So What If The President Likes Nipples?

Here is what I think about this. The Howard Stern show is a shock-jock program that has been on the air since 1986. It is the longest-running show in radio history. Every celebrity who has been on that show has discussed things they would not discuss on the evening news. Trump was on the show regularly for over a decade. He was the kind of guest Stern liked because Trump played the game. He said the things. He answered the questions. He was entertaining.

And the things he said about his daughter — which are the worst of the things, and which I am not going to defend on the merits — were said in 2004, when Ivanka was around sixteen, in a context in which she was being publicly marketed as a model and brand representative of the Trump Organization. The family's whole business model was to make Ivanka into a public face of the brand. She was on magazine covers. She was walking runways. She was in Miss Universe. Trump was on the radio show talking about the brand. He said the wrong things. He should not have said them. The transcripts are embarrassing. They are not, however, illegal, and they are not, on the most charitable reading, sexual — they are a father with a poor filter talking about his daughter on a show that did not have a filter at all. They are also, in a way the press has refused to acknowledge, the kind of boastful, slightly disgusting father-daughter talk that fathers of pretty daughters have been having with their friends in bars since the invention of fathers and pretty daughters. The press treats it as pathological. Fathers of pretty daughters treat it as the kind of thing you say when you have had three drinks and you are proud of your kid and you do not know when to stop.

The press in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2023, and again in 2026 went back through fifteen years of transcripts, picked out the worst moments, and presented them as if they had just been discovered. They were not just discovered. They had been public for years. The press did not cover them at the time because, at the time, Trump was a reality-TV host and a real-estate guy. He became a presidential candidate in 2015. He became President in 2017. The press started covering his past statements as if they were new revelations in 2016 and has been re-running the same material on a cycle ever since. They are the same statements. They have not changed. The press is just running the same material on a cycle, and the women in the press who are most upset about these comments are the same women in the press who, when they were younger and prettier, would have had Trump's direct dial and would have used it.

And the breastfeeding comment — which the press cited as evidence of hostility toward mothers — was made in 2005 on the same program. Trump was asked whether he would prefer his daughter to breastfeed his grandchildren or to use formula. He said something crude about it. The clip circulated in 2015 during the primary. It circulated again in 2024. It will circulate again. The clip has not changed. The press keeps running the same clip. The press also keeps running the same clip of the same young woman breastfeeding in the same restaurant, presented without the father's permission and without the child's consent, every Mother's Day, for a decade. The press is, in this respect, the same kind of person Trump is on the Stern show — it just has better lighting and a more expensive camera.

Here is what I think about this. The Access Hollywood tape was recorded in 2005, leaked in 2016, and treated as if it were live-breaking news in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026. It is the same tape. It has been the same tape for nineteen years. The audio has not changed. The transcript has not changed. Trump has not changed. The press has not changed. The press keeps running the same tape because it is the single most effective piece of evidence the press has against Trump and it is the only one the press does not have to interpret — Trump said the words himself.

And I want to say something about this that I do not think the press is honest about. The "grab them by the pussy" line was not a confession of sexual assault. It was not a description of an event that had happened. It was a description of a fantasy of power. Trump was bragging to Billy Bush — who is, contextually, the kind of man you brag to about women, because Billy Bush was the host of Access Hollywood and his whole professional life was built on the same kind of talk. Trump was performing for Bush. The two men were in a private moment. The press obtained the moment and broadcast it to the world.

What Trump was describing was not a crime he had committed. It was an attitude he held. The attitude is: famous men can do what they want to less famous women, and the women will let them. The press has treated this attitude as if it were a federal crime. It is not a federal crime. It is not any kind of crime. It is a description of an attitude that is, unfortunately, common among rich old men and that the rest of us have known about rich old men for centuries. The press is treating the description of an attitude as if it were the attitude itself. The press is treating a private brag as if it were a public action.

And the "locker room talk" defense was not a dodge. It was accurate. Men do talk like this in locker rooms. Men talk like this in private. Men talk like this when there are no women present. The press has spent a decade pretending that men do not talk like this. The press knows that men do talk like this. The press has covered male athletes, male CEOs, male politicians saying worse things on background for decades. The press treated Trump differently because Trump said the words on a recording. The press treats the recording as evidence. The press treats the recording as if it were news. The press has run the same recording ten thousand times. The press is the only institution on earth that can play the same recording ten thousand times and call it a breaking story each time.

