Denunciations of President Trump’s public manner, of his alleged assaults on polite society’s sensibilities, of claimed boorish behavior on social media, are at best self-deceptive. They are dog whistles and signaling towards debased social virtue. In addition, President Trump’s alleged especially terrible manners may well be just as fraudulently ginned up as President Ford’s physical clumsiness, a fraud perpetrated by leftists in powerful cultural positions for political advantage. A tale of three women voting for Democrats helps us understand the deep need for these poses, these deceptions.

Three women voting for Democrats:

1984, insincere vote: One of my early political memories was of a young woman, a stockbroker on Wall Street, commenting in either Newsweek or US News and World Report on her voting decision in 1984. She said she was so happy that President Reagan took an overwhelming lead in polls shortly before the election. Why? She was assured that her personal near-term economic future was secure, so she could vote for Mondale and abortion rights. That is, she did not have to lie to her social circle about her vote. She greatly valued the social benefits of having all the correct opinions while remaining secure that her circle’s politics would not affect her material comfort.

1990s, knee pads: One of my sisters described Bill Clinton as the guy at the end of the bar, you know that guy, always coming on to any woman in range. Yet, we were collectively treated to his behavior being excused, ignored, and recast by our media and cultural elite. Indeed, we were treated not just to a blue dress and cigars but also to knee pads. In a Mirabella interview, Nina Burleigh, who had covered the White House for Time, said just how far women should go to encourage a policy of unlimited abortion.

In [a Mirabella Magazine] interview, Burleigh, now a New York freelancer, said she in no way felt harassed or pressured by the president but that it was “not unusual for women” to swoon over him. What is unusual, for a journalist, is Burleigh’s sexually charged declaration of support for Clinton. “I’d be happy to give him [oral sex] just to thank him for keeping abortion legal,” she said.

2020, believe all women and vote for Biden anyway: By 2020, the cultural elite’s libertine expectations were such that women in positions of influence openly asserted both support for Tara Reid and an overriding greater good in electing Joe Biden president. #MeToo but vote Biden and #ShoutYourAbortion.

Moreover, it’s not clear what it would mean to take Reade’s account seriously. While some voters want to see a new nominee, others — including Me Too advocate Alyssa Milano — seem to be arguing for the possibility of believing Reade, or at least giving her a hearing, and nominating Biden anyway. “It falls upon women to navigate within the system of men’s design to make pragmatic choices that we hope will lead us to a more equal future,” Milano wrote in an April op-ed. “I still support Joe Biden because I believe that’s the best choice for that future.”

Indeed, just as Hillary, as half of the Clinton Crime Combination, protected Bill against stories of his sexual victims, so Kamala Harris is now prepared to protect Biden, the Democrat Party candidate, so they can grasp the ring of power.

There are only two possibilities. One is that Harris didn’t, in fact, believe Biden’s accusers but claimed she did to score political points against him. If so, she used the very serious issue of sexual assault as a cheap political cudgel.

The other possibility is that she still believes the ex-veep’s accusers but is comfortable teaming up with an abuser (not to mention a racist, another charged accusation Harris has thrown Biden’s way).

These three tales in three decades show the persistent power of abortion as a sacrament of elite culture, a position held by all the smart people, especially self-aware educated women. Just as the young stockbroker.

What is really meant by the supposed oh-so-upright and sincere Bush League Republican’ts, conservatives, in particular is this: President Trump, by doggedly pursuing the true public virtue of keeping his campaign promises and of enforcing laws as written, threatens abortion on demand and lifestyles built on the backs of labor beggared by slanted trade deals and immigrant labor targetted at suppressing American workers’ earnings. The announcements by former Republican governor, and President G. W. Bush’s pick for first Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, and of the minor beer heiress Cindy McCain, that they support Biden-Harris in 2020, are prime instances of this grand fraud.

Look back just seven years to 2013, as the fight for the presidency in 2014 was starting. Former governor Tom Ridge blasted social conservatives with the same lines we hear from the left:

Amidst those scathing remarks, Ridge bemoaned the modern “lack of civility and statesmanship.”

Pro-life activists, he said, “forget about separation of church and state” and engage in activities that are “consistent with what a church may propose but should not necessarily be at the epicenter of governing.”

He added that “God-fearing” people might support abortion and homosexuality. Opponents of those practices “should be more concerned about their own relationship with God,” quoting the admonition, “Judge not lest ye be judged.”

[. . .]

So compelling was his commitment to a woman’s “right to choose” that a grand jury laid the blame for Kermit Gosnell’s “house of horrors” directly at his feet.

