Wonkette laughs at the idea of "duct taped Messicans wandering around the desert."

Obviously, Wonkette assumes you know Wonkette is good and the assholes are on the other side:

Mick Mulvaney ran around the Sunday shows to threaten ANOTHER government shutdown if nobody gives Trump a goddamn wall to "defend the nation" from the duct taped Messicans wandering around the desert, and also to threaten an invasion of COMMUNIST Venezuela. Mulvaney boasted that Trump will get his goddamn wall money "with or without Congress," but declined to say who in flyover country would suffer when Trump starts looking for the cash.

I'm seeing a lot of stories questioning Trump's statement on Friday about duct-taped women — "Women are tied up, with duct tape on their faces, put in the backs of vans" — but I wanted something more soberly written. Here's Monica Hesse in WaPo, "Why does the president keep talking about women and duct tape on the border?"

But women are not tied up, experts have said. They do not have tape on their mouths. When Trump repeated this claim a few weeks ago, my colleague Katie Mettler contacted many authorities on trafficking who have spent time at the border, and none of them had seen or heard anything resembling the violence he described.

Nevertheless, there was Trump on Jan. 4, dramatizing the traffickers who “have three or four women with tape on their mouths and tied up, sitting in the back of a van or car.” There he was on Jan. 6: “They nab women, they grab them, they put tape over their mouths.” On Jan. 11: “Taping them up, wrapping tape around their mouths so they can’t shout or scream, tying their hands behind their back and even their legs.”

Sometimes the tape is explicitly duct tape, sometimes it’s electrical. Sometimes it has a specific color, as it did on Jan. 10: “Usually blue tape, as they call it. It’s powerful stuff. Not good.”...

[T]here’s... a purity to the duct-tape anecdotes, in the sense that it describes behavior that’s purely evil. Black and white. Human trafficking, however, is often complicated: women who believe they’re coming to America for a job, for example, that later turns out not to exist.

The women are initially deceived — that makes it complicated? Really, I find that idea more puzzling than the details about tape.

Allegations of sexual assault are also complicated, as the president should know: He’s been accused of assaulting or inappropriately touching 19 women — and while he’s engaged in “locker room talk” suggesting he’s grabbed women, he’s also said his accusers are all lying. He nominated Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and later mocked Christine Blasey Ford, Kavanaugh’s own accuser. He’s mocked the whole #MeToo movement, implying that victims have gone too far.

Sex trafficking is plainly much worse than even the most negative interpretation of what Trump and Kavanaugh are said to have done, and Hesse is not only equating these things, she is buying into the defense that when it comes to sex, you never really knows what goes on in private. I imagine that she might feel that she's only criticizing Trump, but look at the text. She asserted "Allegations of sexual assault are... complicated." Are. Then she shifted to talking about Trump and saying that he "should know." Know. You don't know things that are not true. To say he should know is to say it is true. Hesse sounds upset that Trump has "mocked the whole #MeToo movement," but to my ear, she too is diminishing the movement with this whole it's complicated business.

Now, I see what her point is. She's saying Trump created the especially evil picture so people would know to be angry at something that, portrayed accurately, might make them wonder whether the women are choosing to undergo suffering to get something they want. That is, Trump is lying because that's his motivation to lie. But is Trump lying? What is the true story?

I see this addition to Hesse's story: "Correction: An earlier version of this story cited a misleading statistic about assaults of migrant women. The reference has been removed." Shouldn't a "correction" be the right statistic? I'd like to know how wrong Hesse's original statement was. (Neither Google Cache nor Archive.org found it.)

This column would feel quite different if it nailed down the correct facts and then speculated about why Trump exaggerated. As it stands, I'm still wondering what the truth is, and how close Trump is to it. I see Hesse just giving up on what is true, and that's not the spirit of the #MeToo movement. Hesse engages in that who-really-ever-knows shrugging that rightly enrages those of us who care about rape.