Tag: Trump

The Economist takes a look at how Trump has been defining deviancy downwards.

HOW do people learn to accept what they once found unacceptable? In 1927 Frederic Thrasher published a “natural history” of 1,313 gangs in Chicago. Each of them lived by a set of unwritten rules that had come to make sense to gang members but were still repellent to everyone else. So it is with Donald Trump and many of his supporters. By normalising attitudes that, before he came along, were publicly taboo, Mr Trump has taken a knuckle-duster to American political culture.

Aka he’s moved the Overton window.

I do think that’s true, and it’s a huge part of why I (and many others) detest him so much. He’s doing terrible damage, every minute of every day, and it’s damage that won’t just slough off as soon as the election is over. We don’t need this. Nobody needs this. Nobody needs a mean, vulgar, ignorant, greedy bully of a man modeling shit behavior in front of howling mobs for months on end. Nobody needs a bad man getting all this adoring attention. It’s bad for us, the way chocolate is bad for dogs – it doesn’t just spoil our appetite for dinner, it poisons our whole system.

The recording of him boasting about grabbing women “by the pussy”, long before he was a candidate, was unpleasant enough. More worrying still has been the insistence by many Trump supporters that his behaviour was normal.

Worrying but not the least bit surprising. After more than five years of being one of the targets of an organized group of Trump-like bullies, and of learning more about that whole culture or movement or whatever you want to call it – I can’t possibly be surprised at the fact that lots of people think Trump’s behavior is both normal and admirable.

Mercifully, America is not about to riot on November 9th. But the reasons have less to do with the state’s power to enforce the letter of the law than with the unwritten rules that American democracy thrives on. It is these that Mr Trump is trampling over—and which Americans need to defend.

If this seems exaggerated, consider what Mr Trump has introduced to political discourse this year: the idea that Muslims must be banned from entering the country; that a federal judge born of Mexican parents was unfit to preside over a case involving Mr Trump; that a reporter’s disability is ripe for mockery; that “crooked” Mrs Clinton must be watched lest she steal the election. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote that when many bad things happen at once, societies define deviancy down, until the list of what is unacceptable is short enough to be manageable. When parents wonder if a presidential debate is suitable for their children to watch, Mr Trump’s promise to build a wall on the Mexican border no longer seems quite so shocking.

That may be Trump’s one skill – performing so many outrages that he gets us to sideline some of them while we try to deal with the worst/most recent.

The list of what’s unacceptable is way too long.

Another woman speaks up about an encounter with Trump years ago. This one is an actual example of “grab her by the pussy.”

Kristin Anderson was deep in conversation with acquaintances at a crowded Manhattan nightspot and did not notice the figure to her right on a red velvet couch — until, she recalls, his fingers slid under her miniskirt, moved up her inner thigh, and touched her vagina through her underwear.

Sorry to interrupt, but I wish people would get the wording right. You can’t touch someone “on” the vagina – it’s not an “on” kind of thing, especially not through underwear. It’s an in, not an on. Genitals, crotch, vulva – even pussy, but not on the vagina.

Anderson shoved the hand away, fled the couch and turned to take her first good look at the man who had touched her, she said.

She recognized him as Donald Trump: “He was so distinctive looking — with the hair and the eyebrows. I mean, nobody else has those eyebrows.”

At the time of the incident, which Anderson said took place in the early 1990s, she was in her early twenties, trying to make it as a model. She was paying the bills by working as a makeup artist and restaurant hostess. Trump was a big celebrity whose face was all over the tabloids and a regular presence on the New York club scene.

The episode, as Anderson described it, lasted no more than 30 seconds. Anderson said she and her companions were “very grossed out and weirded out” and thought, “Okay, Donald is gross. We all know he’s gross. Let’s just move on.”

So they did. She told people about it over the years, but didn’t officially report it to anyone.

Anderson, who said she doesn’t support Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton, did not initially approach The Post. A reporter contacted her after hearing her story from a person who knew of it, and she spent several days trying to decide whether to go public.

Anderson’s decision to do so follows last week’s disclosure by The Washington Post of a 2005 video in which Trump boasted to “Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush that his celebrity gave him the ability to grab women “by the p—y. You can do anything.”

Trump insisted that his comments were “just words” and dismissed them as “locker room banter.”

Pressed about them in Sunday night’s debate against Clinton, Trump said that he had never done the things he had talked about, which would constitute sexual assault.

What Anderson described, however, is consistent with the behavior Trump described on the video.

It’s strikingly consistent with it. It’s not the more usual kind of harassment or assault – grabbing the more available, sticking-out bits. It’s actually “grabbing her by the pussy” and it’s startlingly crude and invasive.

“It wasn’t a sexual come-on. I don’t know why he did it. It was like just to prove that he could do it, and nothing would happen,” Anderson said. “There was zero conversation. We didn’t even really look at each other. It was very random, very nonchalant on his part.”

It was an expression of contempt, basically.

I feel like Michelle Obama, all over again. Can you believe this terrible, trashy guy is a candidate for president?

Anderson said that she was particularly disturbed by the way the video caught Trump and Bush, who were aboard a bus, crudely discussing Arianne Zucker, an actress they spotted waiting to escort them onto a soap-opera set. Bush has since been suspended from his subsequent job as co-host of NBC’s “Today” show, and the network is reportedly negotiating his departure.

“I watched this woman — who could have been me; it could have been anyone — walk in and shake his hand,” Anderson said. “That was just nauseating, because she has no idea what she was walking into, and what could possibly happen to her. And that’s just wrong.”

