It may be hard to believe, but before Donald Trump took over the party, Republicans were terrified of offending women voters by seeming insensitive on matters of sexual violation. Republicans not only failed to acknowledge or address the Title IX overcorrection, sometimes they even joined with Democrats to strengthen the Obama-era effort.

Just last year, the punitive Campus Accountability and Safety Act was reintroduced in the Senate by Democrat Claire McCaskill of Missouri, who praised her Republican co-sponsors, saying this issue “cuts across every political divide.” Those co-sponsors included Dean Heller, Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, and Marco Rubio.

R. Shep Melnick, a political-science professor at Boston College, argued in his book The Transformation of Title IX that Republicans signed on to this bill, one that violated “their general opposition to expansion of federal regulation,” because of “their desire to reach out to women voters and avoid being branded ‘rape apologists.’”

In remarks in support of the proposed legislation, Heller described the difficulty young women face in coming forward with allegations of sexual violation. He said, “Sexual assault is a crime that more often than not goes unreported, which is one of the reasons why data provided by our nation’s institutions [of higher education] simply do not reflect the prevalence of this crime.”

But Trump has now reset the sexual-assault agenda for his party. He has turned sexual assault into a means of attack on his enemies: women, Democrats, and especially Democratic women. He has also pressed the notion that men are the real victims, which is not surprising given that about a dozen women have accused him of sexual violations. At a press conference last month, he claimed that he and other accused men are the targets of a “big fat con job.”

So when Christine Blasey Ford went public with her allegations against Kavanaugh, Dean Heller had a new perspective on what it means for an accuser to tell her story. As he reassured Nevada Republican officials, “We got a little hiccup here with the Kavanaugh nomination. We’ll get through this and we’ll get off to the races.” (After these remarks were reported, Heller said he took sexual assault seriously and welcomed Ford’s testimony.) Following Kavanaugh’s confirmation, Heller tweeted, “Democrats think political games and smears will win them votes, but it only fuels our momentum.”

Last year, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced a major reform of Title IX excesses, careful to emphasize that procedures must be fair to both accuser and accused. Democrats vehemently denounced her, but congressional Republicans remained virtually silent. Now, because of Kavanaugh, Republicans are suddenly fierce advocates of due process. This is a clever piece of jiu-jitsu, given that Democrats have traditionally been the party most concerned with the rights of the accused.