What did Donald Trump do today?

He said that domestic violence wasn't really a crime.

Speaking today at the Museum of the Bible, Trump made light of domestic violence. The context was his military occupation of Washington, D.C., which he has deployed federal troops to on the pretext that crime was out of control. In reality, crime in the District is as low as it has been in decades, but it is not down 100% since the occupation began, as Trump has nonsensically claimed.

Trump used the occasion to complain that his political enemies were pointing to things that weren't really crimes, like domestic abuse, which he called:

Much lesser things, things that take place in the home, they call crime. You know they'll do anything they can to find something. If a man has a [mocking tone] "little fight" with the wife, they say "This was a crime, see?" So now I can't claim a hundred percent.

This is not the first time Trump has tried to minimize domestic violence. He's defended a number of famous men who have been accused of violence against partners, including his former staff secretary Rob Porter, boxer Mike Tyson, and his current Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (whose own mother accused him of violence against his ex-wife).

Even setting aside his history of sexual assault, Trump has been accused by his own partners of domestic abuse. One of the most notable examples came from his first wife Ivana, who vividly described him grabbing her by the hair and yanking clumps of it out, before raping her. Trump denied those allegations publicly, but invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when asked about them under oath. 

Physical violence is always a serious crime, regardless of whether the target is a spouse or partner. About 12 million Americans are subjected to violence by intimate partners every year. It makes up 15% of all violent crime, including almost half of all rapes. A big part of the danger is that what Trump mockingly referred to as "little fights" have a tendency to escalate: women who are subjected to domestic violence are more likely to be killed by a partner than American military forces were while deployed to active war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

Neither Trump nor his staff explained his remarks on domestic violence, but most of the White House comms effort today was focused on the release of Trump's contribution to the "birthday book" of his former friend and confidant Jeffrey Epstein. It shows a silhouette of a girl's body drawn in marker such that Trump's distinctive spiky signature is positioned where pubic hair would be. The text is an imagined dialogue between Trump and Epstein sharing coy references to "secrets" they've shared that "never age."
 

Why does this matter?

• Domestic violence is a crime, even if a domestic abuser doesn't think so. 

• It's insane that this is the second biggest story about Trump tolerating sex crimes that came out today.