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Dahlia Lithwick writes about "The Real Donald Trump." Great article.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2016/10/the_sexual_assault_bragging_tape_revealed_the_real_donald_trump.htmlThe groping tape is different, it reveals both the real Trump and the performer Trump, and it turns out the former is actually scarier than the latter.
Partly it’s because we clearly hear a new version of Trump’s voice on the tape. Yes, his standard swaggering tone—so incredibly familiar at this point—is present. But in this tape he’s not bragging at us in a way he wants us to hear. It’s startling because it’s both perfectly recognizable and perfectly novel in its utter grotesqueness. Partly it’s the coarseness, the glowing pride he takes in acts of sexual violence, that makes this feel different from even the worst comments he has made in the past. But the real reason Trump’s “pussy” comments may prove to be the death knell for the nominee—and have led so many in his own party to abandon him already—is that it definitively proves the truth about the things Trump says: Contrary to his repeated claims and his boosters’ hopes, these words aren’t just “jokes” or him playing a role as an “entertainer.” These words are who he really is. There is no hiding from that now.
What changed with Friday’s video revelation is that Trump has been caught in the perfect duality of a born performer: On the bus with Billy Bush, he’s the braggart, the player, the one who cares only about tits and his score sheet—a woman’s physical autonomy and the law itself be damned. The tape lets us see what happens when the cameras come on and the woman he had been describing as an amalgam of legs, purple, and hotness becomes an actual human person, as he switches to performance mode. We watch his face shift into his entertainer mask, we hear his voice soften and witness his fake avuncular performance. He greets his costar for the day—the soap opera actress Arianne Zucker—with a manly, almost distracted "oh, hello, how are you, hi…" made all the more vile by what we’ve just heard—the real Donald Trump talking as if he was ordering talent off the porno menu.
It’s not just, as Jessica Valenti points out, that Arianne Zucker is the punchline to Trump and Bush’s ugly joke. It’s that she is the unknowing witness to the performance of professional civility in a man who just finished arming himself with Tic Tacs in case he felt himself compelled to sexually assault her for the crime of being an attractive woman.
Partly it’s because we clearly hear a new version of Trump’s voice on the tape. Yes, his standard swaggering tone—so incredibly familiar at this point—is present. But in this tape he’s not bragging at us in a way he wants us to hear. It’s startling because it’s both perfectly recognizable and perfectly novel in its utter grotesqueness. Partly it’s the coarseness, the glowing pride he takes in acts of sexual violence, that makes this feel different from even the worst comments he has made in the past. But the real reason Trump’s “pussy” comments may prove to be the death knell for the nominee—and have led so many in his own party to abandon him already—is that it definitively proves the truth about the things Trump says: Contrary to his repeated claims and his boosters’ hopes, these words aren’t just “jokes” or him playing a role as an “entertainer.” These words are who he really is. There is no hiding from that now.
What changed with Friday’s video revelation is that Trump has been caught in the perfect duality of a born performer: On the bus with Billy Bush, he’s the braggart, the player, the one who cares only about tits and his score sheet—a woman’s physical autonomy and the law itself be damned. The tape lets us see what happens when the cameras come on and the woman he had been describing as an amalgam of legs, purple, and hotness becomes an actual human person, as he switches to performance mode. We watch his face shift into his entertainer mask, we hear his voice soften and witness his fake avuncular performance. He greets his costar for the day—the soap opera actress Arianne Zucker—with a manly, almost distracted "oh, hello, how are you, hi…" made all the more vile by what we’ve just heard—the real Donald Trump talking as if he was ordering talent off the porno menu.
It’s not just, as Jessica Valenti points out, that Arianne Zucker is the punchline to Trump and Bush’s ugly joke. It’s that she is the unknowing witness to the performance of professional civility in a man who just finished arming himself with Tic Tacs in case he felt himself compelled to sexually assault her for the crime of being an attractive woman.