Donald Trump’s new “Al Frankenstein” tweet is beyond the pale

| 10:23 pm EST November 16, 2017
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Senator Al Franken apologized today for having groped a woman in a photo several years ago, in what he describes as an at attempt at humor gone horribly wrong. Most of the public has spent the day trying to figure out how to digest the Franken news in a thoughtful and appropriate manner. Then there’s Donald Trump, who tweeted something so inappropriate about the Franken situation that it’s simply beyond the pale.

Here’s the exact, unedited text of Trump’s tweet tonight: “The Al Frankenstien picture is really bad, speaks a thousand words. Where do his hands go in pictures 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6 while she sleeps?” First, we have to point out a few things. Trump is so immature and deranged, and he’s also so bad at typing and spelling, there’s no way to know whether he was actually trying to make an “Al Frankenstein” joke or if he typed “Al Franken” and autocorrect tacked on the rest. In any case he misspelled “Frankenstein” as “Frankenstien” so it’s difficult to figure out what happened. But that’s the least of the problem here.

Donald Trump is a serial sexual predator who has been accused of sexually assaulting fourteen women. He was caught admitting to sexually assaulting multiple women in explicitly graphic fashion. He’s one of the very last people on earth who should be lecturing anyone else about sexual assault. And when you compare what Al Franken has been accused of to what Donald Trump has been accused of, while there’s no excusing or minimizing any of it, the accusations against Trump are orders of magnitude more serious.

But most of the attention here will likely go to the fact that Donald Trump referred to “Al Franken” as “Al Frankenstein” and then misspelled “Frankenstein.” If we’re going to focus on that angle, let’s keep in mind that Trump takes sexual assault so non-seriously, he either intentionally made a joke about it, or he couldn’t be bothered to even look at what his tweet said before posting it.