The great uproar over the recently released video of Donald Trump’s crude remarks about women is difficult to understand — especially in the context of this particular election as are the calls for him to step down as the Republican Party’s presidential nominee.
To sort this out, let’s acknowledge that we already knew that Trump has been prone to making inappropriate remarks; any outpouring of shock over the video seems a tad contrived.
{mosads}In it he is taped — without his knowledge — on a bus with some younger males. The scene is redolent of a boy’s locker room, with sexual braggadocio on display, as an older male seeks to demonstrate his virility by boasting of the liberties he can take with beautiful women. The liberties that boys can only dream of in their rawest adolescent fantasies.
So, amid the controversy, I was braced for the worst when Trump, upon disembarking from the bus, encountered an attractive young woman who was there to greet him. After all, the members of his entourage, who had listened to his licentious comments on the bus, were watching. I feared that Trump would grab the woman around the waist with one hand, plant a big one on her mouth, and grope her genitalia with his other hand.
What followed was totally different from what I was led to expect. Instead, I saw him politely kiss the woman on her cheek and proceed to comport himself in a totally professional manner. The juxtaposition was telling: He was all talk and no action.
Were he facing anyone but a Hillary Clinton, his statements might give us some pause about his candidacy. But, as we all know, either he or Clinton will win this election. So we have to consider the alternative. And here, the alternative is far worse.
In the Clintons, we have not so much inexcusably callous words as inexcusably criminal actions — actions that have victimized women; actions that have entailed perjury and obstruction of justice; and actions that were calculated to smear the very victims who had the courage to speak out against an incumbent President.
For my part, I thought that Trump’s apology hit the right note, by expressing regret, focusing on his personal growth, and putting his past remarks into perspective as assessed against the Clintons’ record of real abuses of persons and power.
The hope here is that Sunday’s debate will — at long last — move the discussion to where it needs to be: on the disastrous Obama policies that Hillary is committed to continue, and on her lies and deceit about the email scandal, the Clinton Foundation, Benghazi, and so much more.
That’s because this election must be about changing America’s direction. And Donald Trump remains our last, best hope for doing that, notwithstanding his venial sins of testosterone talk.
Blaine Winship is the author of Moralnomics: The Moral Path to Prosperity (Moralnomics Press), available in e-book from amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com. and in hardcover from moralnomics.com. (“Moralnomics” is a trademark owned by Blaine H. Winship.)
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