Yes it is.

As Anderson agonized over whether to tell her story publicly, the New York Times reported the accounts of two women who said that Trump had groped them, and a People magazine reporter wrote a first-person story claiming that in December 2005 Trump pushed her against a wall and began “forcing his tongue down my throat.”

That decided it for Anderson.

“It’s a sexual assault issue, and it’s something that I’ve kept quiet on my own,” Anderson said. “And I’ve always kept quiet. And why should I keep quiet? Actually, all of the women should speak up, and if you’re touched inappropriately, tell somebody and speak up about it. Actually go to the authorities and press some charges. It’s not okay.”

…

Only in recent years did the incident with Trump start to take on larger meaning to her, Anderson said.

“Every once in awhile it [would] come up in a ‘remember the time when . . .’ conversation and we [would] have a moment of disgust,” she wrote in an email to a Post reporter as she considered going on the record. “It didn’t cross my mind then that this person was a predator.”

Now, she said, she sees that sort of behavior as a “gateway” to something worse.

A stranger “sort of groping you on the side, on the sly, like you’re some kind of stuffed animal on the couch. That’s really not okay, and it opens the door for much worse behavior on [his] part and for the girl, allowing worse things to happen to them because they feel that it’s inconsequential.”

“It’s really not nothing, and it sends an awful message to women that they’re nothing,” she added.

We see you, Donald. We see you.

Oh god. We dive ever deeper into the sewer. Fox Business Network anchor Lou Dobbs tweeted the address and phone number of Jessica Leeds this morning.

I cannot wait for this to be over. It’s a little sliver of fascist hell all by itself, and we won’t recover from it in a hurry. This terrible human being is trashing the place.

The Times reports:

Donald J. Trump pushed back aggressively on Thursday against what he called “false smears” from women who claimed unwanted advances, seeking to stabilize his campaign as Michelle Obama declared “it doesn’t matter what party you belong to, no woman deserves to be treated this way.”

The dueling addresses showed how the race had been galvanized by reports of Mr. Trump’s behavior with the election less than four weeks away, with Mr. Trump calling the disclosures a “horror show of lies” as they increasingly consumed his campaign.

He’s projecting, as he always does. The horror show is coming from inside the house.

“Anyone who challenges them is deemed a racist, a sexist, a xenophobe and morally deformed,” he said of the news media, repeatedly singling out the “failing New York Times.”

No, Donald – that’s you. You’re deemed those things because of the words that come out of your mouth.

At a rally Thursday in New Hampshire, Mrs. Obama, the first lady, ripped into Mr. Trump and said that his treatment of women was a sign of weakness. “We simply cannot endure this or expose our children to it any longer, not for another minute let alone another four years,” Mrs. Obama said.

She added, “Now is the time to stand up and say enough is enough.”

She’s profoundly shaken by the whole thing, as so many of us are. It’s not as if we focus on the sexism and racism and bullying because we want Trump to lose for some other, hidden, venal reason. The sexism and racism and bullying are the reasons. There are additional reasons, because Trump is generous that way, but they’re all of the same kind.

Jerry Falwell Jr., a prominent evangelical Christian leader who is the president of Liberty University in Virginia, said that he did not believe the allegations made against Mr. Trump and defended his character.

“That videotape that was released last week, I think there’s a different Donald Trump now,” Mr. Falwell told CNN. “Unlike Hillary, I believe all people are redeemable, and I believe his life has changed.”

I think most people are redeemable – but people with certain personality disorders maybe not. I think Trump is a wrong’un. I don’t think there’s anything in him that could make him change.

NPR has a transcript of a Trump speech today. I don’t watch his rallies, but I can stand to read some of a transcript, because it’s so much faster. It’s striking how crude and stupid it all is. But even more striking is how fascist it is.

For them it’s a war, and for them nothing at all is out of bounds. This is a struggle for the survival of our nation, believe me. And this will be our last chance to save it on Nov. 8, remember that.

This election will determine whether we are a free nation or whether we have only the illusion of democracy, but are in fact controlled by a small handful of global special interests rigging the system, and our system is rigged. This is reality, you know it, they know it, I know it, and pretty much the whole world knows it. The establishment and their media enablers will control over this nation through means that are very well known. Anyone who challenges their control is deemed a sexist, a racist, a xenophobe, and morally deformed.

They will attack you, they will slander you, they will seek to destroy your career and your family, they will seek to destroy everything about you, including your reputation. They will lie, lie, lie, and then again they will do worse than that, they will do whatever is necessary. The Clintons are criminals, remember that. They’re criminals.

This is well documented, and the establishment that protects them has engaged in a massive cover-up of widespread criminal activity at the State Department and the Clinton Foundation in order to keep the Clintons in power.

Never in history have we seen such a cover-up as this, one that includes the total destruction of 33,000 e-mails, 13 iPhones – some by hammer – laptops, missing boxes of evidence, and many, many other things.

It’s fascism. Lies and rage, intended to work people into a violent frenzy.

I know this isn’t news, it’s just that it’s so…blatant.

Then he explains how the New York Times is lying lying lying about him, and then he has a complete breakdown in communication between his brain and his mouth:

The only thing that can stop this corrupt machine is you. The only force strong enough to save our country is us. The only people brave enough to vote out this corrupt establishment is you, the American people.

We are going to have a policy: America first.

They control incredibly, the Department of Justice.