And I want to say one more thing that the press will not say. The woman Trump is describing in that conversation — the unnamed woman he says you can grab by the pussy — is not a real person. She is a composite. She is a type. She is the kind of woman who, Trump is asserting, will tolerate being grabbed. He is asserting this because he is, at that moment in his life, a famous man who has been on magazine covers, and he has been told, by the women around him, that he is attractive, and he has started to believe it. The press treats this as a confession of predatory intent. The press is wrong. The press is treating a man's ego talking to another man's ego as if it were a man's hand on a woman's body. The press has spent a decade treating one man's mouth as if it were ten thousand men's hands. The press's arithmetic is its own problem. The press is the one inflating the number. The press is the one writing the headlines. The press is the one running the tape. The mouth in the recording is one mouth. The press is the multi-million mouth. The press is the assault.

Here is what I think about this, and I want to be careful. The E. Jean Carroll allegation is not the Access Hollywood tape. It is not a fifteen-year-old radio recording. It is a specific accusation by a specific person about a specific alleged event. I am not going to say it did not happen. I am not going to say it did happen. I am going to say: a federal jury in a civil case — where the standard of proof is lower than in a criminal case — found Trump liable for sexual abuse. The jury did not find rape. The jury found sexual abuse. The damages in the first case were $5 million. The damages in the second case — for the defamatory statements Trump made about Carroll after she made the allegation — were $83.3 million. The total is $88.3 million.

And here is the thing I want the reader to think about. The defamation damages — the $83.3 million — were not for the original alleged event. They were for what Trump said about Carroll after she made the allegation. Trump said Carroll was a liar. Trump said Carroll was "not my type." Trump said the photo of him with Carroll was a photo of him with his wife. The jury found those statements defamatory. The $83.3 million is a punishment for what Trump said, not for what he did.

Now, the press has spent the last three years treating the Carroll verdicts as a conviction. They have called Trump a "rapist" in headlines. They have written editorials saying the verdicts proved Trump was guilty of rape. The jury did not find Trump guilty of rape. The jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse in a civil case in which Trump did not appear in person, did not testify, and was advised by his lawyers not to take the stand. The distinction matters. The press has consistently collapsed the distinction. The press has done this because the women in the press do not have a sense of proportion. The press has spent its entire professional existence being told, by the women in the press, that all women are equally credible when they say they have been assaulted, and the men in the press have been afraid to point out that some women are not equally credible, and the result is a press that has lost the ability to make fine distinctions between sexual abuse and rape, and the result is that a man who has been found liable for sexual abuse in one civil case is called a rapist in 10,000 headlines.

And the "not my type" line — which the press has used as evidence of Trump's contempt for women, as if it were a separate confession — is, in fact, a defense. The defense is: I did not have sex with this woman because she is not the kind of woman I have sex with. The press has treated this as evidence of guilt. The press is wrong. The press is treating a denial as a confession because the press does not know how to read a denial by a man who has been accused of something by a woman he did not want to have sex with. And here is the thing the press will not say: Trump was, in 2019, seventy-three years old, and Carroll was, by the standards of the New York fashion-magazine world in which both of them lived, an elderly woman. They were not in the same dating pool. They were not in the same building's lobby. The "not my type" line is not a confession. The "not my type" line is the kind of thing a man says when he is being publicly accused by a woman he has never met, which is what was happening.

And the alleged event — the dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman in the mid-1990s — was not a crime scene that anyone investigated at the time. The police were not called. Store security was not called. Carroll did not go to a hospital. Carroll did not report the event. Carroll did not tell her friends. The event was alleged twenty-three years after it allegedly happened, in 2019, in the middle of the 2020 presidential campaign. The press has treated this as a serious allegation because it is a serious allegation. The press has not asked why the press did not ask the question of why the allegation surfaced in 2019 and not in 1996, and the press has not asked why Carroll chose to publish the allegation in a magazine and not to the police. I am not saying those questions resolve the question. I am saying the press has not asked them. The press has not asked them because asking them would slow the story down. The press does not want to slow the story down. The press does not want to slow the story down because slowing the story down would require the press to admit that some of the women in the press are not as credible as the women in the press need them to be.

