Once upon a time, while watching a nature documentary, I was struck by the sight of a wolf pack hunting caribou. Running at full speed, the pack seamlessly split in two, flanking the herd and ensuring the evening’s feast. The way they coordinated their work demonstrated to me the primitive, nasty intelligence built into the prey drive… at will and without a word, these wild animals organized into a highly efficient, motivated, and ruthless team.
Meanwhile, a link or two up the food chain…
Everyone has been focused on “grab her by the pussy,” and understandably so. Trump’s persona is explicitly and proudly predatory, giving the world little reason to grant him the benefit of the “I was just bullshitting" doubt. He’s made a career out of convincing us all that he’s exactly that kind of guy.
But to me, that’s why it’s barely even news. By 2005, the world had a pretty good idea of what Donald Trump was, and all the world did about it was find a way to recycle his rose-scented, gold-encrusted dumpster fire of a life into a disturbingly robust revenue stream. We all knew what he thought every time he looked at a woman, because he delighted in telling us. Nothing he said on that tape should be a surprise.
Billy Bush, on the other hand? Fuck that motherfucker.
“How about a little hug for The Donald?” Are you kidding me? We’ll probably never know if Trump was idly boasting or wistfully reminiscing, but we know for a fact that seconds after being told about Trump’s self-proclaimed proclivities, Bush decided it would be fun to goad the moldering and sexually aggressive Cheeto into groping a fellow industry professional on-camera, knowing she’d be forced to deal “gracefully” with whatever Trump might do. Unprompted and without missing a beat, he served her up.
Like it was the most natural thing in the world.
To every man who has looked into a camera over the last week and asserted that he has never heard “locker room talk” like that, I call Shenanigans. You’re either lying, or impressively sheltered. Either way, your perspective in irrelevant.
Personally, I’ve heard far worse. For example, I was twenty when the new guy working in a warehouse with me casually and cheerfully confessed to fucking pubescent prostitutes in Thailand. Bear in mind, this wasn’t the culmination of a series of escalating boasts about our sexual histories; we’d just met, it was hot as hell, the boxes just kept coming down the line, and I was not in the mood for chit-chat. It was more like “Hey, I’m so-and-so, I just got out of the Navy, want to know what it was like? Let me tell you a story…”
As I often do, I handled the whole thing poorly. Instead of jumping his shit or walking away, I just suggested he keep that kind of thing to himself, for his own sake. I’m still not sure what I could have/should have done as a clueless kid on a summer day in the early ‘90s, but essentially counseling him to avoid detection probably wasn’t it.
With that said, y’know what I absolutely didn’t do? I didn’t listen to his story, cheer him on, and then immediately direct him toward a nearby twelve year-old, just to see what would happen. Because that would have made me a complete scumbag.
Right, Bushy? Right?
I truly resent that this political cycle has forced me to learn the definition of “pussy bow”. I’m pretty sure some useful fact was pushed out of my brain to make room for that nonsense.