Donald Trump’s ‘Locker Room Talk’ Was the Last Straw for Young Republican and First Time Voters

Donald Trump’s ‘Locker Room Talk’ Was the Last Straw for Young Republican and First Time Voters by Katie Reilly ( Republished with permission of the Author and Time Magazine in which the article first appeared) 

As many have pointed out Donald Trump was not in the Locker Room when those comments were made but at work and Billy Bush was not the only other occupant on the 60 seated bus. The developments of this week have made for a collision between the presidential election and campus conversations about rape culture

The bombshell dropped on the Washington Post’s website just after 4 p.m.: a video of Donald Trump, in 2005, using extremely vulgar language to describe women, detailing his attempt to bed a married woman and bragging that he can grope women because he is Donald Trump, a Reality Star .

When Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. appeared on television this week to say Donald Trump deserves forgiveness for boasting about groping women, what students at the Christian university heard was ambivalence to “an atrocity which plagues college campuses across America.” And when advocates listened to Trump’s dismissal of his lewd comments as “locker room talk,” they recognized a familiar and “deeply concerning” pattern of denial that perpetuates what has become known as rape culture.

Waves of campus protest over sexual assault in recent years have made millennials more aware of the problem, and those young voters, with whom Trump was already struggling, have been among his most vocal detractors over the last week week.A recent Quinnipiac University poll found Trump trailing among likely voters aged 18-34, 48% to 27%. That was before multiple women this week accused Trump of kissing or touching them inappropriately without their consent. Trump denied the accusations as “totally and absolutely false” on Thursday.

Taken together, the developments have made for a collision between the presidential election and the conversations percolating on college campuses across the country.

“Any faculty or staff member at Liberty would be terminated for such comments, and yet when Donald Trump makes them, President Falwell rushes eagerly to his defense—taking the name ‘Liberty University’ with him,” a group of Liberty students said in a statement on Wednesday, denouncing Trump and his association with their school. “‘We’re all sinners,’ Falwell told the media, as if sexual assault is a shoulder-shrugging issue rather than an atrocity which plagues college campuses across America, including our own.”

Sofie Karasek, co-founder of the advocacy group End Rape on Campus, said attempts to discredit or intimidate accusers speak to the “culture of fear” surrounding assault. But she said she’s heartened by the cultural shift, especially among young people, toward taking survivors seriously.

“We have really had a quite a number of moments over the past couple of years where we’ve had a conversation about sexual violence that the country really hasn’t seen before,” she said in an interview, referring to high-profile campus activism. “People have started to pay attention to this issue in ways that they haven’t before.”

A 2014 White House report estimated that one out of every five women is sexually assaulted in college, and hundreds of schools are now under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education for their handling of sexual assault cases. In response, many schools have adopted new policies that require affirmative consent. In 2014, California became the first state to institute a legal requirement for affirmative consent, commonly known as “yes means yes.” New York state followed suit.

Dustin Wahl, executive director of the Liberty University group, Liberty United Against Trump, said Trump’s lewd comments pushed him to finally speak out.

“Honestly it was some of these sexual assault remarks that Trump made recently that made us get together and say, ‘Hey, we need to do something as a group that says we, as a university, don’t want to be associated with Donald Trump,'” Wahl, 21, told TIME. “Tying yourself to a man who promotes and laughs about sexual assault and creepy, awful things like that doesn’t exactly do well to advance the mission of making the teachings of Jesus Christ the center of your life.”

For other young Republicans, Trump’s comments about being able to “do anything” to women proved too much to forgive.

“The Party of Lincoln is not a locker room, and there is no place for people who think it is. Definitely not with her, but not with him,” Alex Smith, the national chairman of the College Republicans, tweeted on Saturday, as other GOP leaders condemned Trump in droves.

During Sunday’s debate against Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, Trump again dismissed his comments as “locker room talk.” Afterward, a student at Washington University in St. Louis, which hosted the debate, confronted Trump surrogate Omarosa Manigault and accused her of “minimizing” the issue. “There are legitimate attacks against Clinton, but they don’t rise to the level of perpetuating rape culture,” the student told Bloomberg.

