Vulgar remarks are not enough to turn me away from voting for Donald Trump. More disturbing to me are his business decisions, political naïveté and policies that seem to invite domestic and international disaster. If I felt he would make a good president, I would vote for him, despite the lewd video from 2005 of his private comments that has just been released by the Washington Post.
The video says nothing new about the man’s sexual morality. More relevant as to whether or not Trump is fit to govern the country are issues such as allegations of fraudulent business practices and other improprieties. David A. Graham of The Atlantic lists some of these in his article, “The Many Scandals of Donald Trump: A Cheat Sheet.”
Is it a surprise to anyone that Donald Trump is a horny old goat who often manages to get his end away with comely babes? From time immemorial, a male with wealth and power, including many a past president, has been able to attract beautiful young women into his bed. Without his status, those women would have been out of his league.
In his book, The Art of the Deal, originally published in 1987, Trump bragged about bedding other men’s wives: “If I told the real stories of my experiences with women, often seemingly very happily married and important women, this book would be a guaranteed best-seller.”
Trump was caught on mic voicing the same opinions that many philanderers would think and discuss in private with their friends, but never mention in public. In the 1970s, before the rise of feminism and laws against sexual harassment, male crassness towards women was commonplace and not censored—an attitude brilliantly depicted in the British TV series, Life on Mars, where a modern-day detective finds himself back in 1973, serving in a police department rife with what he sees as rampant sexism and scant respect for women.
As I wrote in Huffington Post on August 4, infidelity is a presidential tradition. President John F. Kennedy made Bill Clinton look like a complete amateur. JFK is on record for having said, “If I don’t have sex every day, I get a headache.” JFK had many affairs, most notably with Marilyn Monroe. His 1,000-day presidency was apparently noteworthy for its 1,000 nights of romantic trysts. However, America had different views on philandering politicians in the 1960s. At that time, no journalist would have been crass enough to report their affairs in the newspapers.
If you are a powerful enough man, even being wheelchair bound will not prevent you from having mistresses. Crippled with polio from the age of 39, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was President of the United States from 1933 to 1945. FDR had long-term relationships with Lucy Mercer, his wife’s social secretary, and with Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, his private secretary. He also had a love affair with Margaret “Daisy” Suckley, a distant cousin. Nevertheless, for the work he did in office, bonking aside, many consider FDR to be one of the top three American presidents, alongside Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.
Huffington Post contributor, M.W Jacobs, on September 1 drew many similarities between Trump and another celebrity who sought political office—Arnold Schwarzenegger. The actor was elected Governor of California in 2003 despite facing several allegations of sexual groping that earned him the title of “Gropinator.” Will that “celebrity Teflon” continue to work for Donald Trump? There is irony in the fact that the LA Times has just reported that the Gropinator, who took over for Trump this year as host of NBC’s “The Apprentice,” will not be voting for him. Democrats should be glad that Schwarzenegger was born in Austria which disqualifies him to serve as US President. Otherwise he, rather than Trump, might be the Republican Presidential candidate and would most likely romp to victory.
Daniel Marans reports in Huffington Post that Trump’s horndog comments took place while his wife Melania was pregnant (and not too long after he married her). Clearly not the behavior you would expect from a loving husband. They met in 1998, while Trump was separated but still not divorced from his second wife, actress and model Marla Marples. You could say that he made an honest woman of his mistress Melania by marrying her.
Trump’s well-documented affair with Marla Marples while married to his first wife Ivana led to an acrimonious divorce. Trump wed Marla soon afterwards. She was 17 years younger than her husband. However, as the late British business tycoon and philanderer, Sir James Goldsmith declared, “When you marry your mistress you create a vacancy.” After about five years of marriage, he found himself a younger model, Melania Knauss—yes, she was a model too, and 24 years his junior. They wed in 2005. However, as the newly-released video shows, she was unable to turn Mr. Libertine into Mr. Fidelity.
Given its long history, isn’t infidelity considered a presidential prerogative? At the time of Clinton’s sex scandal in 1998, I heard some people claim that since the beginning of the 20th century, the only US President who had not had an affair was Richard Nixon, and thus Tricky Dick was the only US President morally suitable for the job. Yet the Watergate scandal, which had nothing to do with infidelity, revealed that his presidency was mired in corruption and immorality on a grand scale.