A few things:
- Open borders and free trade sounds relatively good to me. At least, you'd have to make the case against them.
- "public" versus "private" positions is
obvious. We, in fact, talk about this all the time. We widely *expect* politicians of any party to, whatever they may be adopting officially, have certain more nuanced thoughts (often more in line with our own expectation).
A good example of the latter is support for Trump. Well, Paul Ryan supports Trump but really, he's the Speaker of the House and the leader of his Party, so he kind of has to -- he may disagree with so many things Trump says, but he has to make this show of support to work with him and advance the Republican platform. Etc, etc.
There's a strong case to be made that throwing in publicly without any filter deprives us of the ability to have sensibly negotiated policies. A discussion that plays out entirely in public is an exercise in posturing and stance-taking, with a keen eye towards scoring political points. In private, you have certain goals that are more important than others and you're willing to make those trade-offs, but "I'll yield A for B if it comes to it" is not the kind of stance you take out in the open.
A brief journey back to the topic of sexual harassment. These are things we'd probably mostly forgot about. Unsettling is the right word: (Emphasis mine, in light of Trump's recently come-to-light direct quotes)
Trump’s comments are an unsettling reminder of a story that former Miss Utah Temple Taggart told the
New York Times.
She said Trump kissed her on the lips at the Miss USA pageant, twice, against her will.
We cannot ignore that Trump hasn't just said countless boorish things about women
in public. He has also been accused of sexually aggressive and creepy behavior
in private, as
interviews with dozens of
women who worked with or for him have revealed.
Some of those encounters were the textbook definition of a
“hostile work environment” created by sexual harassment and objectifying behavior. Others, like Taggart’s story, could constitute sexual assault.
And Trump has also been accused, in sworn statements, of a
brutal 1989 rape by his ex-wife Ivana, and of
sexual assault by another woman, Jill Harth.