The Trump campaign has recently sought to limit the damage with female voters by elevating the claims of women who say they were sexually assaulted by former President Bill Clinton. “With rape culture being what it is, these facts are going to shock millennial women,” Trump deputy campaign manager David Bossie told Bloomberg Businessweek. “There will not be a millennial woman who will want to vote for her when these facts come out.”

But while Trump has hailed Bill Clinton’s accusers as “very courageous women,” the Republican nominee has attacked the credibility of the women now accusing him of assault.

Wahl said he thinks the presidency requires “higher standards.”

“I know that misogyny used to be accepted many years ago—more than it is today,” said Wahl, a registered Republican who supported Florida Sen. Marco Rubio in the primary. “We, as a generation, are saying we’re done with that. It’s not acceptable.”

Donald Trump, Groper in Chief ( Republished with permission of the Author Nicholas Kristof and the New York Times)

Donald Trump, Groper in Chief ( Republished with per mission of the Author Nicholas Kristof and the New York Times). This article underwent numerous and extensive fact checking and also  senior and multiple legal opinion by the NY Times before it was published . More women who have been subject to similar and worse treatment by Donald Trump have now come forward .The NY Times is seeking legal opinion on  over two dozen women who signed  non disclosure agreements that  prevents them from coming forward with tales  revealing heinous sexual predator incidents and date rape by Donald Trump. 

Jill Harth’s first concern with Donald Trump’s hands wasn’t that they were small. It’s that they were everywhere.

Harth and her longtime boyfriend were in meetings with Trump to forge a business partnership. “He was relentless,” Harth recalled in an interview, describing how on Dec. 12, 1992, he took the couple to dinner and a club — and then situated himself beside Harth and ran his hands up her skirt, to her crotch. “I didn’t know how to handle it. I would go away from him and say I have to go to the restroom. It was the escape route.”

We’ve all heard of Trump’s unethical or loutish behavior, most recently in a 2005 recording unearthed by The Washington Post on Friday in which he boasts of kissing and groping women. The story that Harth and the boyfriend, George Houraney, tell of their interactions with Trump over six years — including business cheating and attempted rape — shows how that predation worked in practice. “He name-dropped continuously,” Harth said under oath in a deposition in a subsequent lawsuit, “when he wasn’t groping me.”

Harth and Houraney were simply an ordinary Florida couple thrilled that Trump wanted to partner with them. And that’s when the nightmare began. (Trump strongly denies these improprieties.) Anyone thinking about voting for Trump would do well to listen to Houraney and Harth.Continue reading the main story


They were operating a small Florida company called American Dream Enterprise that ran a “calendar girl” beauty contest, an automobile show, a music competition and other events. They had been together for 13 years and were negotiating with Trump to hold the events in his Atlantic City casinos as a way to bring all of them more revenue.

Trump dazzled them with his bold and confident vision of turning their events into huge moneymakers. So, Harth says, she was in a bind familiar to many women: She didn’t want to risk offending a potential partner and benefactor, but neither did she want to be pawed.

The first sign of trouble came the day before the evening groping, in an initial business meeting in which, Harth and Houraney say, Trump spent the time asking about the breasts of the beauty contestants — real or enhanced? — and staring at Harth, then 30. At one point he asked Houraney, “Are you sleeping with her?” Houraney explained awkwardly that they were a couple, but Trump was unfazed.

“You know, there’s going to be a problem,” Trump told Houraney, according to a 1997 sexual harassment lawsuit Harth filed against him. “I’m very attracted to your girlfriend.”

On Jan. 24, 1993, Harth and Houraney went to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida for a contract-signing celebration, bringing along some “calendar girls” at Trump’s request. He offered Harth a tour of the estate and then pulled her into the empty bedroom of his daughter Ivanka.

“I was admiring the decoration, and next thing I know he’s pushing me against a wall and has his hands all over me,” Harth told me. “He was trying to kiss me. I was freaking out.” Harth says she was desperately protesting, and finally managed to run out of the room and find the group again. She and Houraney left rather than stay the night, as they had intended.

Some of the calendar girls stayed, and the sexual harassment lawsuit says Trump showed up uninvited in the predawn hours in the bedroom of one of the young women; she kicked him out but was shaken. When contacted, the woman declined to speak about the experience, and I’m not naming her here.

