"Have you ever in your life encountered a character as wretched as Donald Trump? For many people, this was a question asked and definitively answered twenty years ago, when Trump was still a real-estate vulgarian shilling his brand on Howard Stern's radio show and agreeing with the host's assessment that his daughter Ivanka was "a piece of ass" and describing how he could "get away with" going backstage at the Miss Universe pageant to see the contestants naked."
"Or, perhaps, his character came clear a decade later, during his first run for the Presidency, when he said of John McCain, who spent more than five years being tortured in a North Vietnamese prison, "He's not a war hero. He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured." This was from a man who avoided the war with four student deferments and a medical deferment for bone spurs in his heel."
Donald Trump displayed vulgar and exploitative behavior early in his public life, boasting on Howard Stern about seeing Miss Universe contestants naked and endorsing crude remarks about his daughter. He disparaged John McCain's military service, preferring those "weren't captured," while having avoided service through deferments and a disputed medical exemption. His rhetoric includes repeated personal insults—"blood coming out of her-wherever," "Horseface," "Fat pig," "Suckers," "Losers," "Enemies of the people," "Pocahontas"—and dismissive phrases like "Piggy" and "Things happen." Years of this conduct have desensitized many observers, while supporters frame the cruelty as authentic persona.
Read at The New Yorker
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