And they even secretly meet with the Attorney General of the United States. In the back of her airplane, while on the runway — remember he was there — he was going to play golf. Oh, oh gee, there’s the Attorney General. Let me go say hello — plane’s on the runway. Let me go say hello to the Attorney General. He never got to play golf, I understand. And it was Arizona, a place I love, but the weather was about a hundred and some odd degrees — he’s not gonna play. He was never there to play golf, folks, don’t be foolish.

They met for 39 minutes and most likely it was to discuss her reappointment, in a Clinton administration, as the Attorney General, just prior to making a decision over whether or not to prosecute Hillary Clinton, okay? That’s what happened. That’s called real life and that’s pretty sad.

They met for 39 minutes. Remember he said, we talked golf and we talked about our grandchildren. Three minutes for the grandchildren, two minutes for the golf, then they sat there and they twiddled their thumbs. Now I believe they talked about her remaining in her position under a crooked Hillary Clinton administration. That’s what I believe. That’s what I believe folks. That’s what I believe and I think that’s what most people in this room believe.

Then there’s a lot about what a martyr he is, and how kind of him it was to do this when he could have just enjoyed all his money instead.

The Times itself reports on the ridiculous libel threat.

Donald J. Trump threatened to sue The New York Times for libel on Wednesday night in response to an article that featured two women accusing him of touching them inappropriately years ago, but the newspaper defended its reporting and told Mr. Trump’s lawyer that “we welcome the opportunity to have a court set him straight.”

See Arkell v Pressdram:

Dear Sirs,

We acknowledge your letter of 29th April referring to Mr. J. Arkell.

We note that Mr Arkell’s attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of our reply and would therefore be grateful if you would inform us what his attitude to damages would be, were he to learn that the nature of our reply is as follows: fuck off.

Yours,

Private Eye

The Times stands by the story.

David McCraw, vice president and assistant general counsel of The New York Times, followed up in a letter to Mr. Kasowitz and said that the article would not be retracted.

“The women quoted in our story spoke out on an issue of national importance – indeed, an issue that Mr. Trump himself discussed with the whole nation watching during Sunday night’s presidential debate,” Mr. McCraw wrote. “It would have been a disservice not just to our readers but to democracy itself to silence their voices.”

Mr. McCraw also made the case that the crux of a libel claim is that a person’s reputation has been damaged. However, Mr. Trump has repeatedly boasted in public about his “non-consensual sexual touching of women,” Mr. McCraw said.

It would be an interesting challenge to think of a way anyone could damage Donald Trump’s reputation.

The LA Times shares the letter a lawyer for the NY Times sent in response to a “shut up” letter from Trump’s lawyer.

Team Trump told the Times (the NY one from here on) to remove the story from their website and say they were sorry. They decline to do so.

The essence of a libel claim, of course, is the protection of one’s reputation.

Then a partial list of all the ways Trump has trashed his own reputation, starting with the fact that he has “bragged about his non-consensual sexual touching of women.”

Nothing in our article has had the slightest effect on the reputation that Mr. Trump, through his own words and actions, has already created for himself.

Hard to answer, innit. If you go around saying you did X, you won’t have much success claiming it’s libel to say you did the X you say you did.

Michelle Obama says it too – it’s not just the politics, the guy is a terrible human being.

First lady Michelle Obama delivered Thursday an impassioned denunciation of Donald Trump, calling the recently unearthed comments by the Republican presidential nominee “shocking” and “demeaning,” and below “basic standards of human decency.”

…

“I can’t believe I’m saying a candidate for president of the United States has bragged about sexually assaulting women,” Obama said.

…

Obama said the comments made by Trump in the video, which was recorded in 2005, had left her “shaken.”

“I can’t stop thinking about this,” she said. “It has shaken me to my core in a way I could not have predicted.”

She added: “I know this is a campaign but this isn’t about politics. It’s about basic human decency.”

Several news outlets have posted updated lists of the current accusations of sexual assault by Trump. New York mag is one.

It was just last week that a tape emerged of Donald Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women. Since then, Trump has been accused of harassment and assault by anumber of women, with several coming forward to share their harrowing stories of alleged misconduct by a so-called “megalomaniac” who also happens to be running for president. The Cut has compiled a list of all the new allegations against Trump, as well as past accusations of assault, harassment, and discrimination by women.

They will probably have to update it regularly.

Some of the new ones:

Kissing a Former Miss USA Contestant Twice Without Consent

Former Miss USA contestant Temple Taggart McDowell claims Trump kissed her on the lips on at least two occasions without consent when she was just 21 years old. In 1997, McDowell was representing Utah in the beauty pageant, and was “shocked” that he thought he had the right to kiss her on the lips, according to the Daily Beast. After one of the kisses, a woman who accompanied her to Trump Tower allegedly warned her not to go into a room alone with Trump. McDowell told NBC News, “I would never approach or greet somebody like that unless it was somebody that I had been dating.” Trump has called the accusation “ridiculous.”

And yet we know he has told people he kisses women without asking. We heard the Tic Tac box rattling.

Sexually Assaulting a People Magazine Writer

Natasha Stoynoff, a staff writer at People, came forward as an alleged victim of Trump on October 12. In an essay, Stoynoff wrote that Trump assaulted her and forcibly kissed her in 2005 while she was on assignment for the magazine. At the time, Stoynoff was asked to interview Trump and wife Melania on their one-year anniversary at Mar-a-Lago. While there, Trump allegedly insisted upon giving her a tour. Stoynoff wrote:

“We walked into that room alone, and Trump shut the door behind us. I turned around, and within seconds, he was pushing me against the wall, and forcing his tongue down my throat. Now, I’m a tall, strapping girl who grew up wrestling two giant brothers. I even once sparred with Mike Tyson. It takes a lot to push me. But Trump is much bigger — a looming figure — and he was fast, taking me by surprise, and throwing me off balance. I was stunned. And I was grateful when Trump’s longtime butler burst into the room a minute later, as I tried to unpin myself.”