Trump was then with Marla Maples, who was pregnant that spring with his daughter Tiffany, but this didn’t constrain him. He took an intense interest in the calendar girls, pursuing some and rejecting others, Harth says, adding that he had an aversion to black contestants and made derogatory comments about them.

That year, Harth continued to meet Trump for business — and, she says, he continued to try to jump her. “He’d say, ‘Let’s go in my room, I want to lie down,’ and he’d pull me along. I’d say, ‘I don’t want to lie down,’ and it would turn into a wrestling match. … I remember yelling, ‘I didn’t come here for this.’ He’d say, ‘Just calm down.’”

Harth says that she worried about being raped by a man who weighed twice as much as she did, and at one point she vomited as a defense mechanism. But she says that he was never violent and genuinely seemed to assume sexual interest on her part; often he was playful as she was frightened: “His mind was in a totally different place than mine,” Harth recalls. “He thinks he’s God’s gift to women.”

Harth said in her deposition that all this was “very traumatic,” but she remained cordial because she feared that showing anger would destroy the business relationship and her ambitions of getting ahead. For the same reason, she told me, she did not go to the police to report sexual assault.

This was also a different time, when it was perhaps more accepted for powerful men to prey on young women, when women felt less able to protest. In fairness to Trump, other senior men in politics and business — John Kennedy and Bill Clinton come to mind — also sometimes showed a sense of entitlement toward young women.

In the end, Houraney and Harth used a Trump casino to hold an event that Trump praised in a letter to them. But in 1994, Trump walked away from the relationship and refused to pay what he owed, they say.

Houraney, who owned the events planning company, sued Trump for breach of contract, and the two sides eventually reached a confidential settlement. Harth says Trump paid somewhat more than $100,000. Harth separately had filed her sexual harassment suit, which also alleged attempted rape; she withdrew her suit as a condition for settling the contract dispute, she says.

After the settlement, Houraney and Harth say, Trump reached out to them, inviting them to a party and coming across as so charming that they wondered if he had been transformed. Not long after this, Houraney and Harth, who had married in 1995, had a bitter falling out and divorce.

Houraney and Harth haven’t spoken in years, but they offered almost identical accounts when I interviewed them separately, and their stories match Harth’s deposition and her sexual harassment lawsuit from the time.

During the divorce proceedings, Harth fell into a deep depression, compounded by the death of her brother and the loss of her job at Houraney’s company. At this point Trump began calling her, consoling her on the divorce and offering her a plane ticket to visit him in New York. She was wary but also flattered and practical enough to wonder if he might help her find employment. So in 1998 she began dating him.

I asked her: Why would a woman who accused Trump of attempted rape ever go out with him?

“I was scared, thinking, ‘what am I going to do now?’” she says. “When he called me and tried to work on me again, I was thinking maybe I should give this a try, maybe if he’s still working on me, I should give this rich guy a chance.”

They dated for several months in 1998, when he was separated from Maples, she says. In the end, he was a disappointing boyfriend, always watching television and rarely offering emotional support, she says.

“It was a hard divorce, and I was in a nonstop crying jag,” she recalls. “You know what he was thinking? He wanted me to get a boob job. He made an appointment for me to get a boob job, a doctor in Miami.”

Have you, as a woman, faced treatment like Donald Trump describes? Have you, as a man, talked the way Donald Trump did, or listened to men talking that way? Replies may be referenced in a follow-up post.

Harth says that she left him, finally fed up, and that soon afterward he took up with Melania, his current wife.

Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, responded after this article was published online: “Mr. Trump denies each and every statement made by Ms. Harth.” Indeed, Trump has long offered a version of events that is very different.

In 1996, after Harth alleged sexual harassment, The National Enquirer quoted Trump as having told a close friend: “The truth is that Jill Harth is obsessed with me — and would do everything she could to get into my pants.”

In April of this year, Trump told The Boston Globe that Harth and Houraney had alleged sexual harassment only because their breach-of-contract lawsuit was going nowhere, and he denied as “total nonsense” the idea that he had slipped into the bed of the young woman at Mar-a-Lago. Trump also denied that he had rejected black contestants.

