Parenting & Family Quote by Tom Cole

The disarming casualness of Tom Cole's phrasing is the point - and the indictment. "Well, I guess" and "in a sense" read like verbal airbags, cushioning a memory that should need no qualifiers. It captures a political survivor's instinct to understate, to keep the temperature down even while describing something that, in any sane moral register, demands alarm. That reflex tells you how power works: not just through acts, but through the social pressure to narrate those acts as minor, ambiguous, or merely "a thing."

The line that lands hardest is the attempted domestication of abuse into preference: "he had a fetish for feet". Cole reaches for a clinical-sounding explanation, as if naming the behavior can make it legible and therefore containable. It also mirrors a culture that has long preferred pathology over accountability - the abuser as oddball, not predator. "He used to play with my feet and other kids' feet" expands the frame from a private violation to a patterned practice, yet the language stays almost playground-innocent: "play", "kids", "his thing". It's a chilling euphemism, because euphemism is often what children (and later adults) are left with when adults around them don't provide a vocabulary for what happened.

Coming from a politician, the quote doubles as a case study in institutional self-protection. Cole isn't only describing Phillips; he's revealing the ambient expectation that even victims should speak in lowered tones, careful not to sound accusatory, careful not to disrupt the story the institution wants told.