Afterward, Trump reportedly told Stoynoff that the two were going to have an affair. The writer says she didn’t report the assault at the time, as she both blamed herself and wrote it off as one of the risks associated with her job.

At the time, she didn’t know he’d be a candidate for president of the US. No one knew that. I doubt that many people fantasized about how great it would be.

Groping a Woman at Mar-a-Lago

Mindy McGillivray claims Donald Trump groped her 13 years ago while she was visiting Mar-a-Lago with her companion, photographer Ken Davidoff. According to the Palm Beach Post, Davidoff brought his friend McGillivray with him to the estate while he covered a concert by Ray Charles. Only 23 at the time, McGillivray allegedly had her ass grabbed by Trump while he stood next to his then-fiancée, Melania.

Well her ass was just standing there right next to him. What was he supposed to do, not grab it? That would be sheer waste! Think of the starving children in Whereverstan! Waste is criminal.

Groping Miss Washington USA 2013

In a Facebook post earlier this year, former Miss Washington USA Cassandra Searles claimed Trump grabbed her ass and invited her back to his hotel room, according toRolling Stone. She called Trump a “misogynist” and accused him of treating women like cattle. Searles wrote that he “lined up [contestants] so he could get a closer look at his property,” a claim that has been corroborated by Paromita Mitra of Mississippi.

Walking in on Teen Pageant Contestants While They Were Changing

Four women who competed in the 1997 Miss Teen USA beauty pageant have accused Trump of walking into their dressing room while the contestants were changing, BuzzFeed News reported. Mariah Billado, a former Miss Vermont Teen USA, told BuzzFeed News that the contestants (who ranged in age from 14 to 19) were “just scrambling” to grab whatever garments they had when he walked in. She said, “I remember putting on my dress really quick because I was like, ‘Oh my god, there’s a man in here.’” Trump reportedly responded something along the lines of, “Don’t worry, I’ve seen it all before.”

Since he boasted to Howard Stern about doing exactly that, we have little reason to doubt the story.

Sexually Harassing a Woman During the 1993 White House Correspondents’ Dinner

When Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter invited Trump to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 1993 as a “novelty guest,” he allegedly got more than he bargained for. Forty-five minutes after Trump sat down next to Swedish model Vendela Kirsebom, Carter claims she came over to his table, almost in tears, begging him to move her. “It seems that Trump had spent his entire time with her assaying the ‘tits’ and legs of the other female guests and asking how they measured up to those of other women, including his wife,” Carter wrote. ‘“He is,’ she told me, in words that seemed familiar, ‘the most vulgar man I have ever met.’”

And last, for now –

Hiring Women Based on Appearances

Trump gave writer Mark Singer a tour of Mar-a-Lago for an article in TheNew Yorkerin 1997. Singer wrote that Trump introduced him to the property’s resident physician, Dr. Ginger Lea Southall. When she was out of earshot, Singer asked Trump where Southall had been trained.

Trump replied, “I’m not sure. Baywatch Medical School? Does that sound right? I’ll tell you the truth. Once I saw Dr. Ginger’s photograph, I didn’t really need to look at her résumé or anyone else’s. Are you asking, ‘Did we hire her because she’d trained at Mount Sinai for fifteen years?’ The answer is no. And I’ll tell you why: because by the time she’s spent fifteen years at Mount Sinai, we don’t want to look at her.”

The most vulgar man anyone has ever met.

I was thinking what L. V. Anderson says at Slate: that Clinton’s ability to stay calm, cheerful, reasonable, and coherent during that trainwreck of a “debate” on Sunday is a kind of superpower. I was thinking the whole time how totally impossible I would find that. I was thinking about the years of experience she’s had, as a practicing lawyer as well as a campaigner and politician, that must have helped train her, but also that it’s still a superpower.

Trump was as ugly and uninspiring as usual. But here’s what people haven’t been saying in the days since the debate: Hillary was inspiring as all get out.

Yes, I’m familiar with all the arguments against Hillary as inspirer-in-chief. She’s part of the establishment. She’s laden with potential conflicts of interest. Her judgment during the whole email thing was poor. She seems, to many observers, wooden and robotic. Fine. The fact remains that Hillary stood onstage and calmly and persuasively made the case for her candidacy while her looming, lurching, lunatic opponent attempted to humiliate her in front of the entire world. If Hillary can do that, then the rest of us can do whatever we put our minds to.

Wait, there’s more. Two women say Trump groped or kissed them.

At the debate he said it was just talk; he’d never actually done it.

At that moment, sitting at home in Manhattan, Jessica Leeds, 74, felt he was lying to her face. “I wanted to punch the screen,” she said in an interview in her apartment.

More than three decades ago, when she was a traveling businesswoman at a paper company, Ms. Leeds said, she sat beside Mr. Trump in the first-class cabin of a flight to New York. They had never met before.

About 45 minutes after takeoff, she recalled, Mr. Trump lifted the armrest and began to touch her.

According to Ms. Leeds, Mr. Trump grabbed her breasts and tried to put his hand up her skirt.

Tried to grab her by the pussy, in short.

