Some of Donald Trump’s most insulting comments about women
The footage of Donald Trump released Friday in which he brags about aggressively groping women and trying to seduce a woman who is not his wife is the latest example of lewd and sexist comments made about women by the billionaire businessman and former reality TV star. The comments threaten the viability of the Republican nominee’s campaign for president. Here is a look at some of the other past comments Trump has made about women. ___ “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” He adds seconds later: “Grab them by the p—-. You can do anything.” — Trump in a previously unreleased recording made by “Access Hollywood” in 2005, published Friday by The Washington Post and NBC News. ___ “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America #MakeAmericaGreatAgain.” — Trump tweeted in April 2015. He later deleted the post. ___ “It must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees.” — Trump to a female contestant in 2013 on an episode of “Celebrity Apprentice.” ___ “Did Crooked Hillary help disgusting (check out sex tape and past) Alicia M become a U.S. citizen so she could use her in the debate?” — Trump tweeted in September 2016. He was referring to former Miss Universe winner Alicia Machado, whom he publicly shamed for gaining weight when he owned the contest. ___ “It’s certainly not groundbreaking news that the early victories by the women on ‘The Apprentice’ were, to a very large extent, dependent on their sex appeal.” — Trump wrote in his 2004 book, “How To Get Rich.” ___ “All of the women on ‘The Apprentice’ flirted with me — consciously or unconsciously. That’s to be expected. A sexual dynamic is always present between people, unless you are asexual.” — Trump, also from “How To Get Rich.” ___ “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.” — Trump in an interview with CNN in August 2015, referring to Fox News Channel anchor Megyn Kelly. ___ “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president? I mean, she’s a woman, and I’m not s’posedta say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?” — Trump in a September 2015 interview with Rolling Stone, speaking about then-primary rival Carly Fiorina. ___ “It doesn’t really matter what (the media) write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.” — Trump in an interview with Esquire Magazine in 1991. ___ “A person who’s flat-chested is very hard to be a 10, OK?” — Trump in an interview with shock jock Howard Stern in September 2005. ___ “I saw a woman who was totally beautiful. She was angry that so many men were calling her. ‘How dare they call me! It’s terrible! They’re all looking at my breasts.’ So she had a major breast reduction. The good news: Nobody calls her anymore — nobody even looks — and not only that, it was a terrible job.” — Trump to Stern in 2008. Republished with permission of the Associated Press.
Updates from the 1st presidential debate
The Latest on the first of three presidential debates between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump (all times EDT): 10:45 p.m. Both candidates concluded the first presidential debate by saying they will accept the outcome if the other wins. Hillary Clinton spoke directly to viewers and said, “It’s not about us, it’s about you.” Donald Trump initially dodged the same question, saying he would make a “seriously troubled” America “great again.” He added: “I’m going to be able to do it. I don’t believe Hillary Clinton will.” But Trump finished his answer by saying that if Clinton wins, “I will absolutely support her.” ___ 10:43 p.m. Hillary Clinton is punching back at Donald Trump’s assertions that she doesn’t have the “stamina” to be president. Trump has questioned whether Clinton has the physical fitness to be president and he repeated the criticism to her directly during the debate. Clinton’s response? Trump shouldn’t talk about stamina until he’s tried out the busy schedule she kept up as secretary of state. Trump didn’t answer moderator Lester Holt’s original question about his past comments that Clinton doesn’t have the “presidential look.” Clinton suggested the remarks were about gender, and she reminded the crowd of Trump’s past comments calling women “pigs” and other derogatory names. ___ 10:42 p.m. Donald Trump says NATO needs to “go into the Middle East with us” to combat the Islamic State group. And he is taking credit for NATO focusing resources on combating terrorism. In fact, the alliance agreed in July to contribute aircraft and conduct training in Iraq and has increased intelligence coordination there. And NATO set up an anti-terrorism program in 2004 — years before Trump criticized them as a presidential candidate. Earlier this year, Trump criticized