Donald Trump defended his lewd and sexually aggressive comments as “locker room” talk three times during Sunday’s presidential debate.
On Friday, previously unaired 2005 footage revealed the Republican presidential nominee bragging about trying to have sex with a married woman and being able to grope women.
“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything,” Trump had said.
Trump later issued a apology, calling the conversation “locker room banter.”
1. ‘This was locker room talk’
“I don’t think you understood what was — this was locker room talk. I’m not proud of it. I apologize to my family. I apologize to the American people. Certainly I’m not proud of it. But this is locker room talk.”
2. ‘It’s locker room talk’
“Yes, I’m very embarrassed by it. I hate it. But it’s locker room talk, and it’s one of those things. I will knock the hell out of ISIS. We’re going to defeat ISIS. ISIS happened a number of years ago in a vacuum that was left because of bad judgment. And I will tell you, I will take care of ISIS.”
3. ‘It was locker room talk’
“It was locker room talk, as I told you. That was locker room talk. I’m not proud of it. I am a person who has great respect for people, for my family, for the people of this country. And certainly, I’m not proud of it. But that was something that happened.”
So what room do I need to be in to call Donald Trump a racist, sexist, motherfucker and be completely excused?
Donald Trump claimed he never did any of the actions described in the 2005 tape, but a New York Times piece interviewed hundreds of women who allege otherwise. Some, such as Jill Harth settled in court over her claims.
Donald Trump bragged in vulgar terms about kissing, groping and trying to have sex with women during a 2005 conversation caught on a hot microphone — saying that “when you’re a star, they let you do it” — according to a video obtained by The Washington Post.
The video captures Trump talking with Billy Bush of “Access Hollywood” on a bus with Access Hollywood written across the side. They were arriving on the set of “Days of Our Lives” to tape a segment about Trump’s upcoming cameo on the soap opera.
The tape obtained by the Post includes audio of Bush and Trump’s conversation inside the bus, as well as audio and video once they emerge from it to begin shooting the segment.
In that audio, Trump discusses a failed attempt to seduce a woman, whose full name is not given in the video.
“I moved on her and I failed. I’ll admit it,” Trump is heard saying. It was unclear when the events he was describing took place. The tape was recorded several months after he married his third wife, Melania.
“Whoa,” another voice said.
“I did try and f— her. She was married,” Trump says.
Trump continues: “And I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said, ‘I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.’”
“I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there. And she was married,” Trump says. “Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look.”
At that point in the audio, Trump and Bush appear to notice Arianne Zucker, the actress who is waiting to escort them into the soap opera set.
“Your girl’s hot as s—, in the purple,” says Bush, who’s now a co-host of NBC’s “Today” show.
“Whoa!” Trump says. “Whoa!”
“I’ve gotta use some tic tacs, just in case I start kissing her,” Trump says.“You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — 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,” Trump says. “You can do anything.”
“Whatever you want,” says another voice, apparently Bush’s.
“Grab them by the p—y,” Trump says. “You can do anything.”
A spokeswoman for NBC Universal, which produces and distributes “Access Hollywood,” declined comment.
“This was locker room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago. Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course – not even close,” Trump said in a statement. “I apologize if anyone was offended.”
The tape appears at a time when Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, has sought to make a campaign issue out of his opponent’s marriage. Trump has criticized former President Bill Clinton for his past infidelity, and criticized opponent Hillary Clinton as her husband’s “enabler.”
“Hillary Clinton was married to the single greatest abuser of women in the history of politics,” Trump told the New York Times in a recent interview. “Hillary was an enabler, and she attacked the women who Bill Clinton mistreated afterward. I think it’s a serious problem for them, and it’s something that I’m considering talking about more in the near future.”
Trump carried on a very public affair with Marla Maples — his eventual second wife — while still married to first wife Ivana Trump.
Trump has been criticized in this campaign for derogatory and lewd comments about women, including some made on TV and live radio. In an interview Wednesday with KSNV-TV, a Las Vegas television station, Trump said that those comments were made for entertainment.
“A lot of that was done for the purpose of entertainment. There’s nobody that has more respect for women than I do,” he told the station.
“Are you trying to tone it down now?” asked the interviewer, Jim Snyder.
“It’s not a question of trying, it’s very easy,” said Trump.
The tape obtained by The Post seems to have captured Trump in a private moment, with no audience beyond Bush and a few others on the bus. It appears to have been shot around September 16, 2005, which was the day press reports said Trump would tape his soap-opera cameo.
The video shows the bus carrying Trump and Bush turning down a street on the studio backlot. The two men cannot be seen.
“Oh, nice legs, huh?” Trump says.