Mr. Trump’s claim that his crude words had never turned into actions was similarly infuriating to a woman watching on Sunday night in Ohio: Rachel Crooks.

Ms. Crooks was a 22-year-old receptionist at Bayrock Group, a real estate investment and development company in Trump Tower in Manhattan, when she encountered Mr. Trump outside an elevator in the building one morning in 2005.

Aware that her company did business with Mr. Trump, she turned and introduced herself. They shook hands, but Mr. Trump would not let go, she said. Instead, he began kissing her cheeks. Then, she said, he “kissed me directly on the mouth.”

But he’s supposed to be allowed to do that, because he’s a star. He said so himself.

In a phone interview on Tuesday night, a highly agitated Mr. Trump denied every one of the women’s claims.

“None of this ever took place,” said Mr. Trump, who began shouting at The Times reporter who was questioning him. He said that The Times was making up the allegations to hurt him and that he would sue the news organization if it reported them.

“You are a disgusting human being,” he told the reporter as she questioned him about the women’s claims.

No, Trump, that’s you. You’re the disgusting human being. It’s not Clinton who’s full of hate, it’s you. You’re projecting.

Asked whether he had ever done any of the kissing or groping that he had described on the recording, Mr. Trump was once again insistent: “I don’t do it. I don’t do it. It was locker room talk.”

But for the women who shared their stories with The Times, the recording was more than that: As upsetting as it was, it offered them a kind of affirmation, they said.

That was the case for Ms. Taggart. Mr. Trump’s description of how he kisses beautiful women without invitation described precisely what he did to her, she said.

“I just start kissing them,” Mr. Trump said on the tape. “It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.”

“Wait” as in “wait to ask and to receive an affirmative answer.”

Leeds didn’t complain to a flight attendant at the time because she was all too familiar with handsy men in business.

“We accepted it for years,” she said of the conduct. “We were taught it was our fault.”

She recalled bumping into Mr. Trump at a charity event in New York about two years later, and said he seemed to recall her, insulting her with a crude remark.

She had largely put the encounter on the plane out of her mind until last year, when Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign became more serious. Since then, she has told a widening circle of people, including her son, a nephew and two friends, all of whom were contacted by The Times.

They said they were sickened by what they heard. “It made me shake,” said Linda Ross, a neighbor and friend who spoke with Ms. Leeds about the interaction about six months ago. Like several of Ms. Leeds’s friends, Ms. Ross encouraged her to tell her story to the news media. Ms. Leeds had resisted until Sunday’s debate, which she watched with Ms. Ross.

That’s interesting. She resisted until the debate – until Anderson Cooper asked him straight up if he’d done it and he said no. Until she felt like punching the tv.

Guess who’s the disgusting human being here.

Jessica Lussenhop at the BBC is another who points out that it’s unfortunate the Central Park 5 story got buried last week by the boasting of sexual assault story.

The heinous attack was committed while New York City was in the throes of a crack epidemic and the number of homicides were reaching all-time highs.

In this climate, and in response to the attack, Donald Trump – then known only as the flashy real estate developer who had just purchased the Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City – took out a full-page ad in four New York newspapers.

“Bring back the death penalty. Bring back our police!” the ad read.

“I want to hate these murderers and I always will. I am not looking to psychoanalyse or understand them, I am looking to punish them,” he continued.

“Civil liberties end when an attack on our safety begins!”

That’s Trump. He’s not looking to understand anything.

But in 2002 serial rapist and convicted murderer Matias Reyes confessed he’d done the crime on his own, and DNA evidence confirmed it.

Nevertheless, Mr Trump has never apologised for his ads or acknowledged the existence of the true perpetrator.

To this day, he insists the Central Park Five are guilty.

But very soon after he told CNN that, the rapey comments story broke, and grabbed all the attention.

In the ensuing uproar, the Central Park Five comments were lost.

With them went an opportunity to carefully examine why Mr Trump refuses to accept the exonerations of the five men, and what implications that has for a Trump presidency.

There were no questions about it at the Sunday debate.

However, many prominent observers want the moment marked.

“Apparently Mr Trump is unfamiliar with the concept of wrongful conviction,” tweeted documentarian Ken Burns, who made a critically acclaimed film about the bungled investigation and prosecution of the five boys.

“He should be apologising for calling for their death, not claiming they’re guilty,”tweeted California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom. “This is not ‘law and order’.”

Some, like the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson, called Mr Trump’s stance blatantly racist.

“For young African American and Latino men, Trump has a clear and ominous message: You must be guilty of something. Not even scientific proof can convince him otherwise,” Robinson wrote.

“If that is not racism, the word has no meaning.”

Or his ominous message is even: It doesn’t matter whether you’re guilty or not, you need to be punished anyway.

I’ll be so glad when this is over.

NPR reports that Trump is apparently quoting Russian propaganda in order to slime Clinton some more.

A riff by Donald Trump at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Monday night about Hillary Clinton’s culpability in the deaths of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, is raising questions about where exactly Trump got his information and how.

During his speech, Trump held up a piece of paper. “This just came out a little while ago. I have to tell you this,” Trump said as he read from the page, which he identified as an email from Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal.

“The attack was almost certainly preventable,” Trump read. He continued, “Clinton was in charge of the State Department … if the GOP wants to raise that as a talking point against her, it is legitimate.”

Trump said, “In other words he [Blumenthal] is admitting that they could have done something about Benghazi. This just came out, a little while ago.”

Trump folded the page and let it fall to the floor, and his audience booed.

But – surprise surprise – it’s just another Trump lie.

