Vol. 90: Trump and women

At last, the real story

      “Depending on how you count them,” the New York Times reported a week ago, 19 or 26 or 67 women” have accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct. “Women who have said he ‘squeezed my butt,’ ‘eyed me like a piece of meat,’ ‘stuck his hand up my skirt,’ ‘thrust his genitals,’ ‘forced his tongue in my mouth,’ was ‘rummaging around my vagina,’ and so on.” (Click here.)

       This is the sort of biased journalism we’ve come to expect from the liberal mainstream media. There are two sides to every story, and Donald Trump’s relationships with women are no exception. Here’s the report the Times should have printed:

Love in the afternoon

       Depending on how you count them, 19 or 26 or 67 women have accused Donald Trump of intellectual abuse. Women who have said he “blabbered endlessly about tariffs,” “advocated deporting radicals,” “denied climate change,” “claimed that migrants are eating dogs and cats,” urged them to “bring back coal,” “bad-mouthed NATO while praising Putin and Kim Jong Un,” “argued that abortion should be left to the states,” and so on.

       “When he invited me to his hotel room,” one disillusioned woman told the Times, “I assumed we’d have terrific sex. Instead, he spent two hours complaining that the Fake News failed to report his ‘Man of the Year’ award from some real estate developers’ club in Queens. He wasted my entire afternoon!”

       “I tried to come on to him,” said another. “But he totally turned me off with his inane arguments about the benefits of tax cuts for the rich. He never drew a breath. Thank God I brought a magazine to read.”

       “His orange hair and rippling pecs made me weak in the knees,” confessed a third. “But he wouldn’t let me near him unless I first promised to oppose electric vehicles and federal funding for public schools that teach critical race theory. What a jerk!”

‘Grab ’em by the crotch’

       Mr. Trump has denied any intellectual misconduct. He, in turn, has accused such women of being “political operatives,” plotting a “conspiracy against you, the American people,” looking for their “ten minutes of fame,” and not being his “type.” Asked to describe his type, Mr. Trump replied, “Probably a cross between Phyllis Schlafly and Ayn Rand.”

       Following the 2020 presidential election, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was surreptitiously recorded (in the now-notorious “Access Washington” tape) boasting, “When you’re famous, as I am, you can do anything with men. Grab ’em by the crotch— you can do anything.” But she said Mr. Trump was the sole exception: “He wouldn’t let me touch him. He just groused endlessly about how the election was stolen from him. I told him that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. But that concept seems to have eluded him.”

       These women are not looking for revenge, exactly. They simply want an acknowledgment and an apology. An admission, from the man himself, that they aren’t crazy or hysterical, that he really did subject them to nonsensical diatribes.

       Eloise McGurgle, a former Trump campaign worker from Sludge Prairie, Nebraska, has been pleading with America to hear her story. She takes a sip of coffee, black, clears her throat and begins to tell her story again. Her voice shaky, her eyes periodically tearing up, she says, “All I wanted to do was kiss him. But he cornered me and subjected me to an idiotic harangue, something about ‘I am you warrior, I am your justice. I am your retribution.’ Then he said, ‘I will prevent World War III, which we’re heading into.’ I’m not making this up. Never in my life have I been so bored!”

Wharton’s dumbest student

       The long-run effects of discourse with Mr. Trump can be far more devastating. “When I arrived in America from Slovenia, he dazzled me with his intellect,” says Melania Knavs, a former fashion model. “He told me he was a self-made billionaire and a best-selling author who graduated from Wharton first in his class. So I married him, only to discover that he’s a total buffoon who’s up to his eyeballs in debt. His businesses have gone bankrupt six times. All of his books were written by ghostwriters, and a Penn professor says Donald was the dumbest student he ever taught. He can’t even find Slovenia on a map! Now we’re reduced to peddling hats, T-shirts, and other souvenirs just to make ends meet. And he refuses to give me a divorce, because he says it would hurt his image.”

       Neurologists have noticed a condition similar to Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE, a progressive degenerative disease affecting people who have suffered traumatic brain injuries, that may occur in athletes as well as women who have been exposed repeatedly to insipid conversations with Mr. Trump.

       Consequently, there is no such thing as closure when it comes to Donald Trump. “You can spend thousands on therapy, you can sue him, move out of the country, stock your library with the Great Books of the Western World, play uplifting Mozart and Beethoven tapes from morning ’til night, but you can’t get him out of your system,” says Fifi LaRue, a former cocktail waitress who served briefly as Mr. Trump’s Secretary of Defense. “The lack of any reflection or penance by Trump and the fact that he seems so threaded into the fabric of our country— well, there’s no escaping him. Especially not now that he might be president again.”

       It’s not that these women want to be remembered, exactly. But they want their stories to be remembered. Ms. LaRue says it feels sometimes that she is shouting into a void. “None of us thought we’d still be talking about this after so many years,” she reflects. “We thought he’d be gone. But what else can we do, really, other than try? He wasted hours and even days of our lives. And time is one commodity that, once lost, can never be recovered.”

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com