NATO for not focusing on terrorism. He said that afterward, he saw an article reporting that NATO was opening a new, major anti-terrorism division. He said Tuesday that NATO’s action was “largely because of what I was saying, and my criticism of NATO.” ___ 10:40 p.m. Donald Trump is avoiding a specific declaration on how he would use nuclear weapons if he’s elected president. The Republican nominee said during the first presidential debate that he “would not do first strike” because “once the nuclear alternative happens, it’s over.” That statement suggests he would not authorize a nuclear attack unless the U.S. was struck first. But in the same answer Trump said he “can’t take anything off the table.” He mentioned adversary nations such as North Korea and Iran. President Barack Obama has considered changing existing policy to state clearly that the United States would not deploy nuclear weapons without first being attacked by nuclear weapons. But he met resistance and has elected not to make such a shift. ___ 10:38 p.m. Hillary Clinton is accusing Donald Trump of being too easily provoked to keep the United States from going to war — perhaps even one involving nuclear weapons. Trump says: “I have much better judgment than she does. I have much better temperament.” That drew laughs from some in the debate crowd, and prompted Clinton to exclaim: “Woo! OK!” Clinton then pivoted to policy, defending the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. Clinton said Iran was “weeks away” from a nuclear bomb when she became secretary of state — and says the Obama administration thwarted that progress. She continued that Trump didn’t have “good judgment or the right temperament” because he could take the country to war over small issues, like being mocked on Twitter. ___ 10:35 p.m. Donald Trump is continuing to insist he opposed the Iraq War before the U.S. invasion despite evidence to the contrary. Trump says during the debate that he “did not support the war in Iraq,” calling that charge “mainstream media nonsense.” But there is no evidence Trump expressed public opposition to the war before the U.S. invaded. Trump was asked in September 2002 whether he supported a potential Iraq invasion in an interview with Howard Stern. Trump briefly hesitated, then responded: “Yeah, I guess so.” Presented with the comment during the debate, Trump responds: “I said very lightly, I don’t know, maybe, who knows.” He’s also telling reporters to call Fox News host Sean Hannity to confirm private conversations he said they had about the war. Hannity is a top Trump supporter. Clinton voted in favor of the invasion in 2002 while she was a New York senator. She has since said it was a mistake. ___ 10:27 p.m. Donald Trump is interrupting the moderator of the first presidential debate to insist he has the best temperament for the office. Trump repeatedly made the assertion after clashing with moderator Lester Holt over his early support for the Iraq War. Then he segued to his temperament. “I think my strongest asset by far is my temperament,” Trump said. “I know how to win.” Clinton and her allies have repeatedly hit Trump over his temper and inability to take criticism. ___ 10:23 p.m. Hillary Clinton says one key to fighting terrorism in the United States is working closely with Muslims living here. Clinton says Donald Trump has “consistently insulted Muslims abroad, Muslims at home.” She says Muslim people can provide information that law enforcement may not be able to obtain anyplace else. Both candidates were asked to explain how they would combat terrorism in the U.S. Clinton says her plan includes an intelligence surge to obtain “every scrap of information” and to “do everything we can to vacuum up intelligence from Europe, from the Middle East.” ___ 10:20 p.m. Hillary Clinton says defeating the Islamic State group and taking out its leaders would be a top priority as president. Clinton says she’s hopeful the Islamic State group would be pushed out of Iraq by the end of the year. She says the U.S. could then help its allies “squeeze” the terrorist group in Syria. Clinton says she would do everything possible to take out the group’s leaders, and make that one of her administration’s organizing principles
Martin Dyckman: Khizr Kahn challenges a ‘morally untethered’ Donald Trump