For Newsweek reporter Kurt Eichenwald, the words Trump read sounded familiar. It turns out they were taken from an article he wrote, which Blumenthal had included in an email. So they were not Blumenthal’s words, but Eichenwald’s.

The misconstrued “email” that Trump was reading had appeared in an article on a Russia-funded website called Sputnik, which has since taken it down.

You can see the original in a screen grab from The Washington Post.

Eichenwald asked in Newsweek “Who in the Trump campaign was feeding him falsehoods straight from the Kremlin?”

Roger Ailes? Rudy Giuliani? His hairdresser?

The Blumenthal email containing the Eichenwald story was posted by WikiLeaks, and apparently hacked from Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s account.

The Obama administration stated last week it is confident that Russia is behind the hacking, which it asserts is “intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.”

It just couldn’t be any more squalid, could it.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights doesn’t think much of Donald Trump.

Mr Hussein said at a news briefing in Geneva: “If Donald Trump is elected on the basis of what he has said already – and unless that changes – I think it is without any doubt that he would be dangerous from an international point of view.”

Mr Hussein said he was “not keen or intent on interfering in any political campaign within any particular country”.

But he said that when an election could result in an increase in the use of torture “or the focus on vulnerable communities in a way that suggests that they may well be deprived of their human rights, then I think it is incumbent to say so”.

That’s sweetly understated. Trump has been very clear about his contempt for human rights.

During the campaign, Mr Trump has said that “torture works” and has promised to bring back “a lot worse than waterboarding”.

Waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques previously used by US forces on terror suspects have been banned by the Obama administration.

Mr Trump said of waterboarding in June: “I like it a lot. I don’t think it’s tough enough.”

His comments on migrants, Mexicans in particular, have drawn fire from rights activists.

He has vowed to build a wall along the Mexican border and in June 2015 branded some Mexican migrants “rapists” and “murderers”.

He’s disgraced us all. It will take years to live it down.

John Scalzi on Trump as the worst ever and the inevitable result of what the Republican Party has been up to.

He’s not some weird “how did that happen??” but the natural outcome of the Republicans’ steady march to the right.

Well, surprise! Here’s Donald Trump. He is the actual and physical embodiment of every single thing the GOP has trained its base to want and to be over the last forty years — ignorant, bigoted and money-grubbing, disdainful of facts and frightened of everything because of it, an angry drunk buzzed off of wood-grain patriotism, threatening brown people and leering at women. He was planned. He was intended. He was expected. He was wanted.

Only, they wanted someone more charming about it, more telegenic, more adorable. They didn’t want an angry pumpkin who can’t string a coherent sentence together. Also they wanted a Republican, someone they could control. Trump is a Trumpist instead of a Republican.

And this is why the GOP deserves the chaos that’s happening to it now, with its appalling and parasitic standard bearer, who will never be president, driving his GOP host body toward the cliff. If it accepts the parasite, it will be driven off the cliff. If it resists, the parasite Trump will rip himself from it, leaving bloody marks as it does so, and then shove the dazed and wounded GOP from the precipice.

…

Trump was never about being a Republican; he was just looking to expand his brand. As it turns out, like apparently so many things Trump does, he’s done an awful job of it — the name Trump, formerly merely associated with garish ostentation and bankruptcy, is now synonymous with white nationalism, sexual battery and failure — but the point is on November 9th Trump is going to move on and leave the wreckage of the GOP in his wake, off to his next thing (everyone assumes “Trump TV,” in which Trump combines with Breitbart to make white pride propaganda for the kind of millennial racist who thinks a Pepe the Frog Twitter icon is the height of wit — and I hope he does, because the Trump touch will drive that enterprise into the ground, and little would warm my heart more than a bankrupt Breitbart).

I don’t know – I think the GOP will just dust itself off and laugh ruefully and go right back to being the home of the Tea Party.

H/t G Felis

Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” has triggered another one of those social media floods, the Times reports.

It was the author Kelly Oxford, a social media powerhouse, who got things started on Friday night.

“Women: tweet me your first assaults,” she wrote on Twitter at 7:48 p.m. “They aren’t just stats. I’ll go first: Old man on city bus grabs my ‘pussy’ and smiles at me, I’m 12.”

When she first posted the message, Ms. Oxford said in an interview later, she did not expect more than a handful of replies. “It was such a personal question,” she said. “I thought, ‘No one is going to share anything on Twitter.’”

Yet by Saturday morning, she was getting as many as 50 responses per minute: often-explicit, first-person accounts of molestation. A hashtag had materialized: “#notokay.” The Twitter posts continued to pour in through the weekend. And by Monday afternoon, nearly 27 million people had responded or visited Ms. Oxford’s Twitter page.

There’s probably not a woman on the planet who hasn’t experienced it, multiple times.

Facebook pages and Twitter feeds filled with comments and multiplying threads from women who recalled being groped by doctors, by piano teachers, by photography instructors, by perfect strangers. They told stories of being flashed on the bus by masturbators, of having male colleagues rub up against them at the copy machine in their office, of dates and bosses demanding sex.

It’s a wonder more women aren’t put off sex for life. In fact…it occurs to me that this ubiquity makes it very strange – stranger than I already thought it – that libertarian feminists like to call radical feminists “sex negative.” Why wouldn’t many women be “sex negative” given this background? Why isn’t that a perfectly understandable and legitimate (however sad) response to an experience of repeated sexual assaults? It’s good that most women don’t hate sex, but it’s pretty generous of them not to.

