There was a news story recently that a New York journalist accused Trump of trying to rape her, back in the 1990s. This sort of accusation now is so common that it tends to be ignored as yet another “he said-she said.”

George Conway, husband of Trump’s senior advisor Kellyanne Conway, says that Republicans should believe her because they believed that Bill Clinton raped Juanita Broadderick, who had less evidence than today’s accuser.

Right before the second Presidential debate in 2016, Trump introduced four women to the media, all of whom claimed they were sexually assaulted by Clinton. Trump called Broadderick “courageous.” This was his effort, writes Conway, to defuse the Access Hollywood tape in which he bragged that he grabbed women by their genitals and they let him do whatever he wanted.

Conway writes:

But today there’s another woman with a similar allegation, against a different powerful man. Her name is E. Jean Carroll.

She, too, says that she was raped — by Donald Trump…

Carroll’s claim, for a number of reasons, actually rests upon a significantly stronger foundation than Broaddrick’s.

For one thing, before she went public with her story, Broaddrick had repeatedly denied that Clinton had assaulted her, even under oath: In an affidavit she had submitted in Paula Jones’s sexual harassment case against Clinton, Broaddrick had sworn that the allegations “that Mr. Clinton had made unwelcome sexual advances toward me in the late seventies … are untrue,” that the press had previously sought “corroboration of these tales,” but that she had “repeatedly denied the allegations.” (Disclosure: I provided behind-the-scenes pro bono legal assistance to Jones’s lawyers.)…

Finally, no controversy involving Trump would be complete without at least one utterly brazen, easily disprovable Trumpian lie. In his statement denying the rape allegation, he added the claim that “I’ve never met this person in my life.”

If Trump had even bothered to glance at Carroll’s published account, he would have seen a photograph of himself and his then-wife, Ivana, from 1987 ― in which he was amiably chatting with Carroll and her then-husband. By making the absurd and mendacious assertion that he never even met Carroll, Trump utterly annihilates the credibility of his claim that he didn’t assault her.

Conway asks: Why did Republicans believe Broadderick but not Carroll?

Answer: Republicans know he is a sexual predator but they don’t care. They care about getting anti-abortion, pro-gun extremists and religious fundamentalists appointed to the federal judiciary. That’s all that matters, not ethics or morality.