Sexual assault allegations pile up against Trump's cabinet

Will Senate Republicans bend the knee and confirm them all anyway? Probably.

Last week, I kept a running tab of Donald Trump’s new cabinet nominees, from the bizarrely unqualified to the downright repugnant. (That was all before he tapped an anti-vaxxer with a literal brain worm to dismantle the health department and FDA.) This week, I’ll be keeping a running tab of the sexual assault allegations piling up/resurfacing against several of these men and whether any of the new details we’ve learned—or will potentially learn from leaks in the coming days—is damaging enough to jeopardize even one of their confirmations.

The fish rots from the head, so let’s start with a brief refresher on the allegations against Trump himself. As I wrote for GQ back in 2019, he’s been accused by more than 20 women over the years of sexual assault, harassment and rape. His first accuser was his ex-wife Ivana, who in a deposition described a violent rape by her husband in 1989 in which he held back her arms, pulled out fistfuls of her hair and forced himself on her. He was found civilly liable this summer for the rape of columnist E. Jean Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the 1990s, and she won both defamation cases she brought against him related to that assault. Prolific child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein described Trump on tape as being his “closest friend for 10 years,” and a model who met Trump through the billionaire pedophile recently accused Trump of groping her at Trump Tower in a “twisted game” between the two men.

Trump, of course, has won re-election anyway, so it’s no surprise that he’s chosen to surround himself with men who have also been accused of sexual assault and who also have an axe to grind against women in general. Elect a rapey president, get a rapey cabinet.

What’s slightly more eyebrow-raising is Republicans in the House and Senate—including the Bible-thumping House Speaker Mike Johnson—trying to defend and cover for these men whom they well know are wildly unqualified for cabinet positions instead of using this deluge of sexual assault headlines as a great excuse to block their confirmations. (We know that anyone who supports Trump doesn’t genuinely oppose rape on any kind of moral ground, so we’re purely talking about politics here.)

All that said, here’s a rundown of the allegations against Trump’s cabinet picks and the current outlook on their confirmation chances:

Matt Gaetz (for Attorney General)

The same day Trump announced Gaetz for AG last week, the term “Rapey McForehead” began trending on social media. We already knew Gaetz was under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for sex trafficking minors, paying for sex with a 17-year-old, and showing off the nudes of women he’d slept with on the House floor, among a litany of other crimes and bad behaviors. So when Trump tapped him for a cabinet position in the final days of that investigation, he promptly resigned from the House, giving Republicans the cover they needed to bury that damaging report because he’s a “private citizen” now. Speaker Johnson, who was just pictured amid a pile of McDonalds burgers on a private jet with Trump, says the ethics report should never see the light of day, even though the House has released reports on former members before. “We are in a different era,” Johnson said yesterday.

But the details of the report probably won’t stay buried. Over the past week, we’ve learned that a witness testified before the House ethics committee claiming that she personally saw Gaetz raping a minor at a “drug-fueled” party in 2017 while he was a congressman (most headlines say “having sex with,” but this would be considered statutory rape). We’ve also learned that Gaetz used the Paypal account of his “adopted” Cuban son, Nestor, to pay women and girls for sex. And NYT reported today that an unidentified hacker has gained access to the full ethics report on Gaetz, which suggests we’re probably going to see it soon, unless the hacker was Elon Musk.

So what does this mean? Some Senate Republicans are “privately saying” that Gaetz doesn’t have the votes to be confirmed. He can only afford to lose three GOP votes, assuming all Dems vote no. But the reality is that senators privately saying things doesn’t mean shit if they’re not willing to say those things publicly, and the rumor on Capitol Hill is that Musk is already threatening to fund a primary challenge against any Republican who defies Trump. Musk tweeted today that Gaetz “will be our Hammer of Justice” and that he considers the allegations against Gaetz to be “worth less than nothing.” Keep in mind that Musk, himself, was accused of exposing himself to a SpaceX flight attendant and offering to buy her a horse in exchange for sex. His company paid her $250K to shut up about it.

Meanwhile, Trump’s threat of adjourning Congress to bypass the Senate and jam his cabinet through via “recess appointments” remains very real, despite Mitch McConnell saying confidently that that’s not going to happen.

Bottom line: I were a betting woman, I’d say that Gaetz will probably end up being our attorney general. I hope Republicans surprise me!

Pete Hegseth (for Defense Secretary)

The Washington Post reported over the weekend that Hegseth paid a woman who’d accused him of rape to keep her allegation quiet, because he was worried he’d be fired from Fox News. The woman had filed a complaint with the police in Monterrey, California, claiming that a very drunk Hegseth raped her at a 2017 conference for the California Federation of Republican Women. She reportedly went to the emergency room the next day, where she received a rape-kit examination that “was positive for semen.” The police confirmed they investigated the incident, but the woman ultimately signed a nondisclosure agreement instead of bringing charges.

Hegseth claims the encounter was consensual, and Trump’s spokesman said he’s not concerned at all: “Mr. Hegseth has vigorously denied any and all accusations, and no charges were filed. We look forward to his confirmation as United States Secretary of Defense so he can get started on Day One to Make America Safe and Great Again.”

Republicans have not raised as many concerns about Hegseth as they have about Gaetz, RFK Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard, so it looks like this smarmy jagoff has the votes to sail through.

Bottom line: Hegseth is going to be our defense secretary.

RFK Jr. (for HHS Secretary)

RFK Jr.’s former nanny accused him in a Vanity Fair article this summer of having sexually assaulted her in the 90s, when she was 23 and he was 45 (and married with five kids). She says he approached her from behind in a pantry once and groped her, among other similar incidents.

Kennedy sent an unsolicited late-night text message to this woman apologizing after the story came out, which she called “disingenuous and arrogant.”

“I have no memory of this incident but I apologize sincerely for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable or anything I did or said that offended you or hurt your feelings,” Kennedy texted Eliza Cooney at 12:33 a.m. on July 4. “I never intended you any harm. If I hurt you, it was inadvertent. I feel badly for doing so.”

Kennedy also suggested that he and Cooney meet face to face to discuss her allegation, but she rejected the invitation. “Meet ‘face to face?’” Cooney told WaPo after he texted her. “What woman wants to do that?”

Kennedy, you’ll recall, is that man Trump said he is putting in charge of “women’s health.”

As to his hopes of getting confirmed, Republicans have a lot of substantive reasons to be concerned about Kennedy running multiple public health agencies, so if he falls short of the votes, it will have more to do with his opposition to vaccines, his promises to dismantle the FDA and remove flouride from our water, etc. The sexual assault allegation here is materially irrelevant to them.

Bottom line: He will probably be confirmed.