The Trump campaign also released emails from last fall and winter in which Harth, who is now a makeup artist in New York, sends warm wishes and pleads for jobs doing his hair and makeup. “I am definitely Team Trump,” she emailed the campaign a year ago, and at a Trump event in January she was ushered backstage to see him.

I asked her: If he traumatized and cheated you, why email his aides and meet him?

“I thought I was making nice, maybe they’d call me for makeup, maybe I could get some kind of work out of the dude,” Harth told me. “But it was not well thought out. It came back to bite me, and I look like a fool.”

Talking to Harth and Houraney, and reviewing the lawsuits and depositions from the time, convinced me that they’re telling the truth. It helps that many others have testified about Trump behavior that matches elements of the story — the stiffing of business partners, the sexual predation — and that he himself has promoted his own boorishness.

“He’s all about him,” Harth says, summing up what she learned about the man who may be our next president. “He’s a con artist.”

This column has been updated with a response from the Trump campaign.

Donald Trump, Groper in Chief ( Republished with permission of the Author Nicholas Kristof and the New York Times)

Donald Trump, Groper in Chief ( Republished with per mission of the Author Nicholas Kristof and the New York Times). This article underwent numerous and extensive fact checking and also  senior and multiple legal opinion by the NY Times before it was published . More women who have been subject to similar and worse treatment by Donald Trump have now come forward .The NY Times is seeking legal opinion on  over two dozen women who signed  non disclosure agreements that  prevents them from coming forward with tales  revealing heinous sexual predator incidents and date rape by Donald Trump. 

Jill Harth’s first concern with Donald Trump’s hands wasn’t that they were small. It’s that they were everywhere.

Harth and her longtime boyfriend were in meetings with Trump to forge a business partnership. “He was relentless,” Harth recalled in an interview, describing how on Dec. 12, 1992, he took the couple to dinner and a club — and then situated himself beside Harth and ran his hands up her skirt, to her crotch. “I didn’t know how to handle it. I would go away from him and say I have to go to the restroom. It was the escape route.”

We’ve all heard of Trump’s unethical or loutish behavior, most recently in a 2005 recording unearthed by The Washington Post on Friday in which he boasts of kissing and groping women. The story that Harth and the boyfriend, George Houraney, tell of their interactions with Trump over six years — including business cheating and attempted rape — shows how that predation worked in practice. “He name-dropped continuously,” Harth said under oath in a deposition in a subsequent lawsuit, “when he wasn’t groping me.”

Harth and Houraney were simply an ordinary Florida couple thrilled that Trump wanted to partner with them. And that’s when the nightmare began. (Trump strongly denies these improprieties.) Anyone thinking about voting for Trump would do well to listen to Houraney and Harth.Continue reading the main story


They were operating a small Florida company called American Dream Enterprise that ran a “calendar girl” beauty contest, an automobile show, a music competition and other events. They had been together for 13 years and were negotiating with Trump to hold the events in his Atlantic City casinos as a way to bring all of them more revenue.

Trump dazzled them with his bold and confident vision of turning their events into huge moneymakers. So, Harth says, she was in a bind familiar to many women: She didn’t want to risk offending a potential partner and benefactor, but neither did she want to be pawed.

The first sign of trouble came the day before the evening groping, in an initial business meeting in which, Harth and Houraney say, Trump spent the time asking about the breasts of the beauty contestants — real or enhanced? — and staring at Harth, then 30. At one point he asked Houraney, “Are you sleeping with her?” Houraney explained awkwardly that they were a couple, but Trump was unfazed.

“You know, there’s going to be a problem,” Trump told Houraney, according to a 1997 sexual harassment lawsuit Harth filed against him. “I’m very attracted to your girlfriend.”

On Jan. 24, 1993, Harth and Houraney went to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida for a contract-signing celebration, bringing along some “calendar girls” at Trump’s request. He offered Harth a tour of the estate and then pulled her into the empty bedroom of his daughter Ivanka.

