In the men’s locker room of Donald Trump’s imagination, dudes talk about grabbing at women’s vulvas and gobble Tic Tacs in case their mouths become magnetically affixed to women’s mouths. The women’s locker room, Trump believes, is a little lewder. There, ladies discuss poop.
So the candidate surmised in a 2010 episode of Celebrity Apprentice, when he fired pro wrestler Maria Kanellis for saying something about another contestant’s bowel movements. “This is my board room. It’s not a locker room,” Trump said.
The clip shows Kanellis objecting to the “arrogant” behavior of another contestant, Australian chef Curtis Stone, who’d entered the women’s dressing room to use the bathroom. “You came in our dressing room and you took a crap and left the stench in the room,” Kanellis said. “So that is the whole purpose of why I was upset. It wasn’t your room. It wasn’t your place to go.”
Trump could not countenance such crude language. “That is a little below the belt,” he said. Later, he asked Kanellis if she regretted her mention of poop: “Isn’t it sort of gross, though, bringing that up? It’s like, disgusting.”
In the days since the release of a recording of Trump saying he can kiss and “grab [women] by the pussy” with impunity because he’s a “star,” the candidate has defended his remarks as “locker-room talk.” Bragging about sexually assaulting women is just “one of those things” that happens in locker rooms, Trump insisted at Sunday’s debate against Hillary Clinton. His statement on the Celebrity Apprentice suggests that the locker rooms of the Trump universe are abuzz with conversations about poop, too.
But it’s hard to keep track of Trump’s complicated calculus for determining what kinds of comments are appropriate in which kinds of settings. Talking about one’s penis on the stage of a national presidential debate: classy, appropriate, befitting of an aspiring commander-in-chief. Alluding to poop on a reality show: disgusting, out of place, gauche. Boasting about nonconsensual genital-touching in a bus or locker room: cool, macho, nothing to see here. When a woman engages in locker-room talk, by Trump’s measure, she’s gross. When a man does it—even if he’s trying to be the president, he claims to be the world’s top respecter of women, and his version of locker-room talk sounds like rape apologism—it’s retirement-aged men being boys.
Kanellis was shocked when Trump ousted her from his reality show for failing to meet his sky-high standards of boardroom decorum. “Some of the comments I’ve heard in the past in the boardroom had been 100 times worse than what I said,” she told Niagara Frontier Publications. Indeed, according to a recent Associated Press investigation, Trump was a regular perpetrator of “locker-room talk” in the boardroom. “You’d fuck her, wouldn’t you? I’d fuck her,” he allegedly told a boardroom full of contestants, speaking about another woman in the room. At least he didn’t say anything about her No. 2s.