Thousands of speeches have I heard and forgotten since my first byline 64 years ago. Very few have deserved to be remembered nearly as much as Khizr Kahn‘s 368-word address to the Democratic National Convention Thursday night. Eloquent and powerful in its simplicity and directness, it was timely, to the point, and to the heart as well as the head. He spoke of his son Humayun, a naturalized Muslim-American, an Army captain who died saving his soldiers from a suicide bomber in Iraq. Had it been up to Donald Trump, he said, “he never would have been in America.” Then, in calm and measured words, he hurled a powerful challenge at Trump: “Have you even read the United States Constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy.” He pulled it from his suit pocket. “In this document,” he said, “look for the words liberty and equal protection of the laws. “Have you ever been to Arlington Cemetery? Go look to the graves of brave patriots who died defending the United States of America. You will see all faiths, genders and ethnicities. “You,” he said to Trump, “have sacrificed nothing and no one …” Unless you were watching Fox “News” (why, oh why would you?) you could see and hear it live. As reported by Variety, Fox “chose to cut away from the elder Khan’s speech, in favor of a series of other prepackaged stories.” One of them was a day-old clip of FBI Director James Comey‘s news conference on the ISIS threat. It was as if Trump himself had called the shot. But you can still hear and see the speech for yourself on YouTube and at other links that neither Trump not Fox can suppress. It’s a personal issue with me. Cousins who had sought refuge in France died in the Holocaust because the United States would not let them come here. The State Department was infested at the time with anti-Semites. (Read about them in Eric Larson‘s book, “In the Garden of Beasts.”) Among their pretexts: there might be spies and saboteurs among the refugees fleeing Hitler. Does that sound familiar? Fellow immigrants — unless your ancestors met the boat at Jamestown, this means you — all of us have been the intended victims, at one time or another, of bigots like Trump. Laws on immigration, voting, even property rights targeted specific ethnic groups of all races and religions. An anti-foreigner party nicknamed the Know Nothings was strongly influential in the 1840s and threatened for a time to infest the infant Republican Party, where its ghost stalks again. Trump’s bigotry on that issue speaks for itself. Khizr Kahn raised two other points that bear more discussion. Has he ever read the Constitution? In one infamous interview, Trump denied that the Constitution (in the 14th Amendment) guarantees citizenship to everyone born here. Later, he vowed to “stand up for Article Two, Article Twelve, you name it …” There are only seven articles, along with 28 amendments. For all that, it’s one of the shortest founding documents on earth. That palm-size booklet Kahn offered to lend to Trump — I have a copy also — has only 38 pages. But even that is probably way beyond Trump’s attention span. A larger question is whether Trump, who boasts of getting his information from television, ever reads or absorbs anything. Tony Schwartz, the guilt-ridden co-author of Trump’s “The Art of the Deal,” for which he spent months shadowing the subject, told Jane Mayer in the New Yorker (July 25) that Trump “has no attention span.” “This fundamental aspect of who he is doesn’t seem to be fully understood,” Schwartz said. ” … It’s impossible to keep him focused on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes, and even then … “If he had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, it’s impossible to imagine him paying attention over a long period of time …” What, if anything, has Trump ever sacrificed? Like many another affluent young man, Trump escaped the draft with a series of routine student deferments. In the end, he got a medical deferment despite having been active in college sports. None of that was inherently dishonorable. But contrast that with the suffering John McCain endured at the same time as a prisoner of war in Hanoi — the ordeal that Trump has mocked because McCain couldn’t avoid capture. And consider Trump’s 1997 interview with Howard Stern in which he described the risks he had run of catching a sexually transmitted disease as “like Vietnam … better than Vietnam, a little better … “It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier,” he said. Did it not occur to him that a lot of truly brave soldiers came home without their genitals? Or that many more never came home at all? Or was he just being flip? No matter. It is the unguarded comments people make that best reveals their true selves. In that unspeakably ugly moment, Trump exposed himself to be what David Brooks, The New York Times conservative columnist, recently said of him: “He is a morally untethered, spiritually vacuous man who appears haunted by multiple personality disorders.” And yet he might become president. God save the United States from that. ___ Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor of the newspaper now known as the Tampa Bay Times. He lives in suburban Asheville, North Carolina.