“I was admiring the decoration, and next thing I know he’s pushing me against a wall and has his hands all over me,” Harth told me. “He was trying to kiss me. I was freaking out.” Harth says she was desperately protesting, and finally managed to run out of the room and find the group again. She and Houraney left rather than stay the night, as they had intended.

Some of the calendar girls stayed, and the sexual harassment lawsuit says Trump showed up uninvited in the predawn hours in the bedroom of one of the young women; she kicked him out but was shaken. When contacted, the woman declined to speak about the experience, and I’m not naming her here.

Trump was then with Marla Maples, who was pregnant that spring with his daughter Tiffany, but this didn’t constrain him. He took an intense interest in the calendar girls, pursuing some and rejecting others, Harth says, adding that he had an aversion to black contestants and made derogatory comments about them.

That year, Harth continued to meet Trump for business — and, she says, he continued to try to jump her. “He’d say, ‘Let’s go in my room, I want to lie down,’ and he’d pull me along. I’d say, ‘I don’t want to lie down,’ and it would turn into a wrestling match. … I remember yelling, ‘I didn’t come here for this.’ He’d say, ‘Just calm down.’”

Harth says that she worried about being raped by a man who weighed twice as much as she did, and at one point she vomited as a defense mechanism. But she says that he was never violent and genuinely seemed to assume sexual interest on her part; often he was playful as she was frightened: “His mind was in a totally different place than mine,” Harth recalls. “He thinks he’s God’s gift to women.”

Harth said in her deposition that all this was “very traumatic,” but she remained cordial because she feared that showing anger would destroy the business relationship and her ambitions of getting ahead. For the same reason, she told me, she did not go to the police to report sexual assault.

This was also a different time, when it was perhaps more accepted for powerful men to prey on young women, when women felt less able to protest. In fairness to Trump, other senior men in politics and business — John Kennedy and Bill Clinton come to mind — also sometimes showed a sense of entitlement toward young women.

In the end, Houraney and Harth used a Trump casino to hold an event that Trump praised in a letter to them. But in 1994, Trump walked away from the relationship and refused to pay what he owed, they say.

Houraney, who owned the events planning company, sued Trump for breach of contract, and the two sides eventually reached a confidential settlement. Harth says Trump paid somewhat more than $100,000. Harth separately had filed her sexual harassment suit, which also alleged attempted rape; she withdrew her suit as a condition for settling the contract dispute, she says.

After the settlement, Houraney and Harth say, Trump reached out to them, inviting them to a party and coming across as so charming that they wondered if he had been transformed. Not long after this, Houraney and Harth, who had married in 1995, had a bitter falling out and divorce.

Houraney and Harth haven’t spoken in years, but they offered almost identical accounts when I interviewed them separately, and their stories match Harth’s deposition and her sexual harassment lawsuit from the time.

During the divorce proceedings, Harth fell into a deep depression, compounded by the death of her brother and the loss of her job at Houraney’s company. At this point Trump began calling her, consoling her on the divorce and offering her a plane ticket to visit him in New York. She was wary but also flattered and practical enough to wonder if he might help her find employment. So in 1998 she began dating him.

I asked her: Why would a woman who accused Trump of attempted rape ever go out with him?

“I was scared, thinking, ‘what am I going to do now?’” she says. “When he called me and tried to work on me again, I was thinking maybe I should give this a try, maybe if he’s still working on me, I should give this rich guy a chance.”

They dated for several months in 1998, when he was separated from Maples, she says. In the end, he was a disappointing boyfriend, always watching television and rarely offering emotional support, she says.

“It was a hard divorce, and I was in a nonstop crying jag,” she recalls. “You know what he was thinking? He wanted me to get a boob job. He made an appointment for me to get a boob job, a doctor in Miami.”

Have you, as a woman, faced treatment like Donald Trump describes? Have you, as a man, talked the way Donald Trump did, or listened to men talking that way? Replies may be referenced in a follow-up post.

Harth says that she left him, finally fed up, and that soon afterward he took up with Melania, his current wife.

Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, responded after this article was published online: “Mr. Trump denies each and every statement made by Ms. Harth.” Indeed, Trump has long offered a version of events that is very different.

In 1996, after Harth alleged sexual harassment, The National Enquirer quoted Trump as having told a close friend: “The truth is that Jill Harth is obsessed with me — and would do everything she could to get into my pants.”

