President Donald Trump has recommended another man who has been accused of touching women without their consent for a major government position.

Trump announced last week that he has settled on Herman Cain, a former Godfather’s Pizza executive, for a seat on the Federal Reserve Board. Cain ended his 2012 presidential bid after four women came forward with sexual harassment allegations against him.

One of the women, Sharon Bialek, said Cain asked her for sex when she sought his help finding a job in 1990s. According to Bialek, he said, “You want a job, right?” as he ran his hand up her skirt. Karen Kraushaar, another woman who publicly spoke out, said Cain groped her in the 1990s.

Cain, who hasn’t yet been officially nominated by Trump, has denied these allegations. On Friday, he said in a since-deleted video on Facebook that he would “be able to explain [the allegations] this time, where they wouldn’t let me explain it the last time. They were too busy believing the accusers,” according to Marketwatch.


Cain’s nomination fits into a disturbing pattern for Trump. He has repeatedly nominated men who have been accused of sexual assault, sexual harassment, and intimate partner abuse to top positions in his administration. Others have enabled sexual violence and harassment even if they did not personally commit it themselves.

During the Obama administration, significant negative media reports and criminal accusations about cabinet nominees “would be flagged for further scrutiny,” and sexual assault allegations “would be a serious red flag,” a former Obama staffer who vetted appointees told ProPublica in 2017. But this White House has nominated and hired so many people accused of sexual violence and abuse to top positions that it’s not clear the Trump administration is taking the same approach.

The failure to take sexual assault and intimate partner abuse seriously is also evident in the administration’s policy decisions. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has taken steps to loosen accountability for accused rapists on college and high school campuses, for example, and the administration’s current immigration policies make victims of intimate partner too scared of deportation to come forward.

Brett Kavanaugh

Despite at least three accusations of sexual misconduct, Brett Kavanaugh was nominated and confirmed to the Supreme Court last year.


After Trump tapped Kavanaugh to fill the seat vacated by Anthony Kennedy, Christine Blasey Ford canme forward to accuse Kavanaugh of forcing her into a bedroom, along with his friend Mark Judge, at a small gathering in the 1980s. She told The Washington Post that Kavanaugh pinned her down to the bed while he tried to remove her bathing suit and other clothing and that when she tried to scream, he covered her mouth with his hand. After Judge jumped on them, Blasey Ford said she managed to escape the room.

Other women then came forward with similarly troubling stories. Deborah Ramirez told The New Yorker that Kavanaugh thrust his penis in her face at a party when the two attended Yale University. Julia Swetnick said in a sworn declaration that when Kavanaugh was in high school, he participated in “abusive and physically aggressive behavior toward girls” such as grinding against girls without their consent, trying to remove or shift girls’ clothing to expose private body parts, and making crude sexual comments.

Swetnick also said Kavanaugh was among the boys lined up to participate in gang rapes at house parties. She said she was once the victim of a gang rape; she said Kavanaugh was present when she was assaulted, but did not say he participated in it.

Though he was confirmed by one of the slimmest margins in history, Kavanaugh is now sitting on the nation’s highest court, where he can shape laws that affect victims of sexual assault.

Rob Porter

White House aide Rob Porter resigned last year after the media reported on his alleged spousal abuse.

Porter struggled to obtain a security clearance to work at the White House because of allegations of domestic violence, according to CNN. Two of Porter’s ex-wives, Colbie Holderness and Jennifer Willoughby, told CNN they experienced abuse at his hands.


Holderness, who married Porter in 2003, said the physical abuse began during their honeymoon. She said he would later being to choke her and punch in her the face, and she pointed to a 2005 photo of her bruised face as proof.

Willoughby, who married Porter in 2009, said he yelled at her and was emotionally abusive. A year after they first got married, she said he pulled her out of the shower by her shoulders so he could yell at her.

A third woman, who contacted Holderness and Willoughby in 2016 claiming to be a girlfriend of Porter’s, said he also abused her.

Porter publicly re-emerged in March when he wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal praising Trump’s trade policies. The Wall Street Journal did not acknowledge why Porter left the administration. In response, Willoughby wrote in The Washington Post that although she supports rehabilitation for men who commit intimate partner abuse, “Rob has yet to publicly show regret or contrition for his actions. Giving him a voice before he has done that critical work elevates his opinions above my and Colbie’s dignity.”

Steve Bannon

Steve Bannon, who led Trump’s presidential campaign and served as White House Chief Strategist for the first seven months of Trump’s term, faced charges of domestic violence in 1996.