“Oof, get out of the way, honey,” Bush says, apparently referencing somebody else blocking the view of Zucker.
The two men then exit the bus, and greet Zucker.
“We’re ready, let’s go,” Trump says, after the initial greetings. “Make me a soap star.”
“How about a little hug for the Donald?” Bush says. “He just got off the bus.”
“Would you like a little hug, darling?” Zucker says.
“Absolutely,” Trump says. As they embrace, and air-kiss, Trump says, “Melania said this was okay.”
The video then follows Trump, Bush and Zucker into the studio. Trump did appear on Days of Our Lives, in late October. In a tape of that cameo posted online, Zucker’s character asks Trump — playing himself — for a job at his business, and tells him suggestively, “I think you’ll find I’m a very willing employee. Working under you, I think, could be mutually beneficial.”
Trump’s character gives her the brushoff.
“That’s an interesting proposition,” Trump says onscreen. “I’ll get back to you.”
A publicist for Zucker did not immediately respond to questions on Friday afternoon.
In a 2005 interview on the TV show “Soap Talk,” posted online, host Lisa Rinna asked Zucker if Trump was cute.
“He is so cute and charming,” Zucker said. “You just don’t look above…” she said, and motioned to her hairline.
Donald Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani on Sunday suggested that a man such as Donald Trump would be a better president “than a woman.”
“Don’t you think a man who has this kind of economic genius is a lot better for the United States than a woman, and the only thing she’s ever produced is a lot of work for the FBI checking out her emails,” the former New York City mayor said on ABC’s “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos.
Giuliani’s statements come on the heels of a week during which the Republican nominee has been criticized by Hillary Clinton’s campaign for comments he has made about women. At Monday’s debate, Clinton said Trump had insulted former Miss Universe Alicia Machado by calling her “Miss Piggy.” Trump and Giuliani both criticized Machado and tried to justify Trump’s comments about how much weight Machado had gained.
Giuliani told Stephanopoulos that Clinton was “programmed” to bring up Machado’s story.
“Then she mentioned the woman’s name, the model’s name, and then she made it appear as if [moderator] Lester Holt had brought it up. She had obviously been programmed to bring that up,” Giuliani said.
In addition, the Trump surrogate also said that if Clinton is going to attack Trump on how he “deals with women,” the GOP nominee’s campaign will discuss how the former secretary of state “deals with women.”
“We have to respond by how she deals with women, which is to take money from governments that kill women, take money from governments that stone women, take money from governments that have women who can’t drive cars,” he said. “Not just money, millions and tens of millions of dollars from countries in which women are treated like property and killed when they get raped.”
“And so now, basically, it’s ‘Don’t lecture me, Hillary, on feminism, because you’re a phony.'”The Trump and Clinton campaigns both released ads targeting women this past week.
Giuliani also claimed this was a “jobless” recovery. This is not factual at all. Over 15.1 million jobs have been created since Obama took office in 2009.
Update: In the title we referred to Alicia Machado as “Miss America,” she was Miss Universe.
Donald Trump has doubled down on his attacks on a former Miss Universe in a stream of early-morning tweets.
Trump’s verbal barbs directed at Alicia Machado, who won the Miss Universe title in 1996, started after the first presidential debate Monday when Hillary Clinton mentioned her and claimed that Trump used to call her “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping.”
Rather than back away from the accusations, Trump has repeatedly defended his criticisms of the woman and her weight.
His latest came online this morning:
Wow, Crooked Hillary was duped and used by my worst Miss U. Hillary floated her as an "angel" without checking her past, which is terrible!
Researchers have looked and the so-called “sex tape” came from a reality television show called La Granja, which is nothing more than some grainy, night-vision footage of a couple of covered figures writhing in a bed, hardly qualifies as explicit. And reality television being what it is, the scene the tape depicts was quite possibly staged or fabricated.
Alicia Machado did pose topless for Playboy magazine, though.
However if Machado has a sex tape or not, this does not matter. The argument put forth at the first presidential debate was; Does Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump engage in bullying and sexism and are this qualities you would want in your President? And by Trump attempting deflect charges of sexism and bullying by turning around and engaging in sexist attacks against a woman’s weight and acting like the textbook definition of a bully over several days does not help his defense.
Donald Trump wanted to fire female employees he considered unattractive and replace them with better-looking women at a golf resort he owned, according to court documents from a 2012 lawsuit.
As reported by the Los Angeles Times, the court documents detail a lawsuit that alleges Trump pressured employees at the Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos to replace those he viewed to be unattractive female employees over a number of years in the 2000s.
