The Donald And The Towel-Snappers

Donald Trump has apologized for incredibly crude and offensive comments that were recorded when he made a cameo appearance on a soap opera in 2005.   The recording was released by the Washington Post yesterday.

If you haven’t listened to the recording, I encourage you not to do so, if you want to maintain some semblance of respect for the American political process.  Just know that Trump’s statements were lewd, coarse, demeaning, appalling, and just about every other adjective you can think of that describes the crass end of the behavioral spectrum.  In his apology, Trump described the recorded conversation as “locker room banter.”

“Locker room banter.”  I suppose that accurately describes it . . . if we’re talking about a high school locker room.  Any male who lived through those years remembers the high school locker room, when the boys showering and changing clothes were divided into two groups — the loud talking, preening, strutting, arrogant assholes who were trying desperately to establish themselves as alpha males, and the rest of us who just wanted to get the hell out of there.  The first group included the towel snappers, and the “prank” pullers, and the bullies who thought it was hilarious to torment the uncoordinated, the short, the skinny, and the tubby kids who hated gym class for that very reason.  And it was the same guys who bragged incessantly about their claimed, probably imaginary, sexual conquests in the most vulgar terms you can possibly imagine.  The rest of us were forced to listen to the bullshit, knowing and liking the girls who were being so crudely described and feeling sorry that our classmates apparently were going out with complete jackasses.

So now we’ve confirmed that Donald Trump was one of the towel snappers, and he’s really never moved on.  When the situation presents itself, he can sink to levels of boorishness and grossness with the best of them.  No surprise there, really.  Throughout his career in the public eye, Trump has repeatedly been willing to dip into the muck when he thinks the situation calls for it, whether it’s talking about his romantic exploits or concluding that it’s perfectly acceptable to make veiled references to his sexual potency during a presidential debate.  When you identify him as part of the alpha male locker room brigade, it becomes all too predictable.

God help us!  Election Day can’t get here soon enough.