Here is what I think about this. The "blood coming out of her wherever" comment was about Megyn Kelly, who had asked Trump a question he did not like. The comment was crude. The comment was dismissive. The comment was, in the moment, widely understood as a joke — Trump was on a post-debate show hosted by Anderson Cooper and he was riffing on the way Kelly had been pressing him. The press took the "wherever" as a reference to menstruation. Trump said later he meant her nose, but the press has not accepted that explanation because the press does not want to accept that explanation.

And the "nasty woman" comment — at the third presidential debate, after Clinton had just finished a long answer about Social Security — was said to be about Clinton's tone. The phrase became a feminist rallying cry. T-shirts were printed. The phrase is now permanently associated with Trump's alleged misogyny. The phrase was said in a single moment in a three-hour debate. The press has built a multi-year narrative on top of a single off-the-cuff comment in a 2016 debate. The phrase was said, and the women in the press were furious, and the women in the press have been furious about it for ten years, and the women in the press are, in their own way, as unable to let things go as Trump is unable to let things go. The press's refusal to forgive the "nasty woman" comment is a window into the press's own psychology, not into Trump's.

And the thing I keep coming back to is that the press has not done this for any other presidential candidate. Al Gore sighed. John Edwards got a $400 haircut. Mitt Romney was caught on a hot mic saying 47% of Americans would never vote for him. Barack Obama told a roomful of San Francisco donors that rural Americans "cling to their guns and religion." Joe Biden got handsy with women and children for years before the press wrote about it — and when the press did finally write about it, the press was sympathetic to Biden, because Biden was their kind of man. Donald Trump said "locker room talk" once in 2005 and the press has been running the same tape for a decade. Every other presidential candidate has been allowed to move on. Trump is the only one who is not allowed to move on. The reason Trump is not allowed to move on is that the women in the press do not want him to move on, and the men in the press do not have the spine to overrule them.

Here is what I think about this. The Stormy Daniels payment was a payment to a woman to keep quiet about a consensual affair that happened a decade earlier. The affair was not a crime. The hush-money payment was not a crime. The reimbursement of the hush-money payment was, allegedly, a crime — the falsification of business records to hide the reimbursement. Trump was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records, a Class E felony in New York. He received no jail time.

And I want to say something about this that the press does not want to say. Stormy Daniels is an adult film actress. Her professional life is built on her body. Her income is derived from sex work. The press has been covering her story, by her own account, in ways that are sexually explicit. She has done interviews in which she described the alleged encounter with Trump in detail, including her own anatomy. The press has run those interviews. The press has built a multi-year narrative on top of a sex worker's allegations about a married man. The press is in a business that monetizes her body. The press is also in a business that moralizes about Trump's body. The press is in the same business Stormy Daniels is in, and the press is in a worse position than Stormy Daniels, because Stormy Daniels is honest about being in the business and the press is dishonest about being in the business.

And the conviction — the first felony conviction of a former U.S. President — was not for rape, not for sexual assault, not for sexual abuse, not for any of the things the press has spent a decade saying Trump did. It was for a paperwork crime. The jury found that Trump had falsified business records when he reimbursed his lawyer for a payment to a woman. The press has called this a "conviction" and has cited it as evidence that Trump is a sexual predator. The conviction is not for a sexual crime. The press is treating it as a sexual crime. The press is treating the conviction as if it were the predicate offense for all the other allegations. The press is treating the conviction as if it validated everything else. The conviction did not validate everything else. The conviction validated nothing else. The conviction was for a separate crime, on a separate set of facts, decided by a separate jury, in a separate case.

Here is what I think about this, and the reader will notice that my tone is going to be different in this case, because the press's treatment of this case warrants a different tone.

Eleven women. None with a police report. None with contemporaneous evidence. None with a corroborating witness. All surfacing in the final weeks of a presidential campaign, after the Access Hollywood tape gave them a permission structure to do so. And the press treated all eleven as equally credible on the same day, in the same New York Times feature, as if the press were a dating-app profile of available accusers. The press did not investigate any of the eleven. The press did not cross-check any of the eleven against any contemporaneous record. The press did not interview any of the men the press knew who had been around Trump in those years. The press collected the allegations the way a man collects women at a party: by showing up and letting the women come to him, and then pretending that the women who came to him are the women who were there.

