Once again the wheels seem to be coming off the Trump wagon, but so many times what was believed to be a catastrophe barely ruffled his base; so, it’s hard to believe this time with the lambasted sexist comments made during an hot mic Access Hollywood interview will be any different.
One only has to look at a lifetime of comments Trump has made in Howard Stern interviews or in his own writings to know that he has definitely earned the feminist pejorative of “chauvinist pig.” There have been so many porcine grunts during this campaign season that it hardly seems surprising to hear this full throttle oink. The most surprising thing to me has always been that Evangelicals have viewed the election of this crude, lewd loudmouth as some necessity for the greater good. Even worse, they seem to be buying into his excuse that this is just locker room talk.
Locker room talk—yeah, if you’re a freshman out of earshot of the coach and the upperclassmen who really don’t want to be associated with you. Sure, they’ve put up with you bull and braggadocio because your family is so willing to provide pizza and equipment, but rest assured, behind your back they are making fun of all your pathetic attempts to impress and be one of the guys.
Equating Trump with a freshman male is probably wrong. There are a lot of decent, mature ninth graders who don’t deserve such denigration, but it brings up a very real point. This is a man who seems arrested in eternal adolescence. He has avoided every unpleasant situation in life from Viet Nam to paying bills by gaming the system and leaving the burden to someone else. If you have never had to suffer the consequences for your actions, it becomes easy to assume that everyone, especially women you find attractive, are mere pawns to be used at your discretion.
Every woman I know felt her skin crawl when she heard those comments from the bus because every woman has encountered men like that. Fortunately for most of us, the garden variety creeps don’t have wealth, power, and a vindictive streak a mile long.
Locker room talk ends when you’re out of the locker room—in other words, when you become an adult. As an adolescent who still experience females in abstract, women may not be whole beings. As a grownup, when most men imagine their sister, wife or daughter having to deal with a man like that, they are livid. One would only hope that Trump would feel the same disgust if someone addressed Ivanka like that. However, hearing him praise her beauty as “someone I’d probably be dating of she wasn’t my daughter,” is creepy in itself. It certainly doesn’t evoke any of the warm, loving memories I have of my own father.
There has been a recent barrage of women coming forward to indicate that his crude comments might as well have been a play-by-play of his actual behavior toward them. In a typically adolescent manner, he doesn’t see the backlash as a direct result of his own bad behavior. It is a vast conspiracy of the Clintons, the media, and anyone who sees him as unfit.
There were reasons that the founding fathers set minimum age limits to run for office. They believed that with age came experience, wisdom, compassion—all the qualities we need to inspire us in these troubling times, all the qualities that make us want to our best selves. The 18th Century was a rigorous time marked by profound personal sacrifice for the benefit of the whole society. It was almost impossible to live to 35 or 40 without developing these qualities. Now, clearly, some people can reach their golden years still residing in Never Never Land. And apparently there is a strong contingency of Lost Boys who have no intention of coming back into the real world. It is easier to create your own facts, believe every failure is someone else’s fault, refuse to see that compromise is part to what keeps the world spinning, and that graciously learning to accept failure takes more strength of character than winning at any cost.
Hillary was partially right. There are a few deplorables in the basket. But let’s look at the real problem. It is a mainly a basket of immaturables.