[T]o many victims of sexual assault, Mr. Trump’s words struck a particular nerve. It was not simply that he is the Republican presidential nominee, and that a hot microphone had captured him speaking unguardedly. It was his casual tone, the manner in which he and the television personality Billy Bush appeared to be speaking a common language, many women said, that gave Mr. Trump’s boasts a special resonance.

What he said and how he said it seemed to say as much about the broader environment toward women — an environment that had kept many of these women silent for so long — as they did about the candidate. And Mr. Trump’s dismissal of his actions as “locker room talk” only underscored the point.

Exactly. Trump said what he said so confidently, and Billy Bush played up so obligingly – it’s all too obvious that it’s just normal.

“This is RAPE CULTURE — the cultural conditioning of men and boys to feel entitled to treat women as objects,” Jill Gallenstein, 40, a retail executive in Los Angeles, wrote on Facebook. “It’s women and girls questioning what they have done to provoke such behavior. It’s the dismissing of this behavior because ‘it’s the way it has always been.’ It’s justifying the behavior because other powerful men have done it too. ‘Locker room talk’ normalizes this behavior — what we say matters.”

The “locker room talk” is the cultural conditioning of men and boys to feel entitled to treat women as objects. As Deborah Cameron explained, they bond with each other by exchanging these tokens of entitlement and contempt.

Even before the release of the 2005 recording of Mr. Trump, 2016 was shaping up as something of a watershed year for awareness of sexual harassment, between the pending trial against Bill Cosby and the high-profile case of Brock Turner, the former Stanford University student who was convicted of sexual assault.

For many women watching and reacting to the weekend’s events, the surprise news conference on Facebook Live that Mr. Trump staged before Sunday night’s debate, with three women who have long accused Mr. Clinton of sexual assault or harassment, only compounded the damage he had done in the original recording. They saw him not as giving voice to victims of sexual abuse but as using the women as props.

Props in his project of bullying and degrading a woman who dares to compete with him.

Michael Gerson says the Republicans deserve their fate. True. They spent the night in the dog’s bed and now they’re full of fleas.

What Trump actually did was ensure that hardcore conservatives stay with him until the end of his political journey, when Republicans begin the search for survivors and examine the charred black box. Trump’s performance was perfectly tuned to make a loyal Rush Limbaugh listener burst out in “Hell, yeah!” Put Juanita Broaddrick in the audience? Threaten to jail your opponent? Throw WikiLeaks in her face? Blame her for the death of Capt. Humayun Khan in Iraq? Dismiss all the fuss about sexual predation as locker-room talk? Hell, yeah!

This kind of thing has been normalized in far-right discourse for decades. To the most partisan and polarized portion of the right, these excuses and accusations were familiar and appropriate.

To many people outside the talk-radio hothouse, I can attest, Trump’s debate performance was appalling, contemptible, shameful, squalid, vile.

Exactly so. He makes mediocrities like Bush and Reagan seem stellar.

Trump and his advisers must know that the conservative talk-radio audience, and the Republican primary electorate, is different from a national electorate, which actually includes minorities, young people and women who don’t like disgusting boors. Perhaps Trump’s strategy was a recognition that even his strongest supporters were on the verge of bolting and needed to be appeased. Perhaps Trump’s knowledge of policy is so thin that it fills three or four minutes of a 90-minute debate and all he has left is trash talk. Or perhaps he is captive to his impulses, incapable of shame and nasty to the core.

Those last two. It was those. Trash talk is all he’s got, because he is trashy.

This sad Republican fate is deserved. It is the culmination, the fruition, of an absurdly simplistic anti-establishment attitude. The Trump campaign is what happens when you choose a presidential candidate without the taint of electoral experience — and all the past vetting that comes with it. It is what happens when you pick a candidate who has not engaged in serious public argument over a period in which his or her views and consistency can be tested. It is what happens when you embrace a candidate only on the basis of an outsider persona, who lacks actual political skills — like making a policy argument, empathizing with a voter or avoiding a constant stream of distracting gaffes.

The same can be said of Bush and Reagan, to name two. But compared to Trump, they’re Burke reincarnated.

A dance critic dissects Trump’s moves in the debate.

Donald Trump, looming behind Hillary Clinton like a mob boss, only reinforced his perception as a schoolyard bully in the second presidential debate Sunday night.

…

The dance was grim from the start. Trump entered looking exhausted. In a break with protocol, the candidates didn’t shake hands. And then Trump began lurking behind Clinton when she spoke, with his carefully planted stance, his narrowed eyes and his frown.

More a scowl than a frown. He looked ridiculous. Intimidating, yes, but also ridiculous.

“This is exactly who Donald Trump is,” Clinton said, speaking about the tapes. Trump helpfully backed her up with his demeanor. He paced and rocked and grimaced as she spoke; he broke into her time by shouting over her. When she protested that she had not done the same to him, he shot back with all the finesse you’d hear in a middle school gym: “That’s ’cause you got nothin’ to say.”

Ignorant, vulgar, and rude – what an adornment to the office he would be.

When it was his turn to speak, Trump got angry, pointed at her, swung his arms around with alarming force. Clinton had to have been disturbed by the ill temper and aggressive gestures he directed at her, though she seemed remarkably unflappable.

But bullying was on her mind. Late in the evening she mentioned “the Trump effect” and noted that bullies in school are on the rise because of it. She was referring to a 2016 survey of K-12 teachers, titled “The Trump Effect,” that was conducted by Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. It found a recent increase in bullying, harassment and intimidation among students, along with a rise in fear and anxiety, particularly among the minority groups Trump has targeted.

