Among the many things Donald Trump will go down in history for, he says, one of the “bravest” things of all was spending half a minute in 2016 playing down his boasts about groping women.
Or, at least, that’s what he says an unnamed general told him.
The former president bizarrely tried to put a profound new spin on his infamous 2016 “grab ’em by the pussy” scandal at a gala for the New York Young Republican Club in New York City on Saturday evening, suggesting that his handling of the fallout (so he’d been told) transcends even the courage of war heroes.
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Trump, facing a string of criminal charges over the 2020 election, appeared to grow nostalgic as he recalled the trouble his 2016 presidential campaign found itself in after he was heard crudely bragging about non-consensual groping in a leaked Access Hollywood tape.
“We had a meeting when it was looking bad,” he said, describing the scandal as one of many “inescapable situations,” and recalling how he’d been urged to drop out of the race just weeks before the election.
“But you know, the next day, or very shortly thereafter, we had the debate… I went onto that stage just a few days later, and a general, who’s a fantastic general, actually said to me, ‘Sir, I’ve been on the battlefield, men have gone down on my left and on my right, I stood on hills where soldiers were killed, but I believe the bravest thing I’ve ever seen was the night you went onto that stage with Hillary Clinton after what happened, and then that woman asked you the first question about it, and [you] said ‘locker room talk.’”
“It’s locker room talk! What the hell?! It’s locker room talk,” Trump said.
During that October 2016 debate, Trump offered a fleeting non-apology for his remarks about women but denied that his “locker room talk” had involved boasts about sexual assault: “I apologize to my family, I apologize to the American people, certainly I’m not proud of it. But this is locker room talk.”
