American politics: from hope to grope

Private Eye’s current cover (below) pretty much sums up the direness. But the interesting thing is that it took a recorded private conversation from more than a decade ago to crystallise the desperate situation in which such a loathsome man can even reach this stage in the presidential electoral race, let alone stand a good chance of becoming president of the United States of America.

That Donald Trump is a sexual predator and pervert who holds women in utter contempt has never been a secret. He isn’t even stylish about it. He gropes and grabs like a cave-dweller at a Maltese disco circa 1978.

His first wife, Ivana Trump, whose blonde bee-hive is far more famous than her ex-husband’s hair, made sure that his bad habits and personality flaws (that’s an understatement) featured in every newspaper across the free world back in the early 1990s when she was divorcing him. She even starred as herself in the 1996 film, The First Wives Club, advising other wives “Don’t get mad, get everything.”

Back then, they were the second most famous and written-about married couple in the world; the first were the Prince and Princess of Wales. Both couples split at the same time and their bitter divorce wrangles filled pages of even the most serious newspapers.

Everybody knew that Trump is a lousy pervert, except that it seems they didn’t, having put the accusations down to the ‘woman scorned’ complaints of a series of angry ex wives. His supporters even ignored the contemptuous remarks Trump made about women on air. But when people heard that secret recording from 2005, in which he boasted about “grabbing women by the pussy” and how they “let me do it because I’m a star”, there was widespread shock and disgust.

That recording shattered the barrier which had, until then, kept the women he groped, and on whom he tried to force himself, silent. Several of them have since come forward to speak to the newspapers and on television. Some of those women are now in their 60s and 70s, giving a good indication of just how long his groping career has been.

Is he fit to be President of the United States? Of course not, and not only because he thinks women are there to be groped and paid off with money. It is truly frightening to see what is happening, that Americans can shift so inexplicably from Barack Obama and what he stood for, to Donald Trump and what he stands for. Given what is happening in European politics, too, there is scant comfort.

London socialite Jemima Khan goes to a Hallowe’en party dressed as a woman being groped by Donald Trump.