And I want to be direct about something the press will not say. The reader should notice that not one of these eleven women is the kind of woman Trump is on record as being interested in. Not one. The Trump on the Howard Stern show, the Trump in the Miss Universe dressing rooms, the Trump at the parties, the Trump in the boardrooms — that Trump is interested in a specific kind of woman, and the eleven women in the New York Times feature are not that kind of woman, and the press knows this, and the press has never once in ten years of writing about this asked the obvious question of why the women who have accused Trump of touching them are not the women Trump touches. The press does not ask this question because the answer would disrupt the narrative, and the narrative is more important to the press than the truth.

And the Holvey case — the Miss USA dressing-room inspection allegation — is worth lingering on because it is the one that maps most closely to the Access Hollywood tape. Holvey alleged that Trump walked through a line of contestants in a dressing room and kissed her on the mouth. Trump has hosted Miss USA. Trump has been around contestants. The Holvey allegation, if it were true, would be the kind of thing that, in a normal news cycle, would result in a single AP brief. In the 2016 cycle, it resulted in a New York Times feature, a CNN town hall, a Law & Order: SVU cameo, and a follow-up documentary series. The press treats every allegation against Trump as if it were the story. The press treats every allegation against any other man as if it were a Tuesday.

And I want to say something about the press's tone in covering these eleven women. The press described the women as "brave." The press described the women as "coming forward at great personal cost." The press described the women as "the kind of women the press is proud to amplify." The press did not describe the women as credible. The press did not investigate the women. The press did not vet the women. The press did not ask the women about inconsistencies in their stories. The press amplified the women, and the press called the amplification journalism, and the press has been calling the amplification journalism for ten years. The press has spent ten years treating these eleven women as if they were plaintiffs in a class action, when the press has not even done the discovery.

Here is what I think about this, and I think this is the case the press is most wrong about.

The Ivana deposition is, by any standard, the most serious "accusation" against Trump that has ever been entered into a court record. It was made by his ex-wife. It was made under oath. It was made in a divorce proceeding in which the two parties were at war with each other and in which the deposition was being used to negotiate financial terms. Ivana had every incentive to make the strongest possible accusation. The accusation was: Donald raped me.

And then Ivana walked it back. Ivana did not walk it back under pressure from Trump's lawyers. Ivana did not walk it back in exchange for money. Ivana walked it back in a 1993 interview with People magazine, three years after the deposition, in which she said she did not mean rape in the criminal sense, that she meant Donald had "violated" her, that the use of the word had been a mistake, and that she did not believe Donald had committed a crime.

The press has known about the walk-back since 1993. The press has chosen to ignore the walk-back. The press has chosen to re-package the original 1990 deposition statement as if it were Ivana's current position. The press has chosen to do this because the original statement serves the press's narrative and the walk-back does not.

And here is the thing the press is not going to say: the Ivana deposition is, on the press's own logic, more credible than the E. Jean Carroll allegation. Ivana was married to Trump. Ivana had a relationship with Trump. Ivana had a contemporaneous record of the events in question. Ivana was in the same room as Trump. Ivana was, in the press's own framework, the "perfect victim" — a beautiful, accomplished, foreign-born woman married to one of the most famous men in America, accusing him in a public forum under oath, in a proceeding where the financial stakes were enormous. And Ivana walked it back. The press has not been able to explain why Ivana walked it back, because the press's only explanation is that Ivana was paid off or threatened, and the press has no evidence for that explanation, and the press's narrative requires the press to never ask Ivana directly what she meant.

And Trump's 2023 town-hall line — "Ivana said I 'raped' her, and I said 'I didn't rape her.' She meant sex." — is, on the merits, an accurate description of Ivana's own 1993 clarification. Trump is, in that moment, repeating what Ivana said about herself. The press treated Trump's statement as a new scandal. The press treated a man accurately quoting his ex-wife as if it were a new confession, and the press did this in a year in which the press had Ivana's 1993 walk-back available in any database search, and the press did this because the press's narrative requires the press to never acknowledge that Ivana herself did not believe she had been raped.

And I want to point out, in closing this case, that Ivana Trump died in July 2022. She is not available to clarify the deposition. The press, after her death, has continued to treat the original 1990 statement as Ivana's position. The press has continued to do this knowing that Ivana is no longer alive to defend her own walk-back. The press is, in this respect, in the same position as the press is in the Carroll case: the press is treating a dead or absent woman's worst statement as her final word, and the press is doing this because the woman is not available to correct the press. The press does this with men too, but the press does it with women more often, and the press does it with women more often because the press has decided that women are not allowed to walk things back, and the press has decided this because the press is run by women who are still angry about things that men who are no longer alive did to them.