…[A]t this writing, post-release of Access Hollywood’s creepy tape of Trump’s twisted sexual meanderings, along with a growing number of women accusing him of unwanted sexual advances, the odds that the Donald is elected president are just slightly above electing a case of canned yams to the highest office in the land.
Preserve, Protect, Grab and Grope the Constitutional Genitals
The above title might not be a bad oath if Donald Trump is elected president, no?
Sex has-no pun-penetrated the politics of our republic since its founding. Whether it be Thomas Jefferson having children with one of his slaves (which was no secret at the time); the numerous affairs of our pre-Civil War presidents; the out-of-wedlock child President Grover Cleveland fathered; the strange and confused start of the twentieth century, which saw the building of a private room off the Oval Office (with an escape door), all for the purpose of enabling Warren Harding’s numerous affairs; the indiscretions of FDR, JFK, Bill Clinton, not to mention the too-numerous-to-mention sex scandals of members of the House, Senate, governorships, and on and on ….
Whether by remark or action, sex is the jelly to politics’ peanut butter. The situation with Trump, however, is different.
And in order to deconstruct why Donald’s remarks were and are (and will be, as undoubtedly we’ll see more vomitous evidence) just that, I must re-nauseate you. A slice of his conversation with former Today show nearly-host Billy Bush caught on a hot mic (emphasis added):
Trump: Yeah, that’s her. With the gold. I better 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.
Bush: Whatever you want.
Trump: Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.
Bush: Uh, yeah, those legs, all I can see is the legs.
Trump: Oh, it looks good.
For men like Trump, it’s much easier to control bits and pieces than it is to engage in a reasonable dialogue with a woman.
President Obama called this (among other things) “insecure.” Others have fallen back on the “immature” excuse. I disagree. Though the remarks may indeed be insecure and immature, they … they’re … How to contextual Mr. Trump’s babble? They’re … fucking … bizarre. Men do not communicate about women — a man’s sexual conquest of a woman — like this. That is, men who are reasonably — just reasonably — well-adjusted when it comes to their sexuality.
Trump continually describes his rant as “locker room” banter. As in, This is what and how men say what they want to say about women. In the locker room.
What locker room is Mr. Trump hanging out in? Is there a locker room in the deviant block at some nearby federal prison of which I’m unaware? A locker room he frequents? I have to say, I’ve been around the block, and I’ve never heard any guy describe the action of “grabbing a woman by the pussy.’ Grabbing? What does that even look like?
Sure, of course, men objectify women, usually when men gather at a man-event. She has a nice ass; she has this; she has that. When it really gets rolling it can get quite childish. And there is no doubt that men who feel the need to overexplain and hyper-boast about their sexual conquests are either insecure about their own sexual performance, insecure about their personal sexuality in general, incredibly immature, or simply confused about where they fit in the gay-to-straight continuum.
Trump took it a step further, as he does. He wasn’t talking about women. He was talking about “it:” Grab ’em by the pussy. It looks good. More remarks that suggest that when Donald sees a woman, he really doesn’t see a woman. He sees a collection of “its.’ He looks at a woman as one may look at a bunch of Lego pieces. A pile of “its.” Things. Bits and pieces. And let’s be honest: For men like Trump it’s much easier to control bits, pieces, “its;’ than it is to engage in a reasonably normal sexual dialogue, verbal and non-verbal, with a woman. It’s easier to address bits than it is to see and contextualize any type of relationship, minor to major, with the entire being. The whole woman.
This explains why he doesn’t really talk about grabbing a particular woman by her genitals. It’s “grab ’em” by the genitals. The piece. The part. He might as well have been talking about grabbing a woman by the appendix, by the gall bladder. Those are pieces of anatomy that don’t have a mouth to verbalize an objection. The appendix doesn’t object, scream, or scowl. It just … is.
And whereas the whole woman speaks, opines, contradicts, adds, and subtracts from conversation and ideas, the “pussy” can’t talk (unless the internal manifestation of what Donald thinks about a woman’s genitals does in fact speak to Donald, wanting him, soliciting … l mean we’re getting into real nut-job territory here).
Regardless of which scenario you believe, the remarks betray what is becoming a truism: Every woman of a particular type Trump interacts with is a sexual employee, including “pussies” and “tits” and “legs.” The body whole is broken down into its component parts. Even if he never hires, talks to at length, or touches them.
Reasonably well-adjusted men speak about the women they know as entire beings; they do not speak about them like the Tooth Fairy in Silence of the Lambs: “It places the lotion in the basket,” etc. This is the psychosexual control that Donald needs to project. It’s an eerie type of an expression of power. That’s why he had to tell Billy Bush that, regarding women, “I don’t even wait. And when you ’re a star, they let you do it.” Or, more salient: “You can do anything.”
See, here’s the heart of the matter: You can’t do anything. You may think you can do anything. You may even get away with doing anything. But there’s a term for this: sexual assault.
Donald Trump cannot make the rudimentary connection that adults (and teens as well) are expected to make: What I think of myself, my power, the perception of my power, how much I bloviate, how many people turn out to see me rant … all of that does not add up to a permission pill that allows me to, without invitation, engage in a kissing contest, grab a vagina, and generally play checkers with the body parts of women I find attractive.
After the story broke, Donald’s running mate, Mike Pence, took a couple of days of meditative mandatory bullshit silence trying to square the circle. He rates his value system as thus: “I’m a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican in that order:” So, obviously, none of what Trump said or did fits in that particular narrative; however, Pence very cleverly avoided this political Rubik’s Cube by … just … kind of … ignoring his My Values Ratings Scale and maintaining his deal with the devil with the hope that he will be president in 2020 or 2050 or whatever calculation he made in allowing this particular piece of hypocrisy to become digestible.
Pence summed up his feelings with the same worn-out cliche we’ve been hearing for over a year: Let Trump be Trump.
Haven’t we been doing that? And how’d that work out?
As we well know by now, it turns out that the less chance than “a case of canned yams” did in fact grab the Presidency. And he may do it again, as utterly mystifying as that may be to some. You may also recall a noteworthy march of women after that election which may or may not have included a lot more participants than his innaguration address. What you think on that topic — and ultimately on January 6th — may depend entirely upon whether or not you were watching television at the time. We have proven we can have a democracy. We have not proven we can have a Democracy with social media. So that’s going to be interesting to watch. If only the results did not matter as much as they do.
