Some reflections from an unapologetic Rip Roaring Zionist, an Urban Scavenger for the unexpected. Stephen Darori (#stephendarori,@stephendarori) is a Finance and Marketing Whiz,Social Media Publicist, Strategist ,Investor. Journalist,Author, Editor & Prolific Blogger.
More allegations, questionable Trump comments on women surface As Republican nominee Donald Trump’s campaign tries to move past a recently released 2005 tape of his lewd remarks about women, more video of similar comments made by Trump is surfacing.
In an “Entertainment Tonight” Christmas feature in 1992, Trump looked at a group of young girls and said he would be dating one of them in ten years. At the time, Trump would have been 46 years old.
In the clip, Trump asks one of the girls if she’s “going up the escalator.” When the girl replies, “yeah,” Trump turns to the camera and says: “I am going to be dating her in 10 years. Can you believe it?”
It is not the first time Trump has made reference to his interest in dating much younger women.
In 2006, he made a similar comment about his own daughter, Ivanka Trump: “I’ve said that if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her,” Trump said.
The issue ballooned when 2005 video from “Access Hollywood” revealed lewd banter between Trump and entertainment reporter Billy Bush, who has since been suspended by NBC.
The GOP candidate has defended his remarks as “locker room banter,” apologizing for his suggestion that “when you’re a star” you can “grab [women] by the p****.” “You can do anything,” as he said in the 2005 tape.
In Sunday’s debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump insisted it was all “just words” and that he had never groped a woman.
But at least three women have now come forward to contest that dismissal, telling news organizations he groped them in personal encounters at his home, at Trump Tower in New York, and on a commercial flight. Trump’s campaign said late Wednesday that it would file a lawsuit against the New York Times over a story published by the paper earlier that day, with the accounts of two of the women.
Also Wednesday, People magazine published an account by one of its reporters who recalled Trump “pushing me against the wall, and forcing his tongue down my throat” during an interview session at his Mar-a-Lago home. The alleged attack, according to reporter Natasha Stoynoff, came as Trump’s wife Melania, who was then pregnant, changed into a different outfit in another room before they continued their joint interview. The encounter was in 2005, the same year the now-infamous encounter with Billy Bush was recorded, according to Stoynoff.
Donald Trump on “Entertainment Tonight” in 1992.
Meanwhile, a former beauty queen is confirming Donald Trump’s own words about walking into pageant dressing rooms unannounced, following recently resurfaced audio recordings where Trump boasted about his ability to do so as the owner of the Miss USA pageant. Play VIDEO Former Miss Arizona: Trump walked in on "half naked" contestants in dressing room
Tasha Dixon, who competed as Miss Arizona in 2001, told CBS’ Los Angeles station that the GOP nominee had entered dressing rooms while her fellow contestants were “half naked.”
“Our first introduction to him was when we were at the dress rehearsal and half naked changing into our bikinis,” Dixon said in an interview with KCAL 9. “He just came strolling right in. There was no second to put a robe on or any sort of clothing or anything. Some girls were topless. Other girls were naked.”
In audio from Howard Stern’s radio show in 2005, Trump could be heard discussing how he would use his position of power in the pageants to peek at women while they were undressed.
“I’ll go backstage before a show and everyone’s getting dressed and ready and everything else. And you know, no men are anywhere. And I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant. And therefore, I’m inspecting it. You know I’m inspecting it. I want to make sure everything is good,” Trump told Stern at the time. “You know they’re standing there with no clothes. Is everybody OK? And you see these incredible looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that.”
More allegations, questionable Trump comments on women surface As Republican nominee Donald Trump’s campaign tries to move past a recently released 2005 tape of his lewd remarks about women, more video of similar comments made by Trump is surfacing.
In an “Entertainment Tonight” Christmas feature in 1992, Trump looked at a group of young girls and said he would be dating one of them in ten years. At the time, Trump would have been 46 years old.
In the clip, Trump asks one of the girls if she’s “going up the escalator.” When the girl replies, “yeah,” Trump turns to the camera and says: “I am going to be dating her in 10 years. Can you believe it?”
It is not the first time Trump has made reference to his interest in dating much younger women.
In 2006, he made a similar comment about his own daughter, Ivanka Trump: “I’ve said that if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her,” Trump said.
The issue ballooned when 2005 video from “Access Hollywood” revealed lewd banter between Trump and entertainment reporter Billy Bush, who has since been suspended by NBC.
The GOP candidate has defended his remarks as “locker room banter,” apologizing for his suggestion that “when you’re a star” you can “grab [women] by the p****.” “You can do anything,” as he said in the 2005 tape.
In Sunday’s debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump insisted it was all “just words” and that he had never groped a woman.
But at least three women have now come forward to contest that dismissal, telling news organizations he groped them in personal encounters at his home, at Trump Tower in New York, and on a commercial flight. Trump’s campaign said late Wednesday that it would file a lawsuit against the New York Times over a story published by the paper earlier that day, with the accounts of two of the women.