In April of this year, Trump told The Boston Globe that Harth and Houraney had alleged sexual harassment only because their breach-of-contract lawsuit was going nowhere, and he denied as “total nonsense” the idea that he had slipped into the bed of the young woman at Mar-a-Lago. Trump also denied that he had rejected black contestants.

The Trump campaign also released emails from last fall and winter in which Harth, who is now a makeup artist in New York, sends warm wishes and pleads for jobs doing his hair and makeup. “I am definitely Team Trump,” she emailed the campaign a year ago, and at a Trump event in January she was ushered backstage to see him.

I asked her: If he traumatized and cheated you, why email his aides and meet him?

“I thought I was making nice, maybe they’d call me for makeup, maybe I could get some kind of work out of the dude,” Harth told me. “But it was not well thought out. It came back to bite me, and I look like a fool.”

Talking to Harth and Houraney, and reviewing the lawsuits and depositions from the time, convinced me that they’re telling the truth. It helps that many others have testified about Trump behavior that matches elements of the story — the stiffing of business partners, the sexual predation — and that he himself has promoted his own boorishness.

“He’s all about him,” Harth says, summing up what she learned about the man who may be our next president. “He’s a con artist.”

This column has been updated with a response from the Trump campaign.

Moral Bankruptcy Filed by Donald Trump

Trump Files for Moral Bankruptcy

Over the weekend, Donald J. Trump did what he always does when things go south for him. He walked away. He announced he is not the man at 70 he had been at 59 when he had boasted of sexual assault, and he pledged "to be a better man tomorrow." With that, he effectively declared moral bankruptcy, paying about a dime on the dollar of sincerity.

It was, of course, what Trump had done six times in business, only this time the crisis was not about his finances, but his character. He had been caught talking trash about women. He has been caught boasting about committing the sort of sex crimes transit cops are always on the lookout for. He said he had hit on a married woman soon after he himself had been married. For all of that, he had "regret."


Then, like the angel he thinks he is, he took flight. He left his own body and, looking down, pronounced in his videotaped apology that the Donald J. Trump who said all those repugnant things, the Donald J. Trump who managed to break centuries of newspaper tradition against using certain words, the Donald J. Trump who issued a casting call for the alleged victims of Bill Clinton, the Donald J. Trump who often talked about women in the most despicable terms, the Donald J. Trump who listened to Howard Stern take apart his daughter's physique like she was a Lego creation, the Donald J. Trump who went vile on Megyn Kelly and who has called women "dogs" and "pigs" and who berated a former Miss Universe for gaining weight and who made a tabloid spectacle of his extramarital affair with Marla Maples, that that Donald J. Trump doesn't exist anymore. The man erased his own past.

Anderson Cooper, one of the two moderators at Sunday night's debate in St. Louis, begged to differ. "You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?"

"No, I didn't say that at all," Trump replied. "I don't think you understood what was -- this was locker room talk. I'm not proud of it. I apologize to my family. I apologize to the American people. Certainly I'm not proud of it. But this is locker room talk." And then, forsaking segues and showing contempt for his audience, he veered into the blood-soaked Middle East. "You know, when we have a world where you have ISIS chopping off heads, where you have -- and, frankly, drowning people in steel cages, where you have wars and horrible, horrible sights all over, where you have so many bad things happening, this is like medieval times. We haven't seen anything like this, the carnage all over the world."

Bill Clinton was in the audience. He smiled from time to time, but God only knows what he was thinking. It has been almost two decades since his affair with Monica Lewinsky was revealed and yet the scandal stalks him like a vagrant cat looking for a handout of milk. We have become inured to all this -- the sex, the lying, the slippery definitions of sex, the bouncing tenses -- is, is, was, was -- the tawdriness of it all, the erasure of the line between private and public. Two men in that debate room had much to account for.

Hillary Clinton had the chance to put away Trump. She failed. He was able to pivot, to move on to other subjects, some of which, like her emails, were awkward for her. She did not dwell on the odious tape, 11 years old and stinking with rancid sexism, a dialogue between morons, two men frozen in their adolescence, and she may not have done so because of those alleged Bill Clinton victims sitting in the audience and who had been all over TV just an hour or so earlier. They seemed so pleasant, middle-aged like Hillary. She could not possibly attack them. The whole subject must bring her pain. Best to talk about something else.

