I have been thinking about this for a while now, and I want to lay it out carefully, because I think it is one of the more uncomfortable truths in American politics, the truth that we, as a country, have developed a habit of treating accusations against politicians as credible or not credible based almost entirely on whether we already like or dislike the person being accused, rather than based on the substance of what is actually being alleged, and I think that habit is corrosive, and I think it deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets.
Let me start by being clear about what I am not saying, because I think this is the part people tend to skip past in their rush to score political points. I am not saying that every accusation is automatically true, I am not saying that we should treat an unproven allegation as equivalent to a legal finding, and I am not saying that skepticism toward any particular claim is inherently wrong or done in bad faith. Skepticism is healthy, skepticism is often necessary, and in a world where accusations can be weaponized for political gain, financial gain, personal revenge, or a hundred other reasons, it would be naive to treat every claim as gospel simply because someone made it. We were not there, whatever happened, happened between people in a room or a hallway or a hotel or a home, away from cameras, away from witnesses in most cases, and neither I nor anyone reading this actually knows for certain what took place. That uncertainty is real, and I want to hold onto it honestly rather than pretend it away in either direction.
But here is what I am saying, and I think it is a distinct point from blind belief, we should not let our political tribe determine, in advance, whether an accusation deserves to be taken seriously. And I think if we are honest with ourselves, that is exactly what happens, over and over again, on both sides of the aisle, and I want to walk through some examples to show what I mean, not to relitigate history, but to illustrate the pattern.
Take Bill Clinton. Over the years, several women accused him of serious misconduct, Juanita Broaddrick alleged that he raped her in a hotel room in 1978, Paula Jones alleged sexual harassment when he was governor of Arkansas, and of course there was the relationship with Monica Lewinsky, a young White House intern, which even under the most generous interpretation involved an enormous power imbalance between a sitting president and a twenty-two-year-old employee. For decades, a significant portion of the political left treated these allegations as distractions, as partisan attacks manufactured by Clinton’s enemies, as things that did not deserve serious engagement, and I think, looking back now, in an era that has become far more attuned to how power imbalances shape these situations, a lot of people on the left themselves have quietly reevaluated how they responded to those allegations at the time. That reevaluation is worth something, it shows growth, but it also shows how easily an entire political coalition can talk itself into dismissing accusers when the accused is one of their own.
Now take Donald Trump. More than two dozen women have accused him of sexual misconduct over the years, ranging from harassment to assault, and for a long time, large parts of the political right treated all of these allegations as coordinated smears, as fabrications timed for political effect, as the product of a hostile media trying to take him down. But one of those allegations, from the writer E. Jean Carroll, actually went before a jury, not a partisan committee, not a cable news panel, an actual jury of ordinary citizens weighing actual evidence under actual rules of evidence, and that jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll in a department store dressing room in the 1990s, and separately found him liable for defaming her when he denied it. Trump has continued to deny the underlying conduct and has fought the verdict through multiple rounds of appeals, all of which have failed, most recently when the Supreme Court declined to take up his case at all, leaving the finding and the multi-million dollar judgment in place. I bring this up not to relitigate Trump’s guilt as some kind of gotcha, but to make a narrower point, this was not a case where the accusation floated in some unresolved space forever, this was a case where the American legal system actually examined the evidence and reached a conclusion, and the conclusion did not favor the accused, and yet, even now, a substantial number of people continue to describe this as a hoax, continue to describe Carroll as a liar, simply because believing otherwise would be politically inconvenient for them.
Now take Joe Biden. Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer, accused him in 2020 of sexually assaulting her in the early 1990s, an allegation Biden firmly denied. Reade’s account faced significant scrutiny and inconsistencies came out over time, and unlike the Carroll case, there was no jury verdict, no legal finding either way, just a contested, unresolved allegation. What struck me at the time, and still strikes me now, is how quickly large portions of the political left, the same coalition that had spent the previous several years insisting that survivors should be believed as a matter of first principle, pivoted to picking apart Reade’s credibility, her timeline, her motives, her past statements, treating her claim with a level of skepticism they rarely extended to accusers of Republican figures. I am not saying that scrutiny was necessarily wrong, inconsistencies matter, and I think it is fair to weigh them, I am saying that the intensity and speed of that scrutiny seemed to track suspiciously well with whose political fortunes were at stake.
And now, most recently, we have Graham Platner, the Democratic Senate candidate in Maine, who has faced a mounting pile of controversies over the past year, culminating in a former girlfriend’s allegation, reported by Politico, that he assaulted her in her home in 2021. Platner has denied the allegation categorically. What has been interesting to watch here is that, this time, prominent Democrats, Schumer, Warren, Gillibrand, Khanna, and eventually even Bernie Sanders, moved relatively quickly to distance themselves from Platner once the allegation broke, which suggests that at least in this instance, the response was not simply reflexive tribal defense. But I would gently point out that it took the accumulation of a Nazi-adjacent tattoo, disparaging old comments about assault survivors, a confirmed sexting scandal, and multiple prior allegations from other women before this most recent claim finally became the breaking point, which makes me wonder how much of that earlier tolerance was really about waiting for more facts, and how much of it was about not wanting to lose a candidate the party badly needed in a competitive Senate race.
