I can’t say much about the veracity of the author other than that he has a long resume in Wikipedia, so he’s not some out-of-nowhere blogger. Michael Gross - Wikipedia
I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if it’s true. True or not, we’re probably going to be hearing a lot about this.
And it wouldn’t matter to his most dedicated supporters. After all, it’s in the past.
:smack:
(I just saw a BBC News report about Trump supporters at Liberty University, the college founded by Jerry Falwell. 'Nuff said.)
The delicious Irony is that Trump could put an end to all this stuff by just publicly proclaiming that yes, he was a sinner in the past but he “found Jesus” and is now a reformed man. The evangelicals love that stuff, from what I’ve seen they seem to hold someone that did terrible things and then was “born again” in higher esteem than someone that lives a good decent life from the start.
But of course he can’t do that, because that would mean admitting he did something wrong, even if it was 20 years ago. The phrase “hoist by one’s own petard” was never more appropriate.
The evidence for the main claim to wrong-doing, that Trump was basically pimping underage girls seems pretty vague.
Beyond that, it doesn’t seem particularly revelatory. I don’t think even his evangelical supporters would deny that he threw a lot of parties with young woman and rich older men back then. And the fact that parties in NYC in the 80’s had a lot of cocaine use isn’t going to shock anyone.
If he admitted to what’s in the article then he’d be proclaiming engaging in, or at least promoting, statutory rape.
I think if Trump was to do this today it wouldn’t matter to his dedicated supporters. His supporters think a lot like Trump !
Let’s see if any of those girls come forward. I know he has at least one lawsuit coming up involving a 13 (at the time) year old girl.
Of course, as always, these things come down to he said, she said. It would be interesting if any children turned up with the right DNA who had been born to underage mothers, but that’s pure speculation.
Some of his male supporters would probably want in on it.
Well obviously, what I meant was making a statement that he was a sinner in the past and did bad things without confirming that any specific thing was true or not.
In the case of the Daily Beast article though, it isn’t even that. There isn’t any particular girl mentioned, that some of the girls were under-aged seems to be more or less a guess on the part of the two sources, whether the under-age girls had sex at the parties is just hinted at and there isn’t really anything to say that Trump is responsible for said hypothetical sex except innuendo.
I’m certainly willing to believe Trump was involved in lots of sleezy modeling-related grossness in the 80’s and beyond. But I don’t really like “reporting” that just kinda throws out some vague suggestion someone might have done something horrible without some hard evidence, or even making a specific accusation.
The article clearly wants us to walk away with the impression Trump was pimping under-age girls in the 80’s. That’s certainly a big deal if its true, but since the article author doesn’t seem to even want to make the claim explicit, nevermind provide any evidence for it, I think the voting public will, righly, largely ignore it.
At this point, it doesn’t really matter what Donald Trump does. Partisans will accept him no matter what he does. Partisans on the other side will of course deride him and his supporters. But consider this:
Two thirds of independents don’t care about the lewd video.
Most of his supporters and most of those considering voting for him know damn well he is a racist.
Most republican voters don’t really care about his sexual assault claims.
Trump is buoyed by an extremely strong, almost irrational anti-incumbent, anti-establishment sentiment, particularly among middle class white voters, and that is not going to go away. They feel like they’re country and their culture is being stolen from them, that a giant mass of brown hordes are taking over the simple country of Reagan that they grew up in. And that’s a very, very powerful set of psychological dynamics to fight.
What this really means is, if Trump weren’t so completely and utterly flawed, if he were just merely political incorrect, we would probably be gnashing our teeth at the prospect of a convincing Donald Trump victory.
It doesn’t matter what is revealed in the media, because it is just more evidence that the media(and reality) is biased against Trump.
Michael Gross is a major chronicler of the New York scene, especially the modeling world. He mentions having Trump as a character in two books. I just read one of them, My Generation. He uses the biographies of 19 baby boomers as stand-ins for the experience of the generation. I hadn’t realized that Trump was one of them when I started. The book was written in 2000, so it’s funny to go back in time and see pre-television celebrity Trump as just a loud-mouth rich guy, although he was in hindsight clearly on the path to where he is today.
I don’t really get why people keep saying this. The various negative revelations about Trump pretty clearly have hurt him, and indeed may well be the reason he won’t be President. One might feel they should have done even more damage, but they certainly haven’t been ignored.
And indeed, if actual evidence of the wrong-doings the article hints at do come out, Trump will certainly lose more support.
My take on this is that if this story gets traction, it’ll mostly just solidify Trump’s loss of support, mostly among women, that’s already been happening. People who still consistently support Trump after all that we’ve seen aren’t going to be shaken by this story. It might be one last push that tips away from Trump anyone still on the fence about him - though it’s hard for me to imagine there are still people wavering back and forth about voting for Trump, I guess there still are some.
So if this story gets traction, I think we might see Trump getting only about 40% of the vote in two weeks, while Hillary probably pulls in the lower 50s.
But it’s equally possible at this point, IMHO, that this story just gets lost in the shuffle of ‘Trump = dick’ stories, and doesn’t have any impact at all.
Meh, surprisingly weak tea.
As far as wild parties in the 80s? Who didn’t??
If he has hosted a party where underage (not just teenage, but under age) girls are drinking, doing drugs and having sex, that may be bad. But a generic accusation ain’t carrying any water. For all we know, they were just young girls. Now that I’m in my 50s, even some 25 yr olds look under age to me.
There is no way to know if an under aged girl was there unless he knows about a *specific *girl and saw her ID. Now, if SHE comes foward and says she got high and screwed at a Trump party while under aged, then we got something.
Trump has not lost any support in a week; there is no evidence that the Access Hollywood tape hurt him any more than it did for the four or five days after it came out, nor is there evidence the third debate hurt him. Clinton’s lead has remained about the same, or maybe even shrunk by a point.
Trump’s fall from a near-tie to a very probable defeat started with Debate 1. For all the sturm und drang around the Access Hollywood tape, if you look at a graph of the two candidates’s relative support you would be hard pressed to explain where it happened, if you don’t remember what date that tape came out - and since it more or less coincided with Debate 2, you can’t say for sure which did the most damage. The margin suddenly expands immediately upon completion of Debate 1 and falls steadily until just before **Debate 3, at which point it has remained the same. (Both candidates’s national poll numbers, according to 538, are going up at the same time - people making up their minds and fleeing third parties.)
In truth, I don’t think this story will change anything. The fact Trump is a sexual predator was already well known. I knew he was into humping teenaged girls before this, and I’m no investigative reporter. The Access Hollywood tape apparently doesn’t matter much; “he grabs women by the pussy, so what, boys will be boys, they were all sluts anyway” is the female Trump supporter’s response. To a Trumpist, these stories are all lies and Clinton did worse. There is no more convincing that can be done.
Hillary picked the perfect opponent :D!
He will lose the support of 20% of Republicans. That is about it. The other 80% will vote for him no matter what.
So a decent Republican candidate may get 50% of the national vote, Trump will get 40%. So 4 out of 5 of general gop voters will support anyone with an R next to their name for president. I have no idea what the numbers would be on the Democratic side if we had our own Trump. Bill Clinton had his failings (affairs, accusations of rape and sexual assault) but he was nowhere near what Trump is as a person or politician.
Thank God for the 20%.
I didn’t. I was 26 in 1980–a grown-ass man–and if you think everybody in the 80s partied like it was Studio 54 you have another think coming.