According to police department documents published by Politico shortly before the 2016 election, while Bannon was seated in the driver’s seat of his car, he grabbed his wife’s wrist and “pulled her down, as if he was trying to pull her into the car over the door.” He then “grabbed her neck, also pulling her into the car.” When she escaped and went inside the house to call 911, Bannon allegedly took the phone from her and threw it across the room, which she said later found in pieces. The police officer who responded to the incident wrote that “she complained of soreness to her neck” and “I saw red marks on her left wrist and the right side of her neck.”

Bannon was charged with misdemeanor domestic violence, battery, and dissuading a witness. The case was later dismissed. His ex-wife said in a divorce filing that Bannon persuaded her to leave town and told her that if she went to court, he and his lawyer would “make sure that I would be the one who was guilty.”

Bannon left the administration in 2017, but many of the policies he pushed for are still in place.

Andrew Puzder

Trump nominated Andrew Puzder for secretary of labor, but Puzder dropped out after a video resurfaced of his ex-wife, Lisa Fierstein, appearing on a 1990 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show called “High Class Battered Women.”

“Most men who are in positions like that don’t leave marks,” Fierstein said on the show.

“The damage that I’ve sustained, you can’t see. It’s permanent, permanent damage. But there’s no mark. And there never was. They never hit you in the face. They’re too smart. They don’t hit you in front of everyone.The judicial system would say that. Were there any witnesses? No, come on. They know better.”

After Politico reported the story, Fierstein sent a letter to members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in February. She said she regretted leveling abuse charges against Puzder and going on television.

“What we should have handled in a mature and private way became a contentious and ugly public divorce,” Fierstein said. The attorney who represented her at the time, Dan Sokol, said that Fierstein described an “ongoing pattern with several episodes of physical violence.”

Although Politico reported in 2018 that Puzder would possibly be offered a new White House role, there have been no new reports that he is under consideration for joining the Trump administration.

Steven Muñoz

The Trump administration hired Steven Muñoz for a State Department job as assistant chief of visits, which he began in January 2017. Muñoz was tasked with organizing visits for foreign heads of state, and sometimes their meetings with Trump himself.

According to a ProPublica story published in 2017, five men who attended The Citadel military college said Muñoz sexually assaulted them. One student said he woke up to Muñoz on top of him and said Muñoz kissed him and grabbed his genitals. More than a year after he graduated, Muñoz was banned from campus.

In 2012, BuzzFeed News and Huffington Post also reported on the allegations against Muñoz.

Muñoz, who previously worked for Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum’s presidential campaigns, still lists himself as assistant chief of protocol for visits on his LinkedIn page.

President Trump

Trump has been accused of multiple incidences of sexual predation stretching back to the 1970s — many of which line up with the behavior toward women that Trump himself has described engaging in.

“You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait,” Trump said in a 2005 tape for Access Hollywood that was published just a few weeks before the 2016 election. “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

At least 23 women have come forward with allegations of Trump’s sexual misconduct, many of whom decided to publicly come forward during his presidential campaign. They include a woman who says Trump touched her vagina through her underwear at a nightclub, a woman who says Trump forcibly kissed her during a brunch at Mar-a-Lago, and many other women who say Trump groped and kissed them without their consent.

Trump picks who perpetuate systems of violence and abuse

There are many other Trump nominees and hires who have not personally been accused of sexual harassment, sexual violence, or intimate partner abuse, but who have nonetheless enabled a culture that condones it.

Labor Secretary Alex Acosta — Trump’s second pick after Puzder — signed a secret plea agreement with billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein while serving as U.S. attorney for southern Florida. In February, District Judge Kenneth A. Marra ruled that Acosta’s decision to not make Epstein’s accusers aware of the plea deal was unconstitutional. A House appropriations panel grilled him about the deal in April, but Acosta continues to lead the department.

In 2018, the White House hired Bill Shine, a former Fox news executive, as the president’s top communications aide. Shine landed in the Trump administration after leaving Fox News amid a sexual harassment scandal at the network. He was accused of trying to cover up a culture of harassment at Fox and mishandling allegations.

Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, whom Trump chose as his national security adviser in 2017, was also accused of mishandling a sexual assault case. After the Army investigated the incident, McMaster received a rebuke in 2015 for his oversight of the situation.

Barry Myers, whom Trump nominated in 2017 to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was the chief executive of a family weather company called AccuWeather. An investigation into AccuWeather conducted by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs found that the company subjected women to sexual harassment, and the company paid $290,000 as part of a settlement. Myers’ initial nomination to head NOAA expired after the Senate failed to confirm him last year, but he’s now up for the same position again.