This is the pattern I keep noticing, over and over, across administrations, across parties, across decades, the willingness to extend the benefit of the doubt to an accused person tends to track suspiciously closely with whether that person is useful to us politically, rather than with the actual strength or weakness of the evidence against them. When the accused is on our side, we reach for words like smear, witch hunt, coordinated attack, politically motivated timing. When the accused is on the other side, we reach for words like pattern, credibility, corroboration, accountability. Sometimes those characterizations are accurate. But I think if we are being honest, we deploy them selectively, not consistently, and that selectivity is the actual problem I want to name.
I think the healthier posture, the one I am trying to hold myself to, and the one I would encourage others to hold themselves to, looks something like this, when an accusation comes out against someone, regardless of their party, regardless of whether I like them or dislike them, my first move should not be to ask myself whose side benefits if this is true, my first move should be to ask what the actual evidence shows, who is making the claim, what is their track record of credibility, are there corroborating witnesses, are there documents, are there prior consistent statements, did the legal system ever weigh in, and only then should I form a tentative view, held with appropriate humility, because in most of these situations, absolute certainty is simply not available to those of us watching from the outside. That is a harder discipline than simply trusting my political instincts, but I think it is the only honest way to engage with these situations.
I also think there is a difference worth drawing between two separate failure modes, because I do not want to collapse them into one lazy point. The first failure mode is uncritical belief, treating every accusation as true the moment it is made, regardless of evidence, simply because the accuser says so, and using that accusation as a bludgeon regardless of context. That is a real failure mode, and it has happened, and it has occasionally led to people’s lives and reputations being damaged over claims that later fell apart under scrutiny. The second failure mode, the one I am more concerned with in this piece, is reflexive dismissal, treating every accusation against a political ally as false the moment it is made, simply because believing it would be inconvenient, and using that dismissal as a shield regardless of evidence. Both failure modes are real, both happen constantly, and I think the second one gets far less attention in our political discourse than the first, even though I would argue it happens just as often, maybe more often, because it is the more comfortable failure mode, the one that lets us keep supporting the people and the causes we already believe in without having to sit in the discomfort of reevaluating them.
I want to be honest about something else too, which is that I recognize the discomfort in what I am proposing, because it means that consistency will sometimes force me to take seriously an accusation against someone I admire, someone whose politics I support, someone I would rather not think badly of, and it means I have to sit with that discomfort rather than reaching immediately for a reason to dismiss the claim. It also means, on the other side, that I cannot simply assume guilt against someone I already dislike, because that too would be intellectually dishonest, using an unproven accusation as a convenient weapon rather than a genuine concern. Consistency cuts both ways, and I think that is exactly what makes it valuable, if my standard for taking an accusation seriously only ever seems to activate when the accused is my political opponent, then it is not really a standard about truth or accountability at all, it is just a standard about political convenience dressed up in the language of principle.
So where does that leave me, practically speaking, when a new allegation breaks against a politician, whichever party they belong to. It leaves me trying to ask the boring, unglamorous questions first, who is the accuser, what is the evidence, has this gone before any kind of formal process, are there other similar allegations forming a pattern, and has the accused’s response been a direct, specific denial, or a vague, deflecting one, before I ever let myself land on a conclusion. It leaves me resisting the urge to reach for the word hoax the instant an allegation surfaces against someone I like, and resisting the urge to declare someone guilty the instant an allegation surfaces against someone I do not like. Neither reaction requires any actual thinking, and I think that is precisely why both are so tempting, they let us skip the hard part and go straight to the comfortable conclusion we already wanted to reach.
None of this means treating all allegations as equally strong, they are not, some are backed by extensive documentation, corroborating witnesses, and even jury verdicts, like the Carroll case against Trump, and some remain single, contested, uncorroborated claims with significant factual disputes, like the Reade allegation against Biden, and some fall somewhere in between, with confirmed adjacent misconduct but a still-unresolved core allegation, like the Platner case. Treating those situations with appropriate, evidence-based distinctions is not inconsistency, it is exactly the kind of careful thinking I am arguing for. What would be inconsistent is applying a rigorous evidentiary standard only when the accused is politically inconvenient to me, and a forgiving, dismissive standard whenever the accused is politically useful to me. That is the pattern I see far too often, across the political spectrum, and it is the pattern I am trying, imperfectly, to resist in myself, and the one I would ask anyone reading this to try to resist as well.