More women have accused Donald Trump of rape than have seen him in a Cheesecake Factory

By now you are probably painfully aware of the week’s dumbest media freakout: In Cleveland on Saturday, Barack Obama took a shot at Donald Trump’s well-known fondness for dictator-chic decor: “He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” And then the national news media freaked the hell out, pretending that Obama was snobbishly insulting the Cheesecake Factory and its patrons, as though it wasn’t patently obvious that the insult part of the line was the “Saddam Hussein” part.

That’s all very, very dumb, and I’ve written tens if not hundreds of thousands of words about previous very dumb nontroversies ginned up by the news media to make prominent Democrats look bad, and I’m not in the mood in doing it again right now, so I was going to let all of this pass.

Then I saw this dumb tweet in which the Trump White House sought to take advantage of the news media’s obsession with making Democrats look bad over the most inconsequential things instead of holding Donald Trump accountable for extremely consequential things:

How often do you think Donald Trump has been inside a Cheesecake Factory? Not very often, I’d wager. In fact, I bet there are more women who have credibly accused Donald Trump of rape than there are women who have seen Donald Trump in a Cheesecake Factory.

That brings me to something you might not have heard about this week: House Judiciary Committee Democrats on Monday released a report about Donald Trump’s relationship with convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein that includes a new allegation that Trump raped a participant in his 1993 beauty pageant:

Beatrice Keul told Committee staff that Trump raped her in a Plaza Hotel suite during his November 1993 American Dream Pageant. Keul said Trump promised that [Paolo] Zampolli would arrange her visa while Trump would arrange for admission to New York University; Epstein then approached her, introduced himself as “Don’s best friend” and offered to cover her travel and accommodations for a party at Mar-a-Lago. Following her brutal rape that same day, Keul said Trump pressed her to keep quiet and later called her in Switzerland to renew his offers for a visa and admission to NYU – similar offers Epstein made to his victims. While Keul had previously discussed Trump’s conduct, the report presents more information about the assault than previously offered, as well as corroborating evidence from others present at the pageant.

The report details “evidence involving 11 women, five of whom directly accuse Donald Trump of rape or sexual assault in Jeffrey Epstein’s close company or presence” and “concludes that, based on the available evidence and witness testimony, Trump and Paolo Zampolli—who until recently served as a senior Trump Administration official and diplomat—may have been co-conspirators in Jeffrey Epstein’s conspiracy to traffic and abuse young women in the 1990s.”

There’s a lot more. Judiciary Committee Democrats concluded: “This evidence demands a complete and independent investigation. Judiciary Democrats call for the appointment of an independent special counsel to investigate and prosecute Epstein’s co-conspirators and ensure that state and foreign prosecutors receive DOJ and FBI’s full support, including access to all relevant evidence.”

As I write this, the Washington Post has published at least four articles about Obama’s “Cheesecake Factory” line, and zero articles about a new allegation of rape against Donald Trump, who has already been found liable for sexual assault.

The New York Times covered the Judiciary Committee report with a brief yawn of an article that portrays the report as old news: “it largely cites allegations that have already been public.” Notably, the New York Times chose not to mention that the report contains a new rape allegation, probably because if the Times had acknowledged the new rape allegation it would have been harder to dismiss the report as old news.

At this writing, New York Times articles about the Cheesecake Factory nontroversy outnumber articles about the House Judiciary Committee report 2-1.

The Post and the Times are not outliers; every major media outlet I’ve checked has devoted more – far more, in most cases – attention to the Cheesecake Factory line than to the new allegation of rape against Donald Trump.