The report comes as Trump has faced renewed criticism that he disrespects women, a narrative fueled by his controversial remarks about a former Miss Universe that he worked with when he owned the beauty pageant. Hillary Clinton raised in Monday’s debate the fact that he called Alicia Machado “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping” after she won his 1996 Miss Universe pageant.
Hayley Strozier, an employee at the golf club until 2008, alleged in a sworn declaration she “had witnessed Donald Trump tell managers many times while he was visiting the club that restaurant hostesses were ‘not pretty enough’ and that they should be fired and replaced with more attractive women.”
According to the LA Times report, the employees said in their lawsuit that they rotated employees schedules “so that the most attractive women were scheduled to work when Mr. Trump was scheduled to be at the club.”
The Trump Organization called the allegations “meritless.”
“We do not engage in discrimination of any kind,” said Jill Martin, vice president and assistant general counsel for The Trump Organization. “The statements made by a group of former disgruntled employees are far from an accurate portrayal of what it is like to work at Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles. Mr. Trump’s sole focus is on ensuring that the facility and operation are providing the highest level of service and an unparalleled golf experience. The only appearance Mr. Trump cares about is that of the facility and the grounds. Rather than looking to old statements from a handful of employees with an ax to grind, the media should focus on the thousands of happy employees, of all races, gender, size and shape, whose lives upon which Mr. Trump has made an incredibly positive impact.”
In the lawsuit, employees claim that Trump’s stated preferences regarding female employees caused managers to value appearance over skill when making hiring and staffing decisions. They also allege that Trump himself made inappropriate and unprofessional comments toward female employees.
The LA Times described the case as a “broad labor relations lawsuit” that is “focused on the course’s high-pressure work culture” in addition to spotlighting the revelations about Trump’s treatment of female employees.
According to the Times’ report, “the bulk of the lawsuit was settled in 2013” with a $475,000 payment to plaintiff employees without any admission of wrongdoing. Another female employee who said she was fired for complaining about the treatment of women at the golf club agreed to a separate settlement with confidential terms.
At the end of Monday night’s presidential debate, Hillary Clinton accused Donald Trump of taunting one of his former Miss Universe contestants about her weight.
Clinton said the Republican nominee’s criticisms of Alicia Machado, a Venezuelan who won the Miss Universe contest in 1996, was “one of the worst things he said” about women. “He called this woman Miss Piggy. Then he called her Miss Housekeeping because she was Latina.”
While Trump appeared to dispute Clinton’s accusation on the debate stage, he called into Fox and Friends Tuesday morning and once again called Machado fat.
“I know that person. That person was a Miss Universe person,” Trump told the Fox News morning show. “And she was the worst we ever had, the worst, the absolute worst, she was impossible,” he said. “She gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem. We had a real problem. Not only that, her attitude.”
With his past statements about Machado playing into critiques Clinton wanted to make at Monday night’s high-profile debate, the Clinton campaign was quick to pounce. An hour after the debate ended, her campaign tweeted a two-minute video about Machado’s experience with Trump.
“He was very overwhelming. I was very scared of him,” she says in Spanish. “He’d yell at me all the time. He’d tell me ‘you look ugly’ or ‘you look fat.’ Sometimes he’d ‘play’ with me and say ‘Hello Miss Piggy, hello Miss Housekeeping.’ ”
Donald Trump called her "Miss Piggy" and "Miss Housekeeping."
The Clinton campaign’s video also includes archived footage of Trump telling reporters “she weighed 118 pounds, or 117 pounds, and she went up to 160 or 170. So this is somebody who likes to eat.”
Articles at the time confirm Trump’s comments.
In 1997, Donald Trump told Howard Stern that Machado was an “eating machine” who “ate a lot of everything.” “You whipped this fat slob into shape,” the radio host told Trump. “I don’t know how you did it. I see all these diet plans, everything else. God bless you.” When asked if Trump had “gotten her down to 118,” he said she is going to be there soon.
Around the same time, Trump told Newsweek: “We’ve tried diet, spa, a trainer, incentives. Forget it, the way she’s going, she’d eat the whole gymnasium.”
Machado told the Washington Post at the time she was caught by surprise about reporters being present. “I asked him to please send me to a trainer or a nutritionist or something because I needed some orientation, and he sends me to a gym in New York,” she said. “When I get there, there are 80 reporters waiting to watch me sweat. I thought that was in very bad taste.”
Donald Trump wrote in his 1997 book Art of the Comeback, “I could just see Alicia Machado, the current Miss Universe, sitting there plumply. God, what problems I had with this woman. First, she wins. Second, she gains 50 pounds. Third, I urge the committee not to fire her. Fourth, I go to the gym with her, in a show of support. Final act: She trashes me in The Washington Post — after I stood by her the entire time. What’s wrong with this picture? Anyway, the best part about the evening was the knowledge that next year, she would no longer be Miss Universe.”