The Gosnell grand jury report stated, “With the change of administration from” pro-life Democratic Governor Bob “Casey to Governor Ridge” in 1995, “officials concluded that inspections would be ‘putting a barrier up to women’ seeking abortions. Better to leave clinics to do as they pleased, even though, as Gosnell proved, that meant both women and babies would pay.”

Cindy McCain got her national political voice the old-fashioned way: she paid for it, marrying a distinguished older Navy man and financing his political career. Whatever John McCain’s actual core political convictions, beyond ego gratification and defense, his pay-mistress came out early against the social conservative leg of the Reagan coalition (economy, national defense, and social conservatism), as Cindy and Meghan McCain used NOH8 to publicly struck the correct social pose, literally:

Cindy McCain made headlines and drove conversation in the blogosphere this week by posing for an ad supporting gay marriage.

Her daughter Meghan McCain, who also posed for the ad campaign against Proposition 8, has been an outspoken proponent of gay marriage for years. But this is the first time Cindy McCain has publicly taken a stance so contrary to her husband’s platform.

Cindy McCain signaled support for abortion rights during her husband’s 2008 presidential campaign, indicating that she did not support overturning Roe v. Wade, although that was the position of her husband, supposedly, and of his running mate, Sarah Palin. This was a signal of social class distinction between the two women, one elite and one self-made middle-class, with a strong whiff of working class. Cindy McCain embodies the betrayal of the Reagan coalition, the Republican coalition that allowed national victories starting in 1980, by the economic elite, now Woke Inc:

The post-New Deal new normal, then, is very similar to the pre-New Deal old normal. The present is not a rerun of the age of the age of robber barons after the Civil War, but of the subsequent age in which university-credentialed corporate elites have usually favored free markets and free love and freedom from organized labor, while working-class populations, white and nonwhite, have typically favored a mix of moral traditionalism with pro-labor protectionism in economic policy.

This is not the second Gilded Age. It is the second Jazz Age. And from the perspective of America’s disfranchised and alienated working-class majority of all races, that is bad enough.

We are told over and over again that suburban college-educated women find President Trump personally unacceptable. We are treated to this claim in the context of Arizona, a swing state:

Arizona is one of the most persuadable electorates in the country. Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema won 12 percent of GOP voters to pick up a Senate seat in 2018, a relatively high level of crossover appeal in polarized times. Republican Martha McSally, who was appointed to the state’s other Senate seat after Sinema defeated her, continues to lose a small but critical mass of Republican voters in her follow-up bid. Last month’s CNN/SSRS poll showed Kelly carrying 13 percent of Republicans; he’s been leading throughout the campaign thanks to that degree of bipartisan support.

The self-serving claim is that this is all about supposedly traditional Republicans, meaning business and defense “conservatives,” being offended on grounds one would expect would matter most to social conservatives. Yet, we see the mask slip and even cast aside. Why? Abortion is a likely explanation, as social marker and as a means to social and material ends.

We have been told several times over the past five years or so that one in five women seeking abortions self-identify as evangelical, charismatic, or fundamentalist.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, one in every five women who gets an abortion identifies as a born-again, evangelical, charismatic, or fundamentalist Christian. Given that more than a million women abort each year in the US, this means a staggering 200,000 Bible-believing Christians annually. And according to Christian ministries working with this population, a vast majority of them will never reveal their secret.

Why do evangelical Christian women go to Planned Parenthood? Because social status, belonging to your group, matters most. Evangelical Christian girls and women report not seeking help from church because they see their local church culture as judgmental, and because appearances matter:

Megan had done the moral math. It was worse to endure the disgrace of being an unmarried mother than it was to live with the secret—and the guilt—of terminating the pregnancy. “There was just so much shame in being pregnant and unmarried,” she explains. “I thought, There is no way I can face my mother and my community back home with this.” Again she paid for everything in cash. To this day, her family doesn’t know.

So, suburban women who also identify as Christian have a double reason now to find an excuse to help the Democrat by withholding support from the most pro-life, in actual practice in office, Republican president in our nation’s history. Beyond abortion, you have the rest of the social issues, where suburban churches are being pressed towards conforming to the world created by the cultural elite, with the business elites’ muscle behind them. Again, finding an acceptable excuse when you calculate you will not be hurt significantly by leftist economic policies. The male peers of these women, of course, have an interest in sex without the economic and social consequences of unwed parenthood, and a desire for social acceptance as well.

Is Trump’s special rudeness so real? Consider, as a parting thought, whether you and I have been sold a bill of goods as bogus as the entertainment elite hit job on the former college football star, the appointed president, Gerald Ford. Look it up. This man was not a klutz but was made into one by clever television comedians. Ford was the victim of a clever public image campaign. Perhaps the same has befallen Donald J. Trump, and to the same end: political power.