Say it to her face, Donald

The nation now has the unfortunate privilege of knowing what Donald Trump may be doing while he’s waiting for a 3 a.m. phone call as president: looking for sex tapes.

Last night Trump was awake until the wee hours of the morning, tweeting, among other things:

Did Crooked Hillary help disgusting (check out sex tape and past) Alicia M become a U.S. citizen so she could use her in the debate?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2016

(For the record, Snopes says the tape does not exist.)

But, the question is, if Trump was going to say this, why hide behind Twitter?

Donald Trump has a lot of nerve to launch sex-based attacks against his political opponents, but not enough nerve, apparently, to say it to their faces.

Trump’s late night hate tweets came shortly after his campaign issued a memo to surrogates instructing them to discuss how Hillary Clinton had “bullied and smeared” women who had extramarital affairs with Bill Clinton, while at the same time aiding and abetting those relationships.

Again, Trump isn’t willing to say it himself.

There are legitimate questions to be asked about Clinton’s role in the affairs that could be presented as relevant to her fitness to handle matters of workplace discrimination and harassment. Trump, for his part, hasn’t displayed any ability to approach the matter with such delicacy. 

He admitted he found the subject “inappropriate” to bring up in the first presidential debate, implying he has no idea how to discuss it appropriately.

 Trump said, "I was going to say something extremely rough to Hillary, to her family and I said to myself 'I can't do it. I just can't do it. It's inappropriate. It's not nice.’”

As if saying these things through surrogates without giving Clinton or “Alicia M”—the former Miss Universe whom Trump and the media criticized for gaining too much weight during her reign—any chance to respond is any kinder.

These women would probably love the chance to face their accuser.

Trump’s allegation of a sex tape will be circulated thousands, if not millions, of times before Alicia Machado has a chance to refute it—a position a woman should never be placed in by a presidential candidate.

Similarly, Hillary Clinton will not be able to respond to accusations made dozens of times from Trump’s cable TV surrogates the same way she could in a debate with millions of viewers watching.

Are Trump’s methods effective? Yes. He’s getting everyone else to talk about these subjects, while never having to mouth the words himself.

But Trump is kidding himself if he thinks women aren’t wise to this game and infuriated by it.

Far, far, far too many women are all too familiar with how these sorts of sex smears work. They spread in hushed whispers and online forums where anonymity is guaranteed. The woman rarely gets to face her accuser.

Trump and Clinton, however, will meet again. And Clinton may very well turn to Trump and say, “Donald, you and your campaign spend a lot of time thinking about the sexual history of me and my surrogates. Why don’t you say it to my face?”

After all, if there are any questions Clinton has spent her weeks of debate prep planning for, it would be these.

Trump should recognize that if he’s determined to make these major issues in the campaign, he can’t continue to hide behind Twitter and his surrogates. Trump started these slimy conversations. Let’s see him finish them at the next debate.

If he’s man enough to do it, that is. He hasn’t been so far.

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