski allegedly remarked on the size of his genitalia, described his sexual performance and showed Trashelle Odom his hotel room key. After the incident, Odom told people that Lewandowski repeatedly spoke about sex while using expletives,” Politico reported.
In effect, Odom describes Lewandowski moving on her like a b****, which happens to be how Trump described pursuing another married woman who rejected his own advances.
The famous transcript of Trump’s “Access Hollywood” remarks doesn’t end with Trump bragging of sexual assault. He proceeds to leer at the young woman assigned to greet him outside his bus, and comment on her body before commencing the kind of repartee familiar to every waitress who has ever fended off a geriatric creep after his third Manhattan.
Why would Lewandowski think there is anything wrong with such behavior, which was emphatically endorsed by the entire MAGA movement? Why should Odom think Lewandowski out of line for emulating the MAGA king? Stalking women, and humiliating them, is MAGA certified.
Trump was recently confirmed as a sexual assailant by a New York judge and jury. Two female witnesses in that trial gave sworn, credible, testimony that Trump had attacked them, as well. Trump’s first wife, Ivana, stated in a deposition that Trump had raped her in a bout of rage over his hair. (She later withdrew the claim.) Trump, of course, bragged of barging in on naked teen beauty pageant contestants and agreed with a radio personality who said his daughter, Ivanka, was a “piece of ass.” Former Trump White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham said Trump’s conduct toward one female White House aide was so predatory that she worked to make sure the president wasn’t alone with the young woman.
Political degeneracy breeds sexual violence. Authoritarian thuggery and sexual thuggery are nearly always partners. Silvio Berlusconi, the dissolute former Italian prime minister known for Putinism, corruption and parties with underage girls, a hardy Trumpist trifecta, said in 2009, that Italy wouldn’t be able to effectively police rape because there were too many “beautiful girls.”
In “Strongmen,” her 2020 book on Trump and other authoritarian thugs, Ruth Ben-Ghiat includes a chapter titled “Virility”; right between chapters on “Propaganda” and “Corruption.” Misogyny and sexual domination were key to Trump’s political and personal brand from the start. In the White House, Trump presented frequent photographic tableaux of white men gathered in the Oval Office, dominating the space, dominating the nation, asserting, and exercising, racial and sexual privilege.
Like a man who thinks climate change is someone else’s problem until his home floods, John Odom appears to have assumed that the moral and political degeneracy of Trumpism would not reach his doorstep. Rich, white and male, he likely assumed he was insulated from its harms. Meanwhile, Odom’s ex-wife, who Lewandowski groped and stalked, is showing true MAGA fortitude. She said she doesn’t mind Landry hiring her stalker and says half of the $100,000 Odom donation is rightly hers.
As Ben-Ghiat writes, “Many men who support these leaders’ agendas of female subordination realize, too late, that the ultimate aim is to humiliate them as well.”
Francis Wilkinson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US politics and policy. Previously, he was an editor for the Week and a writer for Rolling Stone.
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