Machado told the campaign that the experience led to long-term eating disorders. “I wouldn’t eat, and I would still see myself as fat, because a powerful man had said so.”
“He always treated me like a little thing. He always treated me like trash,” Machado said Tuesday in a conference call organized by the Clinton campaign.
She said she was caught off-guard when Clinton talked about her Monday night. “I started to cry because I never imagined that someone so important would care about my story,” she said, speaking in Spanish.
“I’m very sorry that I might be an uncomfortable person for Mr. Trump,” Machado said, “but that’s how things happen, that’s how things go.”
"She gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem." —Trump just defended his attacks on Fmr. Miss Universe Alicia Machado. pic.twitter.com/HbVtaBpK3R
Donald Trump has recruited the influential anti-abortion leader Marjorie Dannenfelser to lead his campaign’s national “Pro-Life Coalition.”
Not only that, but Trump has made a new policy promise that strengthens his anti-abortion position.
In a letter to anti-abortion leaders inviting them to join his coalition, Trump commits to a new policy: “Making the Hyde Amendment permanent law to protect taxpayers from having to pay for abortions.”It’s unusual for a Republican presidential nominee to move further to the right on abortion this late in an election cycle. And the move is a direct shot at Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, whose party wrote into its platform that it would repeal the Hyde Amendment. Until this summer, the Democratic platform did not include this plank.
A longstanding policy, the Hyde Amendment bans the use of federal funds to pay for abortions for Medicaid recipients except in cases of rape, incest or when pregnancy endangers the life of the mother.
Trump’s commitment to making Hyde permanent law is new, though his running mate, Mike Pence, brought up the policy at an evangelical conference over the weekend.
In the letter, released by Dannenfelser’s Susan B. Anthony List, Trump also endorses the anti-abortion movement’s two biggest legislative priorities: defunding Planned Parenthood and passing a national ban on abortions after 20 weeks.
The late-term abortion ban, known as the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, has long been one of Dannenfelser’s top priorities. Support for the bill has been the key litmus test for GOP candidates seeking endorsements from the Susan B. Anthony List for several election seasons.
The House approved the bill this year, though the initial vote had been abruptly cancelled after some Republicans voiced concerns about a restriction on abortion for rape victims who haven’t reported the crime to the police.
Legal experts have raised questions about whether a national 20-week ban would stand up in court, but Republicans say it is part of their long game to force the issue to reverse the landmark 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade.
Trump also committed to defunding Planned Parenthood, legalizing the actions of several GOP-led states over the last year. Most of those state actions have been blocked in courts.
Trump additionally doubled down on his promise to appoint “pro-life” justices to the Supreme Court.
“Hillary Clinton’s unwavering commitment to advancing taxpayer-funded abortion on-demand stands in stark contrast to the commitments I’ve made,” Trump writes, “to advance the rights of unborn children and their mothers when elected president.”
Leaders of the anti-abortion movement were hardly quick to embrace Trump, who told an interviewer in 1999 that he supported partial-birth abortion.
But as the prospect of Clinton — a career-long advocate for abortion rights — becoming president came into focus, many anti-abortion activists sided with Trump.
Still, Trump tested their patience when he said that women should be punished for abortions if the procedure were made illegal.
Those remarks in April, which he later walked back, ignored decades of conservative doctrine on abortion, which some leaders of the movement said proved that Trump was out-of-touch with their beliefs. He arranged meetings with anti-abortion leaders, including Dannenfelser, shortly after facing the backlash.
And selecting Pence as his running mate, a trusted ally of Dannenfelser and other leaders, helped Trump immeasurably with the anti-abortion movement.
Co-chairs of the Pro-life Coalition will be announced later this month, according to SBA List’s statement. Coalition members will be asked to write op-eds, speak on Trump’s behalf on television and at public events, and recruit volunteers.
“Not only has Mr. Trump doubled down on his three existing commitments to the pro-life movement, he has gone a step further in pledging to protect the Hyde Amendment and the conscience rights of millions of pro-life taxpayers,” Dannenfelser said.
“For a candidate to make additional commitments during a general election is almost unheard of.”
Reality
Hyde Amendment means that American women — many of them women of color — who cannot afford health insurance are effectively prevented from availing themselves of a legal medical procedure that is their right and that is fundamental to their ability to exert autonomy over their reproductive lives and thus their economic and familial futures. Yes. Hillary Clinton opposes the Hyde Amendment, because it is one of the policies that exacerbates economic and racial inequality in this country.