I haven’t read the survey and have no idea how they determined that Trump was cause and not correlation…but it would be odd if he hadn’t had any effect at all. I suppose we could hope that his long-term effect will turn out to be revulsion and a diminution of bullying…Yeah, that will happen…

Then there was the part where he announced that if elected he would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton’s email setup. Josh Gerstein at Politico reports that it “provoked a sharp blowback from former U.S. prosecutors, who said Trump’s view of the Justice Department serving the whims of the president is antithetical to the American system.”

Well ok but Trump doesn’t know much about the American system. He knows about real estate profiteering, and cheating, and bankruptcy, and pretending to be a Big Boss on tv. Oh and grabbing women by the pussy whether they want him to or not.

While presidents appoint the attorney general, they do not make decisions on whom to prosecute for crimes — and were Trump to do so, prosecutors warned, he would spark a constitutional crisis similar to that of the “Saturday Night Massacre” in the Nixon administration. In that case, Nixon attempted to fire the prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal, and the top two Justice Department officials resigned on the spot.

Oh well Trump would just have them executed, or sent to Russia, or something.

He said it again at a rally in Ambridge, Pennsylvania this afternoon.

“Special prosecutor, here we come, right? If I win, we’re going to appoint a special prosecutor,” Trump declared.

However, former Republican appointees to senior Justice Department posts used words like “abhorrent,” “absurd” and “terrifying” to describe Trump’s threat to use the legal system to imprison Clinton.

“For Donald Trump to say he will have a special prosecutor appointed and to have tried and convicted her already and say she’d go to jail is wholly inappropriate and the kind of talk more befitting a Third World country than it is our democracy,” said Paul Charlton, who spent a decade as a federal prosecutor before serving as U.S. attorney for Arizona under President George W. Bush.

Just locker room talk. No big deal.

Chris Kluwe, a football (US football) player, tells Trump that even football players don’t say the kind of thing he said. I don’t really believe that claim, but he says some good things.

Now, Donald, I’m sure you’re wondering just what it is we talk about in a professional locker room, if we don’t spend all our time regarding 50 percent of the population as mobile fuck receptacles eagerly awaiting our tiny-handed grasp on their love lapels. I shall educate you!

We talk about our families. We talk about our significant others, our children, and our parents. We talk about our fears that if a Hitler wannabe who can’t even string together a coherent statement on domestic policy becomes president, what that might mean for those of us who are married to a member of a minority community, or are a member of a minority community, or have children going to schools where hopefully nobody screams racial epithets at them or tells them to go back to [insert foreign country they couldn’t identify on a map here].

And travel, and foreign cities, and money, and paying taxes – which they actually do, unlike some.

We talk about how all of us pay taxes, every year, and wonder what a presidential candidate might have to hide if he so stubbornly refuses to release his returns, what possible foreign debts might be lurking in that finance closet he so desperately holds shut with every ounce of his contemptible mental faculties.

They talk about accountability.

In a professional sports environment, all of us are accountable to each other. We’re a team. If one of us messes up on the field, it affects everyone. Just like if a president makes a bad decision, it affects everyone. And do you know, Donald, the only way the team wins games? The only way we win is if, in the locker room, we’re willing to accept that accountability, address our mistakes, and work as hard as we possibly can to make sure those mistakes don’t happen again.

We don’t double down on a shitty play simply because a small portion of the fan base got excited by it. We don’t try to carve the team apart from the inside to appease a certain position group. We don’t blame our mistakes on something someone else did, because if we do any of those things, we lose, something you’ve become intimately familiar with on a personal, financial, and political level, and I’m not having too many difficulties reviewing how that happened to you on the game film.

So let me conclude with some advice for you, Donald. The next time you want to claim that something is “locker room talk,” take a moment to recognize the fact that were you in an actual locker room, you would be universally reviled as a cancerous, egotistical train wreck of a disgrace that no team could possibly find the time to employ and, honestly, would never even have on their draft board to begin with.

I’ve been in locker rooms, Donald, and you’re the type of narcissistic, pants-soiling fecal eruption that just doesn’t belong. Even football players are smart enough to know that.

He can play football and he can write.

Paul Ryan got everybody on a conference call and said he and Trump are totally not friends any more.

Mr. Ryan informed Republican lawmakers on a morning conference call that he would never again campaign alongside Mr. Trump and would dedicate himself instead to defending the party’s majority in Congress, according to five lawmakers who participated in the call and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Effectively conceding defeat for his party in the presidential race, Mr. Ryan said his most urgent task was ensuring that Hillary Clinton did not enter the White House with Democratic control of the House and Senate, two lawmakers said.

Well there’s always gerrymandering oh right they did that already.

Trump fans were furious.

Mr. Trump’s candidacy was already in a dire condition before Mr. Ryan’s announcement. A poll published Monday by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal found him trailing Mrs. Clinton by a wide margin and drawing less than 40 percent of the vote. The survey was taken before Sunday night’s debate.

Representative Scott Rigell of Virginia, a Republican who has long been opposed to Mr. Trump, said there was a general sense in the House that more humiliating disclosures about Mr. Trump were likely to come before Nov. 8, Election Day.

Well, you know, when you base a party on misogyny and racism and homophobia, that’s the kind of people you attract. We did warn you.

Mr. Trump’s campaign had hoped that the debate would halt an exodus of fellow Republicans from his candidacy, and it publicly implored members of the party on Monday morning to hang with him through Election Day.

After all, he’s such a great guy.