And so Trump's diversion worked. He lives to fight another day, to continue to bring embarrassment and shame to the Republican Party and the political careerists who would risk a debacle of a presidency rather than take a stand on principle. Lies spill from Trump's mouth and he exudes bigotry, yet he learned long ago that only suckers pay their debts and take responsibility for what they've done. He simply moves on. If he succeeds this time, then we are not his creditors, but as morally bankrupt as he is.

Moral Bankruptcy Filed by Donald Trump

Trump Files for Moral Bankruptcy

Over the weekend, Donald J. Trump did what he always does when things go south for him. He walked away. He announced he is not the man at 70 he had been at 59 when he had boasted of sexual assault, and he pledged "to be a better man tomorrow." With that, he effectively declared moral bankruptcy, paying about a dime on the dollar of sincerity.

It was, of course, what Trump had done six times in business, only this time the crisis was not about his finances, but his character. He had been caught talking trash about women. He has been caught boasting about committing the sort of sex crimes transit cops are always on the lookout for. He said he had hit on a married woman soon after he himself had been married. For all of that, he had "regret."


Then, like the angel he thinks he is, he took flight. He left his own body and, looking down, pronounced in his videotaped apology that the Donald J. Trump who said all those repugnant things, the Donald J. Trump who managed to break centuries of newspaper tradition against using certain words, the Donald J. Trump who issued a casting call for the alleged victims of Bill Clinton, the Donald J. Trump who often talked about women in the most despicable terms, the Donald J. Trump who listened to Howard Stern take apart his daughter's physique like she was a Lego creation, the Donald J. Trump who went vile on Megyn Kelly and who has called women "dogs" and "pigs" and who berated a former Miss Universe for gaining weight and who made a tabloid spectacle of his extramarital affair with Marla Maples, that that Donald J. Trump doesn't exist anymore. The man erased his own past.

Anderson Cooper, one of the two moderators at Sunday night's debate in St. Louis, begged to differ. "You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?"

"No, I didn't say that at all," Trump replied. "I don't think you understood what was -- this was locker room talk. I'm not proud of it. I apologize to my family. I apologize to the American people. Certainly I'm not proud of it. But this is locker room talk." And then, forsaking segues and showing contempt for his audience, he veered into the blood-soaked Middle East. "You know, when we have a world where you have ISIS chopping off heads, where you have -- and, frankly, drowning people in steel cages, where you have wars and horrible, horrible sights all over, where you have so many bad things happening, this is like medieval times. We haven't seen anything like this, the carnage all over the world."

Bill Clinton was in the audience. He smiled from time to time, but God only knows what he was thinking. It has been almost two decades since his affair with Monica Lewinsky was revealed and yet the scandal stalks him like a vagrant cat looking for a handout of milk. We have become inured to all this -- the sex, the lying, the slippery definitions of sex, the bouncing tenses -- is, is, was, was -- the tawdriness of it all, the erasure of the line between private and public. Two men in that debate room had much to account for.

Hillary Clinton had the chance to put away Trump. She failed. He was able to pivot, to move on to other subjects, some of which, like her emails, were awkward for her. She did not dwell on the odious tape, 11 years old and stinking with rancid sexism, a dialogue between morons, two men frozen in their adolescence, and she may not have done so because of those alleged Bill Clinton victims sitting in the audience and who had been all over TV just an hour or so earlier. They seemed so pleasant, middle-aged like Hillary. She could not possibly attack them. The whole subject must bring her pain. Best to talk about something else.

And so Trump's diversion worked. He lives to fight another day, to continue to bring embarrassment and shame to the Republican Party and the political careerists who would risk a debacle of a presidency rather than take a stand on principle. Lies spill from Trump's mouth and he exudes bigotry, yet he learned long ago that only suckers pay their debts and take responsibility for what they've done. He simply moves on. If he succeeds this time, then we are not his creditors, but as morally bankrupt as he is.