Also Wednesday, People magazine published an account by one of its reporters who recalled Trump “pushing me against the wall, and forcing his tongue down my throat” during an interview session at his Mar-a-Lago home. The alleged attack, according to reporter Natasha Stoynoff, came as Trump’s wife Melania, who was then pregnant, changed into a different outfit in another room before they continued their joint interview. The encounter was in 2005, the same year the now-infamous encounter with Billy Bush was recorded, according to Stoynoff.
Donald Trump on “Entertainment Tonight” in 1992.
Meanwhile, a former beauty queen is confirming Donald Trump’s own words about walking into pageant dressing rooms unannounced, following recently resurfaced audio recordings where Trump boasted about his ability to do so as the owner of the Miss USA pageant. Play VIDEO Former Miss Arizona: Trump walked in on "half naked" contestants in dressing room
Tasha Dixon, who competed as Miss Arizona in 2001, told CBS’ Los Angeles station that the GOP nominee had entered dressing rooms while her fellow contestants were “half naked.”
“Our first introduction to him was when we were at the dress rehearsal and half naked changing into our bikinis,” Dixon said in an interview with KCAL 9. “He just came strolling right in. There was no second to put a robe on or any sort of clothing or anything. Some girls were topless. Other girls were naked.”
In audio from Howard Stern’s radio show in 2005, Trump could be heard discussing how he would use his position of power in the pageants to peek at women while they were undressed.
“I’ll go backstage before a show and everyone’s getting dressed and ready and everything else. And you know, no men are anywhere. And I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant. And therefore, I’m inspecting it. You know I’m inspecting it. I want to make sure everything is good,” Trump told Stern at the time. “You know they’re standing there with no clothes. Is everybody OK? And you see these incredible looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that.”
During an extended monologue on her TBS show Full Frontal on Monday evening, Samantha Bee described Donald Trump and Billy Bush as “two drooling hyenas” and “two leering dildos.” She referred to the vehicle that carried the pair, in that now iconically infamous Access Hollywood video, as “the adolescent boner bus” and, later, “Donny and Billy’s fun-time pussy wagon.” She compared Bush’s deference to Trump to George W. Bush’s deference to Dick Cheney, and then referred to both of the latter as “a bullying, cold-hearted alpha male who was completely in charge.”
Later, in response to the non-apology apology that Trump read dutifully off of a Teleprompter, Bee said, “I’m sorry, you were handing out words like a first-grader with a head injury.”
This … was funny! It was, many of Bee’s viewers would likely agree, correct! But it was also a lot of empty vitriol, even for a comedian who’s known for channeling rage into lols. With her “leering dildo” burns, the host was effectively summoning the disgust that many women—indeed, many sentient humans—felt upon hearing the Republican presidential candidate casually brag about his sexual predations to a guy who verbally high-fived him in response. But she was also compounding the frustration as much as offering catharsis from it. Bee, in dismissing Trump and Bush as “drooling hyenas,” was living in the tenor of this anger-reveling election, meeting the Trump revelations not with the Democrats’ borrowed motto—“when they go low, we go high”—but rather with the opposite logic: “When they go low, we limbo right along with them.”Bee met “when they go low, we go high” with the opposite logic: “When they go low, we limbo right along.”
Bee’s job, certainly, is not to reflect campaign-driven talking points. Nor is it to model civility. Nor is it, officially, to do anything beyond making viewers love her or hate her and thereby watch her, week after week. Full Frontal, though, is one of the many current late-night shows—hybrids of comedy and commentary—that strive to live in the legacy of the Jon Stewart-helmed Daily Show: to use humor, asThe Wrap put it, to “become part of the cultural conversation.” Full Frontal set as its challenge from the outset, Rebecca Traister reported, to parse the delicate lines “between horror and humor, between outrage and hilarity,” provoking not just laughter, but action and impact. And Full Frontal has been for the most part extremely effective at striking that balance, via segments that marry the best ofinvestigative journalism with the worst of cathartic indignation. RELATED STORY
Samantha Bee: The Natural Heir to Jon Stewart
Monday’s show, though, featured very little of either. It offered, for the most part, a string of invective that simply reiterated what anyone who had paid attention as “Pussyghazi” played out over the weekend was already well aware of: that “pussy,” the word, was not the problem; that bragging about sexual predation was; that it’s extremely hypocritical for GOP lawmakers who endorsed a known racist/misogynist/demagogue to decide that the Access Hollywood revelations represented the thing that, in the end, would make the candidate unworthy of the presidency. Mostly, though, the episode offered anger—anger that didn’t attempt to temper itself under the guise of “satire.” Anger that seethed. Anger that directed itself at the “leering dildos” who presented themselves on the tapes. Anger that trusted in itself as its own end.
