It’s time now for another installment of “Donald Trump disgraces the office of president of the United States.”
Today’s selection comes to us from the past—specifically, a 2003 interview that The Daily Beast dug up, in which Trump bragged about “first-rate pussy.” That’s just some of the “locker room talk” the boil on humanity dispensed in an old Maximum Golf profile; he also paraded his then-girlfriend Melania Knauss in front of his friends, asking, “Is that as good as it gets?” Oh, and when he missed a putt, he flung his club into the water, because Twitter hadn’t been invented yet and he wasn’t president, so he couldn’t simply threaten to blow up the planet with his smartphone.
The issue for the Daily Beast and other outlets isn’t just that Trump, after singling out “a young socialite” at his Mar-A-Lago club, told his Maximum Golf profiler Michael Corcoran that “there is nothing in the world like first-rate pussy.” Apparently, Corcoran included the quote as a “kicker” in his piece, but the former editor in chief, Michael Caruso, replaced “pussy” with “[talent]” before publishing the interview. Corcoran’s then-editor, Joe Bargmann, says he was pressured to take out the word, and when he refused, Caruso changed it.
What’s telling is that, instead of substituting “[expletive]” the way most publications do when avoiding printing obscenities, Caruso, who’s now EIC at Smithsonian Magazine, replaced “pussy” with the inoffensive “talent.” As some journalists have noted, the move seemed to hinge on preserving Trump’s reputation rather than protecting readers from profanities.
This was long before Trump campaigned for president, and just two years before he talked about sexually assaulting women with similar vulgar bravado to Billy Bush on Access Hollywood. But Trump was still fairly influential, even if he wasn’t respected.
Neither the White House nor Caruso has responded to The Daily Beast’s request for comment. But in the meantime, you can ponder how Trump hung out with convicted pedophile (and billionaire) Jeffrey Epstein on the same trip that was captured in the Maximum Golf profile. And in 2002, Trump talked up their longtime friendship in a New York magazine piece, when he said Epstein “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”