“Lewd” was apparently not a strong enough word for the editors of The Washington Post when they tried to describe the contents of a recording they had acquired, in which Donald J. Trump is heard in a 2005 conversation with Billy Bush, the Access Hollywood host; they went with “extremely lewd” in their headline.
But “lewd,” extremely or not, fails to capture the full essence of that recording. Lewd can be funny. Lewd can even be sexy, in a sleazy, slumming-it kind of way. Lewd can be fine, if whatever it is describing is consensual and no minors are involved. The staff members of New York magazine got a lot closer with a tweet containing a link to the tape: “Extremely disturbing,” they called it.
You might say the recording crosses the line from “extremely lewd” to “extremely disturbing” about a minute in, when Trump starts boasting that when he’s attracted to women, he just starts kissing them. “I don’t even wait,” he says. “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” he says, including, apparently, grabbing the most private part of a woman’s anatomy.
His thinking is ingenious in how hard it works to justify itself, how it flatters Trump: Take first, then claim they let you; explain it all with an inflated notion of your desirability and celebrity. Hovering underneath all that supposed desire is contempt: These women are so stupid, they’ll let me do anything. If there were any doubt that Trump is objectifying a young soap opera star he is about to meet, Trump’s pronoun choice, to Bush, as he sees and describes her, says it all: “It looks good.” It. Not she. It.
But in some ways, the most disturbing moment of the recording transpires when Bush and Trump descend from the bus. Waiting for them is the actress Arianne Zucker of “Days of Our Lives.” On the bus, her hotness has inspired cackles, what sound like high-fives, expletives. Both men have talked about her legs. Trump has already thrown back some Tic Tacs, in case he decides to lunge for a kiss. But when he steps off the bus, Trump greets her with the courtesy of a Boy Scout: “Hello, how are you, hi!”
“Hi, Mr. Trump, how are you?” Zucker says. She is polite; she is professional.
It is a moment of deeply uncomfortable dramatic irony: We, the audience, know something she does not, which is that only moments earlier, Trump was coldly appraising her body parts. Bush, acting as a two-bit pimp, asks Zucker to hug Trump, and then asks for a hug himself. Her small laugh is as fake as Trump’s politeness; it is all excruciating to watch. Then the three of them, now performing, waltz off together. Zucker is game to play along when Bush presses her to answer which of the two men she would pick. “Both!” she finally says.
Maybe Zucker thinks that she is in on the joke. But really, we know, the power is all theirs. It is not just that the two men have erased her as a person, during their conversation on the bus; it is that they share the knowledge that they have done so, silently, collectively, which amplifies their power over her. It is all unspoken, a clubby secret, a male form of control based on exclusion.
Bush and Trump on that bus are, in so many ways, the apotheosis of what so many of Hillary Clinton’s supporters are ready to overturn: the musty sleaziness that went out of style in the 1970s; the old bosses who want their secretaries pretty; the cigar-chomping power brokers who think sexual harassment is the woman’s problem; the drooling dimwits who have gotten further than they should have on connections and male privilege. The bus is the old boys’ club that women rarely get to see inside — but it may also turn out to be the wrecking ball that takes down the club for good.