It had reason to do that trusting. “Samantha Bee Takes Down ‘Leering Dildo’ Donald Trump ‘Like a Bitch,’” The Daily Beast summed it up, appreciatively. “Samantha Bee pulled no punches,” the Huffington Post countered. It’s worth wondering, though, what else is accomplished when even comedy—even the thing meant to give us a little levity among all the ugliness—gets angry. The cliche about Trump is that he’s extremely hard to parody precisely because he so neatly parodies himself. There’s no work the comedian can add to make him funnier, no insight that can be added to make him more cartoonish or outlandish than he already is. But the corollary to all that might be that Trump also makes comedy hard precisely because comedy demands a certain emotional detachment on the part of both the comedian and the audience. You have to distance yourself from something to be able to laugh at it; and Trump, at this point, is very, very hard to laugh at.
It’s sometimes said about Trevor Noah, by way of explaining why he doesn’t enjoy the same rabid enthusiasm that his predecessor did, that he’s a little too cold, a little too detached, a little too balanced to endear himself fully to partisan viewers. Noah, the South African, sees American politics with a global perspective, but doesn’t grok the outrage—and often, with the rise of Trump, the full-on rage—that so many people on the left feel about the current state of the world. You could think of Noah, Slate’s Willa Paskin argued, as “a Potemkin Jon Stewart, someone smooth and ingratiating who is reaching for unconverted viewers, instead of an inveterate political satirist preaching to the deeply informed.”
Bee may have just illustrated the opposite problem: Heat can be just as challenging as coolness. It is very, very hard to do satire when you are angry. It’s very hard to do, actually, much of anything when you’re angry. Bee has acknowledged that perfectly in previous episodes of Full Frontal (“Is it okay if, instead of making jokes, I just scream for seven minutes until we cut to commercial?” she asked after the Orlando shootings). But while her anger about Trump may be similarly righteous, it’s an open question how productive it is. In a previous episode, she referred to Trump as “a tangerine-tinted trash can fire,” which is funny but not much more than that. Audiences may look for catharsis in their comedy, but they also look for sense-making—for jokes that don’t simply mock the world, but help to explain it. Anger is one way of making sense of things. Very rarely, however, is it a terribly good one.
Basest instincts: Donald Trump’s apology sounds like a rapist saying “she asked for it” Will Trump’s lewd comments and "apology" even hurt him with his racist, misogynist "basket of deplorables"?
The 2016 Republican presidential campaign is an Adam Sandler comedy. Donald Trump is the lead character — an amalgam of Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison and any number of others.
During the Republican primaries, Donald Trump talked about the size of his penis, suggested that Marco Rubio urinated on himself during a debate, made allusions to menstruation, and implied that Mitt Romney would perform fellatio on him if so demanded.
On Friday, the Republican presidential campaign turned scatological comedy movie would crescendo to a new low. The Washington Post released a recording of Donald Trump during a 2005 taping of the TV show “Access Hollywood.”
There, alongside Billy Bush, Donald Trump was shown saying:
“I’ve got to use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her. You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything…Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Here, Trump is speaking — joking, he would try to claim — about sexually assaulting a woman because he believes that he is empowered to do so by his stardom, fame, and inherited money.
Such comments should further imperil Trump’s presidential candidacy with suburban white women and college educated white voters—two groups that his brand of Right-wing faux populism, assault on normal politics, bullying behavior, ill-temperament, and hostility to “political correctness” have, to this point, alienated.
However, the 2016 presidential race is an outlier where anything seems possible and many of the standing rules and norms of modern American politics have been broken.
Could Donald Trump’s most recent instance of crude behavior actually boost his support?
To wit: There is recent research in the journal of Political Psychology which suggests that disrespectful behavior may actually be rewarded by some voters.
We already know that Trump is an avatar and idol for the “basket of deplorables” that have flocked to his banner. As demonstrated by numerous public opinion polls and other research, Trump’s voters are racists, sexists, misogynists, nativists, and bigots. They are compelled to Trump because he rejects “political correctness.”
Or alternatively stated: Trump’s voters have little to no respect for non-whites, Muslims, women, gays and lesbians, or any other group that they feel are their social and political inferiors. Trumpthuglicans are authoritarians possessed of social dominance behavior.
Trump’s voters do not support him because of his policy expertise or experience. No. Trump is a celebrity and supposedly “successful” businessman that they can live vicariously through as he blows up the system and demeans their fellow Americans.
After Trump’s statements about grabbing the genitals of unwilling women grew into a cacophony of condemnation across the American news media, he issued two statements. The first was contrite. The second was far more damaging.
In the latter, Donald Trump sounded like someone reading a forced confession with a gun pointed at the ear of his or her head.
Trump said: “Hillary Clinton and her kind have run our country into the ground. I’ve said some foolish things, but there’s a big difference between the words and actions of other people. Bill Clinton has actually abused women, and Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed and intimidated his victims.”
This so-called “apology” has the tone of a convicted rapist admitting to the crime but then saying that “she asked for it.”
I have written many essays about Donald Trump. And I return to a basic question: How can any decent person back Donald Trump? They cannot. Any Republicans or Independents who support Trump are (again) demonstrating that his “basket of deplorables” is far larger than Clinton so modesty suggested several weeks ago.
The American presidency is not a comedy skit or a stage for frat boy humor. The adults — if any remain in the Republican Party — need to send the crass man-child Donald Trump back to his room before he embarrasses them (and himself) anymore.
