“I’ve been waiting for him to grow up,’’ she told me tonight. “At the debate I saw how Hillary needled him and got under his skin and after all these months, if he hasn’t been able to control that, I don’t feel that he’d be able to control it in the White House.
.. She did not consider the “Access Hollywood” tape a deal-breaker about returning to Trump.
“I think it was disgusting but it was more bluster,’’ she said. “He wanted to seem like ‘the guy’ with Billy Bush. I still believe in my heart that half of what he says and does is just bravado to make him look bigger and better. Somewhere along the line, he got an inferiority complex. He’s all mixed up.
.. And when the video of Trump’s bizarre St. Louis press conference before the debate with several of the women accusing Bill Clinton of sexual assault hit the Internet, Peggy thought that was a “totally high school move” by Trump.
“I think it will cause women to feel sympathetic to Hillary,’’ Peggy said, shaking her head. “It will remind them of what she’s had to go through with Bill. Bill is not running for office. Maybe Hillary did enable at some point, but I think that was for survival.
.. When she pulled that Right Wing Conspiracy stuff, she really believed his lies, that he had never been involved.”
.. “I think he did really well,’’ Peggy said. “He has done what the Republicans criticized him for not doing in the first debate, attacking her on Libya and the emails.
.. I like the way he walked around to stay in the picture when Hillary was talking.
.. In the end, my conservative sister concluded: “I could see him as president.’’
Donald Trump Talks at Debate, but Many Women Hear Only a 2005 Tape
Abigail Wilson, who is a registered Republican, listened closely to Mr. Trump and was reminded, she said, of the time she was groped by a stranger. The Republican nominee, she said soberly, “may not have physically harmed anyone with his words, but he has the power to do so by example.”
.. It was a striking and singular tableau: a male candidate for president being asked, by the first woman to share such a stage, to defend crude comments in which he had seemed to reduce her gender to its anatomy.
.. “There’s never been anybody in the history of politics in this nation that’s been so abusive to women,” Mr. Trump said, minimizing his behavior as language, not actions. “Don’t tell me about words.”
.. His first appearance in a primary debate, in August 2015, had led to a highly public — and deeply sexualized — attack against a woman, Megyn Kelly,
‘Because You’d Be in Jail’
About 20 minutes into the debate, Donald Trump delivered a menacing threat to Hillary Clinton. “If I win,” he warned, “I’m going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation, because there’s never been so many lies, so much deception.”
Mr. Trump’s promising on national television to use the power of the president’s office to prosecute his chief political rival, to her face, was chilling enough.
But when Mrs. Clinton responded, Mr. Trump dropped the threat of an official investigation and any veneer of the rule of law.
“It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country,” Mrs. Clinton observed.
“Because,” Mr. Trump replied “you’d be in jail.”
It’s hard to think of anything Mr. Trump could have said to more powerfully underscore the truth of Mrs. Clinton’s point. He said, in a widely watched televised presidential debate, that if he became president, he would put political opponents in cages. That’s dictator talk. But it’s not Mr. Trump’s open contempt for the norms of liberal democracy that made my blood run cold. It was the applause that came after. It is the fact that it’s no longer assured that you automatically lose a presidential debate in which you promise to jail your political rival.
Donald Trump: Narcissist, Creep, Loser
Many theories flutter around attempting to explain this non sequitur, most of them suitably Marxian and absurdist. The two best seem to be that recorded evidence is somehow always more powerful than reported or second-hand evidence, however reliable the reported evidence may obviously be. It was, in effect, hot mics that brought down Nixon, as they have brought down many a mafia don—even if in all those cases, too, the recording merely confirmed what any sane person knew already
.. This was not a dominant American Mussolini asserting himself contemptuously on stage. It was, well, a loser, struggling to impress a very insignificant new acquaintance with pitiful boasts about his masculinity. What runs through the tape is, along with his one-size-fits-all brutality, Trump’s deep insecurity and desperate need for approval from other men.
.. He is not boasting so much as begging, looking for Billy Bush’s confirmation of his sexuality and his stardom, as crazy narcissists will. The same thing is true of the newly discovered tapes of his conversations with Howard Stern. He engages in matchlessly creepy celebration of his own daughter as an object of sexual interest, yes, but it’s obvious that he is doing it above all to be admired and accepted by Stern.
He is willing to throw his daughter under the bus and onto a mattress, so to speak, in exchange for a moment more of the King of All Media’s approval. It is the desperate need for validation and success, as much as the mere ugliness, that impresses.