By this unpleasant moment in such a crazy presidential election year, our best advice to the Republican nominee is to go right ahead and proudly proclaim that he’s a sexist pig. To borrow an infamous phrase from the equally despicable Democratic nominee, what difference, at this point, does it make?
In case you’ve been fortunate enough to have been living in a cave without cable television or internet access or even old-fashioned newspaper delivery for the past several days, last Friday saw the release of an 11-year-old outtake from a celebrity gossip show that featured Donald J. Trump boasting about how his reality-show stardom allowed him to not only kiss any attractive woman he might encounter but also to “grab ’em by the p***y.” Even in this crazy election year, and even at this late date in our long cultural decline, when the unregulated cable news networks and the more daring newspapers are quoting the obscenity without the expurgating asterisks, the story had legs that carried it into Sunday’s presidential debate.
After an uncharacteristic apology for his remarks, which he laughably insisted did not reflect who he is, Trump tried to further mitigate the damage by dragging out three women who could plausibly testify that the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s ex-president husband was an even worse cad. During the debate he tried to dodge a question about whether he had actually done what he bragged about, then finally insisted he was merely all talk and no action, but anyone who familiar with the reality show genre should not be surprised that at least four women are now plausibly testifying that he acted exactly like he had bragged about acting. There are also some former beauty pageant contestants testifying that Trump invaded their dressing rooms while they were undressed, which Trump indignantly denies but is nonetheless plausible given that he also bragged about being able to get away with that during one of his frequent appearances on the shock jock Howard Stern’s radio show, and given the countless other eye-popping quotes he’s provided to the tabloid press over the years the sexist pig charge is becoming hard to deny. Trump and his supporters can cast aspersions on the women making the claims, just as they now indignantly note that Clinton and all his former and current supporters did, but that probably won’t help.
This isn’t likely to help Trump with the 60 percent or so of voters who had already reasonably concluded that he doesn’t respect women, but it won’t faze the 35 percent or so of the country that have stubbornly supported his candidacy from the beginning, and we’re quite sure many of them will regard it as a feature rather than a bug. When we tried to warn our fellow Republicans that Trump was a predatory sexist pig we were often told that he was the only bold enough to point out that so was the Democratic nominee’s ex-president husband, which we had to admit was true, even if he seemed the worst one of the candidates to make the case, and the fact that Trump had long been among those libertine Democrats making excuses for the ex-president’s predatory sexist piggery and casting aspersions on his victims proved unconvincing to Trump’s more ardent fans.
We were also told that Trump’s already well-known eye-popping quotes of sexual piggery were proof of how very “politically-incorrect” he was, and whatever the hell that means to someone in favor same-sex bathrooms it was somehow a big selling point at the time, and that it demonstrated what an world-beating “alpha-male” he was, whatever the hell that means in the context of a draft-dodging isolationist with a worrisome adoration of Vladimir Putin. So as far we understood it the theory was that a six-times bankrupt and self-proclaimed “king of debt” was such a brilliant businessman that only he could deal with the nation’s impending insolvency, that only a twice-divorced and boastfully adulterous and lately-married to an illegal-immigrant-nudie-model could defend our nation’s Judeo-Christian culture, and that the sheer audaciousness required to stand on a Republican debate stage and boast about his hand size and you-know-what-that-means and then grab ’em by the genitals would suffice to slay America’s many foreign and domestic enemies, and that at least he’d be having affairs with more glamorous women than that loser ex-president could get. The theory also claimed that only he would get down in the mud with those awful Clintons, where we were told the battle had to be won, but at this point in such a crazy election year it doesn’t seem to be working out.
Which is a shame, because those Clintons truly are at least as awful, quite arguably more so, and we expect that just about any old boring beta-male or even downright female Republican who wasn’t such an undeniably sexist pig and spent all of his or her time talking up the traditional Republican talking points about the sluggish economy and national debt and rapidly deteriorating foreign relations and free market alternatives to Obamacare and all that blather about sex-segregated dressing rooms and other pressing issues facing the nation would be leading by double digits rather than trailing by the six or seven points that Trump is currently losing. At this point that makes no difference, we suppose, but we’ll hold out hope that at some happier point in the future the Republican Party will remember this awful moment in history.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 