The Chicago Blackhawks, Donald Trump, and Accountability

I am a Chicago Blackhawks fan. I started enjoying hockey as a kid in New England, but when I moved away, and the Whalers moved to Carolina, I switched to the Blackhawks, as my Dad’s family is from Chicago. Needless to say, I enjoyed the hell out of their three cups, especially given how fun the team was to watch. Then came the Kyle Beach story.

Kyle Beach was a minor league player called up to help fill out practices during the 2010 Cup run. This is a common practice — the players are usually referred to as something like Black Aces. It gives some more time off for players who need it without limiting the team’s overall practice and it rewards some up and coming players with a touch of the NHL life. Except in this case, Beach was sexually assaulted by a trainer. The team leadership was told about it — from the President of the team, through the GM and assistant GM to the head coach. They had a meeting and decided to sit on this information until after the season so as to not disrupt the team during the playoff run. Even after the run was over, they just let him resign instead of reporting him to the police and he subsequently went on to hurt at least one other person.

Most of the leadership was banned from the NHL for a short period of time, and the team has settled a couple of lawsuits around the matter. The NHL, to its credit, has also stepped up enforcement and training around this issues, at least somewhat. The GM and head coach have both been allowed back in the league, apparently with the acceptance of Kyle Beach, who, frankly, sounds like a better person than most of us. (I do not think that either should be allowed into positions of power.). The assault, obviously, has been a stain on the organization and those years. What has this, then, to do with Donald Trump?

The tranche of emails from Epstein pretty clearly show that Trump kept in contact with him beyond the point at which Trump claimed to have cut him off. That makes Epstein more credible the Trump in these emails, and the emails pretty clearly attest to Trump knowing about Epstein’s assaults. There is no record of Trump ever reporting these incidents to any authorities, and in his first term, he made the man who gave Epstein the sweetheart deal that almost let him get away with his crimes and probably shielded other powerful men from accountability a member of his cabinet. The parallels should be obvious.

It does not matter, really, if Trump assaulted any of the girls. I believe, given his desperation to hide the files and his past behavior, that he did. But I accept that we don’t have real proof. But we certainly seem to have strong evidence that he knew about the assaults and did nothing at all. That is not acceptable. I know that is chic, especially on the right, to think we do not live in a society, that we only owe those we choose to owe anything. But that is rank bullshit.

We absolutely live in a society, and we owe care to all members of that society. No one was asking Trump, or Bowman and Quenneville, the Hawk’s GM and head coach, to rush in guns blazing to physically rescue the victims. All we wanted, all any decent people would have done, is to have them try and get the authorities to stop the abuse. Instead, they protected their own interests. That should be unacceptable. We cannot allow ourselves to pretend that society does not matter, that we have no obligations to anyone other than ourselves.

All the evidence points to Trump knowing about the abuse of children and doing nothing to stop it. It is a damning indictment of the man as a human being, and should be enough to drive him from the presidency, at least. That it is not is a damning indictment of how far rotten our society has become.