The now infamous 2005 video of Donald Trump and Billy Bush doesn’t surprise many but it’s exactly the kind of thing we’ve come to expect from Trump. In the video, released by The Washington Post earlier this month, Trump is heard making vulgar comments about women and his sexual interactions with them. When asked to defend the controversial comments, Trump offered an equally controversial explanation:
“This was locker room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago,” he said in a pre-recorded video statement on his website.
This weak response is nearly as repugnant as the content of the video itself.
There’s a huge difference between what Trump said and what is actual “locker room talk.”
I would know.
As a three-season athlete, I was in locker rooms throughout high school. There was always talk of women at some point, some of it using questionable language. Locker room talk is about a girl you like, maybe find attractive, the game or meet you’re about to compete in, your day at school or work.
Locker room talk is not suggesting that it is okay to sexually assault women in the manner that Trump did.
“I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.,” he said in the tape.
We all use obscenities. But for Trump to claim that these vulgar statements are comparable to the things that teenagers talk about before the big game is downright ludicrous. The problem is the context, and what they say about his character.
To condone these types of remarks as “locker room talk” diminishes the severity of what was said. Trump was not simply commenting on the looks of a woman; he was insinuating that he actively engaged in sexual assault. He did not say he wanted to just start kissing them, or that he didn’t want to wait.
There is no locker room in which I have personally been in that a player would not be immediately chastised for insinuating they could assault someone. To believe that men talk like this all the time, or that any good man for that matter would let a fellow athlete talk like that, is to indict all men as complicit in this type of behavior.
Even if this kind of talk is common in locker rooms, how is it reasonable to suggest that a presidential candidate of the United States should be held to a standard no higher than the one we set for teenagers in a locker room?
The video was not some sort of secretly recorded “gotcha” tape. According to the Post, Trump and Bush were arriving on the set of “Days of Our Lives” to tape a segment about Trump’s cameo on the soap opera. Even though he was caught on a “hot mic” and did not know that the mic was on, he was not in a locker room. He was not in the privacy of his own home. He was in the very real world saying very real things.
There are many things that Trump has said that the media and the left have unduly criticized. But this is different. As of October 20, The Washington Post has reported that ten women have accused Trump of doing exactly what he said in that video — sexually assaulting them.
Donald Trump, is an American man whose deplorable talk about sexual assault is demeaning not only to the women of the nation, but the men as well. I, and millions of men like me, know that this is not what a locker room sounds like. We will not be put in the same box as him. It is up to every single man in locker rooms everywhere to make sure that words like Trump’s never echo through our showers.