If Donald Trump is elected president, it will likely be with a Republican congress and Supreme Court seats to fill. He could do every single one of the things he’s promising anti-abortion activists he will do. And those things would return women, in a very real way — in a way that is already happening in state and local jurisdictions around the country — to their secondary status: unable to exert full control over their bodies; barred from making choices about whether or when to bear children based on their health, their economic, or familial status, or the condition of the fetuses they carry.
Abortions accounted for 3 percent of the nearly 10.6 million total services provided by Planned Parenthood clinics in 2013, according to its annual report.
Donald Trump on Thursday slammed the pastor who interrupted him onstage during Wednesday remarks at a Michigan church.
In a telephone interview with “Fox and Friends,” the Republican presidential nominee accused the pastor of the church in Flint, Michigan, of planning to come onstage to cut off his remarks when he addressed her congregation on Wednesday.
“When she got up to introduce me she was so nervous, she was shaking,” Trump said. “And I said, ‘Wow this is sort of strange.’ And then she came up. So she had that in mind. There was no question about it.”
He added: “She was so nervous. She was like a nervous mess. And so I figured something was up. Really.”
Several minutes into Trump’s remarks at Bethel United Methodist Church on Wednesday, Rev. Faith Green-Timmons reminded the real-estate mogul that the event was intended to focus on the water-crisis recovery in Flint, where state cost-cutting measures resulted in lead contamination in the city’s water supply.
“Mr. Trump, I invited you here to thank us for what we’ve done for Flint, not to give a political speech,” Green-Timmons said.
“Oh, OK, OK, OK, that’s good,” Trump said. “Then I’m going to go back on to Flint.”
Trump then told Fox and Friends, “The audience was saying, ‘Let him speak, let him speak!’ ”
That isn’t true. In fact, several audience members began to heckle Trump, asking pointed questions about whether he racially discriminated against black tenants as a landlord. (Which he did several times, even after being caught and punished.)
“Well, it is, it is a correct tweet,” Trump said when asked about the tweet during NBC News’ Commander-in-Chief Forum in New York on Wednesday night. “There are many people that think that that’s absolutely correct … Well, well, it’s happening, right? And, by the way, since then, it’s gotten worse.”
26,000 unreported sexual assults in the military-only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?
NBC’s Matt Lauer, who led the forum, pushed Trump to better explain himself and asked if the Republican nominee thinks that the only way to end sexual assault in the military is to kick women out. (Sexual assault in the military is not just a problem for women, as that Pentagon has said that many assault cases involve men attacking other men.)
“No, not to take them out, but something has to be happen[ing],” Trump said. “Right now part of the problem is nobody gets prosecuted. You have reported — and the gentleman can tell you — you have the report of rape, and nobody gets prosecuted. There are no consequence[s]. When you have somebody that does something so evil, so bad as that, there has to be consequence[s] for that person. You have to go after that person. Right now, nobody’s doing anything. Look at the small number of results. I mean, that’s part of the problem.”
First, from Trump’s statements he was clearly under the impression that we are dealing with only men raping women, and may believe the rape myths that men cannot be raped, and that women cannot be perpetrators.
Donald Trump’s answer never addressed the blatantly sexist overtones of his tweet, and instead called for more prosecutions. However this response also calls into question Trump’s understanding of a very nuanced issue.
According to Human Rights Watch, military personnel who report a sexual assault frequently find that their military career is the biggest casualty. This gives most victims of sexual assault no incentive or protections to come forward or with any recourse once they’ve been booted out of the armed forces.
Trump, however, has said women should be in the military because, “they’re really into it.”
Donald Trump’s comment that Hillary Clinton doesn’t have “a presidential look” is seen by some as the Republican presidential nominee’s latest knock on a woman’s appearance.
During an interview with ABC News in Ohio Monday, Trump said, “I really do believe that” Clinton doesn’t look the part.
“I just don’t believe she has a presidential look, and you need a presidential look,” he told ABC News anchor David Muir.
When pressed for specifics, Trump avoided giving any, saying, “I’m talking about general.”
This isn’t the only time that Trump has talked about other candidates’ appearance during this campaign. In one of the most notable cases, he talked about another female candidate, Carly Fiorina, before she dropped out of the Republican Party primaries.
During an interview last year for a September 2015 Rolling Stone cover story, he said, “Look at that face” when a camera zoomed in on Fiorina, according to the magazine. “Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?!”
Trump followed up in other interviews, saying he was talking about her persona and not her appearance. But she made it clear at the next Republican prime-time debate that she wasn’t buying it.
“Women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said,” she said.
