The Trump tape is a dirty trick played in a truly disgusting Presidential campaign. A dirty trick conceived by NBC, and grabbed by David Farenthold, a rabidly partisan anti-Trump propagandista. The real news here is not Donald Trump’s crude grossness, but the whys and wherefors of how the video has been used. Here are ten things you might not know about the circumstances involved.
Few things this year have so clearly shown the muddled hypocrisy of contemporary sexual mores quite as clearly as the Trump in Locker Room Talk fiasco.
Within three paragraphs, a Guardian writer described one thing Trump was heard saying on tape as “sexist”, “offensive” and then “boasting about sexual assault”. In a police station, I think the average detective investigating a case of attempted rape would want the complainant to be a little more specific than that. This morning, I note the Telegraph doing exactly the same thing….but then, I have met the Womens’ editor and she’s just another twit who thinks that one generation’s sexual values and politesse are set in stone forever. But even if she isn’t very bright, this kind of careless, scatter-gun writing is regrettable to say the least of it.
Here are my problems with Lockeroomgate – which it will be dubbed before too long:
- The recording is eleven years old.
- It takes place in a ‘locker room environment’, where 97% of those mouthing off this morning have never been in their lives. It was the sort of male fantasy-boasting I listened to every Saturday before getting changed into my footie kit.
- Nobody died. The US Ambassador wasn’t anally raped and dragged through the streets to a grisly demise. No whistleblower was taken out with a drone.
- It didn’t take place in the offices of Goldman Sachs, it didn’t take place in the Oval Office, and there were no cigars involved.
- If American men are shocked by this kind of talk, they’re either deaf or just never played sports.
- From the day he first opened his mouth in this campaign, anyone with an iota of sensitivity could discern what kind of bloke he is: crude, narcissistic and misogynist. This tape is, therefore, not news.
- The behaviour of his running mate evokes suspicion, I think. Mike Pence voted for Cruz in his home State, and is renowned for his nose being able to sniff a populist soundbite. Both he and Ryan (another Trump-hater in private) were quick to condemn Trump’s remarks unequivocally. Senior GOP movers, however, are reputed to have told the Vice-Presidential nominee that if he dumped Trump, they would make him the Republican candidate “by acclamation”.
- The source of the story – the Washington Post – is the biggest non-surprise of all of all: the journalist involved there, David Fahrenthold, has written several stories about Trump’s charitable foundation (but ignored the infinitely more septic Clinton Foundation) while casting aspersions on his mental capacity to be President (while ignoring Clinton’s consistent inability to stand upright unaided).
- Fellow Washpost blogger Richard Cohen wrote two months ago (with remarkable prescience) ‘The way to hurt Trump is to ridicule him. He is a man of immense pride, a pompous bloviator and a locker-room towel-snapper. Either ignore him or ridicule him.’
- According to the Post, Farenthold knows the identity of the person who leaked the video to him, but will not disclose it. It seems the person works for NBC, who had a team working full-time to find lewd tapes of Trump during production of their programming featuring him. I understand, however, that NBC were going to leave airing the featured extract until Monday – after the Second TV Debate – and so an activist Democrat supporter downloaded the tape and gave it to Farenthold.
Last but not least – cue shower of hate mail – I must regrettably report to the usual shoal of pc offendees that Trump’s assertion “You can do anything with women once you’re famous” has not so much a tiny grain as a wide vein of truth in it. Groupies have been around in one form or another since God was a girl, and fame – if coupled with power and money – are aphrodisiacs for certain female pyschographics. If you dispute that, take a look at George Soros’s current squeeze.
However, the tape also features Trump saying he once tried and failed to have sex with Nancy O’Dell – a respected and beautiful NBC journalist. Hardly the remark of a rapist….that word being apposite in relation to good ol’ Boy Bill Clinton.
I was saying to a friend only last night how odd it seems that the two candidates ‘chosen’ to compete for the White House are the best 350 million citizens can produce. On that basis, candidates are supposed to be less than 1 in a hundred million; but their every utterance and past proves beyond doubt that they’re just a couple of run-of-the-mill power junkies with rather less ruth than most other people.
I’d rather have Trump than Clinton, but I’d rather have neither of them. I’d rather not have élite Parties on both sides of the Pond who just keep on voting for arseholes, but as long as there is big-money support in politics, this will continue to happen.
The key difference between these two gargoyles, however, is that one is The System’s Gal, and the other is The Little Man’s Guy. The latter looks as if he may well have lost the key female vote as a result of these ‘revelations’. But the Farenthold story is irrelevant, vindictive and hypocritical….and shows all the signs of having been pure opportunism on the part of very bad people indeed.
We shall see: quite how Trump is going to continue with Pence as his running mate is hard to envisage. Were it me, I’d fire him off the ticket. But whatever happens, it’s a dirty business, and this morning’s pinched-goblin disapproval of lewd all-male behaviour is pitched at a level roughly in line with a pretty disgusting campaign.
“You think this is bad?” a girlfriend asked me this morning, “Listen John, I’ve heard far worse in the powder room of a Friday night”.
The Slog 