You might say the recording crosses the line from “extremely lewd” to “extremely disturbing” about a minute in, when Trump starts boasting that when he’s attracted to women, he just starts kissing them. “I don’t even wait,” he says. “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” he says, including, apparently, grabbing the most private part of a woman’s anatomy.
His thinking is ingenious in how hard it works to justify itself, how it flatters Trump: Take first, then claim they let you; explain it all with an inflated notion of your desirability and celebrity. Hovering underneath all that supposed desire is contempt: These women are so stupid, they’ll let me do anything. If there were any doubt that Trump is objectifying a young soap opera star he is about to meet, Trump’s pronoun choice, to Bush, as he sees and describes her, says it all: “It looks good.” It. Not she. It. |
