The New York Times’
front-page article last Saturday on Donald J. Trump’s dealings with women
forced me into a weekend of self-examination. As much as I support Trump, this
isn’t a cult of personality. He’s not Mao, Kim Jong-un or L. Ron Hubbard. We
can like our candidates, but still acknowledge their flaws. No one’s perfect.
I admit there are
some things about Trump that give me pause. I’m sure these will come out
eventually, so I’m just going to list them.
First — and this is
corroborated by five contemporaneous witnesses — in 1978, Trump
violently raped Juanita Broaddrick in a Little Rock, Arkansas, hotel room,
then, as he was leaving, looked at her bloody lip and said, “Better put some
ice on that” — oh wait, I’m terribly sorry. Did I say Trump? I didn’t mean
Trump, I meant Bill Clinton.
Hang on — here we go!
Knowing full well about Bill Clinton’s proclivity to sexually assault women, about
three weeks after that rape, Trump cornered Broaddrick at a party and said,
pointedly, “I just want you to know how much Bill and I appreciate the things
you do for him. Do you understand? Everything you do.”
No! My mistake! That
wasn’t Trump either. That was Hillary Clinton. … But this next one I’m sure
was Trump.
In the early 1990s,
Trump invited a young female staffer to his hotel room at the Excelsior Hotel
in Little Rock, dropped his pants and said, “Kiss it” — WAIT A SECOND!
I don’t know how this
keeps happening. That was Bill Clinton. Please bear with me — it’s late
at night and my notes are jumbled.
As CEO of an
organization, Trump had a female employee, just months out of her teens,
perform oral sex on him while he made business calls. That girl’s name was
Monica Lewin– No! Wrong again! That was Bill Clinton, too! Please don’t
stop reading. Let me find my Trump notes …
What I meant was that
Trump was the one who later smeared that girl as a delusional stalker. She may
have volunteered for the sex — at around age 20 — but Monica Lewinsky didn’t
volunteer to be slandered! And yet this fiend, this user-of-women, this
retrograde misogynist, Donald Trump, deployed his journalist friends, like
Sidney Blumenthal, to spread rumors that Monica was a stalker, trying to
blackmail the president.
Oh, boy–this is
embarrassing. This must seem very sloppy. That wasn’t Trump either; it was
Hillary Clinton.
There must be
something here that was Trump … Here! I have one.
When an attractive
woman desperately in need of a job came to Trump’s office in 1993, instead of
helping, he lunged at her, kissed her on the mouth, grabbed her breast and
put her hand on his genitals. He later told a mistress that the claim was
absurd because the woman, Kathleen Willey, had such small breasts.
Uh-oh — you’re not
going to believe this, but — yep, that was Bill Clinton.
This one, I’m sure
was Trump. In January 1992, Trump went on “60 Minutes” to slime nightclub
singer Gennifer Flowers, knowing full well she was telling the truth. He
implied she belonged in a loony bin, telling millions of viewers “every time
she called, distraught … she said sort of wacky things.”
Dammit! I don’t know
how this keeps happening. That wasn’t Trump! That was Hillary, smearing one
of her husband’s sexual conquests.
Let’s just go back to
the Times’ story, based on months of investigation and interviews with hundreds
of women. I’ll give it to you straight: When Trump was at the New York Military
Academy as a teenager, one person who knew him said — and this is corroborated
by two other witnesses: “Donald was extremely sensitive to whether or not
the women he invited to campus were pretty.”
I almost threw up
reading that. I am physically ill.