Donald Trump’s candidacy for presidency has been filled with a great deal of controversy, and his attitude towards women is particularly concerning. After audio tapes were leaked of Trump bragging about assaulting women, his past relations with female employees and acquaintances has come under a lot of scrutiny. More and more women are coming forward to reveal that they were assaulted or harassed by the Republican presidential candidate.
Many of the women who are finally feeling confident enough to come forward about Trump’s behavior are the beauty pageant contestants who competed in competitions run by Trump. Cassandra Searles, a former beauty pageant contestant who won the Miss Washington 2013 title has written a Facebook post describing her past encounters with Trump. While Trump owned the Miss USA pageant between 2002 to 2015, he used his status to degrade many of the female contestants.
On Facebook, Miss Washington addressed her post to the fellow contestants who were in the 2013 pageant with her. She said, “Do y’all remember that one time we had to do our onstage introductions, but this one guy treated us like cattle and made us do it again because we didn’t look him in the eyes? Do you also remember when he then proceeded to have us lined up so he could get a closer look at his property? Oh I forgot to mention that guy will be in the running to become the next President of the United States. I love the idea of having a misogynist as the President. #HeWillProbablySueMe #iHaveWorseStoriesSoComeAtMeBro #Drumpf.”
This post brought to attention many of the reasons that women do not want to vote for Donald Trump. The next thing that Searles revealed was even more shocking. In the comment section of the post, Miss Washington 2013 said, “He probably doesn’t want me telling the story about that time he continually grabbed my ass and invited me to his hotel room.” This story is corroborated by several other employees of Trump who were also repeatedly pestered by Trump to meet up with him in his hotel room.
For a long time, these stories were just brief anecdotes about the lewd behavior of an entitled rich man, and many of the women were not actually believed. Only a few women have even managed to successfully bring sexual harassment lawsuits against Trump. For a long time, his behavior was ignored because he was wealthy and not under a lot of public scrutiny.
However, now that Trump is running for president, they are seen in a whole new light. Countless people stepped forward to defend Trump after the damaging audio tapes by claiming that they did not actually represent his personality. However, it seems clear that this is actually how Trump views women.The dozens of tales of Trump’s sexist behavior show that he does not seem to see women as equals. The type of man who sees half of the United States population as mere sex objects is not the type of man who ought to be representing these citizens on an international basis.