“I have the best words.”
Throughout the entirety of his campaign, Donald Trump has bragged that he has the best of everything: advisers, policies, know-how and, apparently, words.
Cue our collective confusion, then, when, during the last presidential debate, he informed us that the 2005 recording of him boasting about using his celebrity status to sexually assault women is “just words, folks.”
Here’s a direct quote from the recording, in case you haven’t heard yet: “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything."
But back to the main point here. This discrepancy leaves us with two different options: we must either take all of his words to be true or none of them at all.
Both leave us with a rather stark outlook for Trump.
If the first, well, that’s not good. It means that he is a rapist, a birther, an anti-vaxxer, a racist and a misogynist — in other words, everything that we should aspire not to be.
If the second, well, that’s not good, either. It means that Trump, a major party candidate for president of the United States, cannot be taken at his word — any of them, in fact.
Like I said, both are troubling. Frightening. Horrible. Enough to make me want to lock myself in my room and stress-eat nothing but pints of Ben & Jerry’s Half Baked ice cream until the morning of Nov. 9.
When preparing to write my column this week, I almost wrote about something else. Several other IDS columnists had already written about this latest scandal in Trump’s scandal-ridden campaign, and I didn’t want to beat a dead horse.
But the election is less than a month away, and as easy as it would be to metaphorically lock myself in a Trump-less state of mind, bingeing on cartons of calorie-laden ice cream, I simply cannot do that. I can’t.
We cannot allow this to go the way of nearly every other narrative in the news cycle — that is, circulate for a few days, then make an appearance every once in a while as a talking point.
No, this revelation needs to be a watershed moment in the 2016 election. It needs to define the remainder of the election.
We owe it to our country and ourselves to ensure that no one forgets this, but most of all, we owe it to the future generations of our country. Trump’s America is entirely unrecognizable to me: it is hateful and divisive, cruel and untrusting. It sees the worst in nearly everybody.
But Trump’s America is not yet our America. We can prevent it from becoming a reality by refusing to elect him on Nov. 8.
Now is the moment for us to define our country’s beliefs, values, and hopes for the future. Or, if you want to put it in the terms of “Les Misérables,” “It is time for us all to decide who we are.”
Who we are is nowhere near what Trump says we are. And that’s not “just words” — that’s a fact.
