The past few weeks have been the most damaging to Donald Trump in his bid for president, between leaked footage of the candidate bragging about kissing and groping women, followed by a disastrous second debate, to the ensuing accusations made by a growing list of women who claim that Trump groped or assaulted them. And in between all this, Trump’s past interviews with Howard Stern have been coming back to haunt him, as every couple of days another interview surfaces in which he does everything from dole marital advice about “vagina being expensive,” to calling his own daughter a “piece of ass” and speculating what sex would be like with the troubled then-teen Lindsay Lohan. And let’s not forget where Trump’s remarks about supporting the Iraq War came from.
So unwittingly, the shock jock has found himself right smack in the middle of a presidential election. And while it would be easy enough to court attention and beat media outlets to the punch by replaying his own salacious interviews with his frequent former guest, Stern explained on his SiriusXM program Monday morning why he’ll never do that.
“These conversations that I had with Donald Trump weren’t done in private like the Billy Bush tapes, this was on the radio,” said SiriusXM host Stern, lashing out at reporters who claim to have unearthed the chats. “Why don’t I play all the tapes? I have to tell you why: I feel Donald Trump did the show in an effort to be entertaining and have fun with us and I feel like it would be a betrayal to any of our guests if I sat there and played them now where people are attacking him.”
Of course that makes perfect sense. Who would want to be interviewed by someone, especially by someone like Stern, if the subject knew there was a chance he would turn around and use their words against him. He emphasized that his conversations with Trump were never about “f*cking him over” and that at the end of the day it was about having a good time.
“I knew I had a guy who loved to talk about sex… I had a guy who loved to evaluate women on a scale of 1-10. These are avenues I went down because I knew it would entertain the audience.”
Stern also admitted that he 100 percent saw this coming. When Trump’s bid for president was starting to look serious, he personally called him up and warned him: “Don’t you know what they’re gonna do to you? Don’t you know they’re gonna open up everything?”
But despite his long friendship with Trump, one thing Stern can’t get on board with is the candidate’s so-called “locker room talk.”
“But this idea of ‘locker room talk’… all the times I’ve been around guys — and believe me when I’m around guys 85 percent of the times you’re talking about p—y– but I have never been in the room when someone has said ‘grab them by the p—y,” said Stern, repeating Trump’s boast from the bus. “No one’s ever advocated going that step where you get a little bit, ‘hey I’m going to invade someone’s space.’ … A lot of [locker room banter is] real kind of desperate talk. The reason it’s in a locker room is because no one’s proud of it.”
When even a guy who has built his empire on crass sex talk and vulgarity thinks Trump took it too far, that alone should be enough reason to give serious pause.
(Via Billboard)