Illustration by Edward Steed

What Donald Trump has taken to calling his “locker room remarks”—a strange series of boasts about being able to sexually assault women whenever he wants—are proving the undoing of his campaign, although the comments are just half of the offense. Trump has made a career of opportunism and cruelty; traits regrettable in leaders make for energetic business in the real-estate trade. The deeper perversity rides on his suggestion that discussing stranger-groping, in stark language, is a thing that men do when they’re left alone in gyms, private clubs, or, apparently, a bus. “Let’s be honest—we’re living in the real world,” Trump said in a wan video apology. He elaborated during Sunday’s debate: “Certainly, I’m not proud of it, but this is locker-room talk.”

The phrase has galled many people, not least denizens of locker rooms. In the days after Trump’s apology, professional athletes denied hearing such talk in any gym or arena they’d known. Trump, though, had some basis even if he had no grounds. According to pop culture, locker rooms are places where untempered maleness, like tile mildew, thrives. In “Moneyball,” the locker room was a site of ribaldry and discipline; in “Goon,” it introduced hazing with a helmet; in “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” it brought us counselling on chivalry and Ryan Gosling’s domineering “schwanz.” Conceivably, Trump sought to evoke the last Republican President, whose locker-room affinities were marked enough to title at least one book: “Towel Snapping the Press: Bush’s Journey from Locker-Room Antics to Message Control.” Or perhaps Trump’s allusive goal was simpler. Locker rooms, for boys who are nerdy or effeminate or weak, are traditional sites of shame and bullying as pack order is marked out by the “alpha” elect.

There are, of course, as many women’s locker rooms as men’s. And yet the more traditional female counterpart to the Trumpian locker room is the restroom, which, as Judith Halberstam put it in her influential 1998 book, “Female Masculinity,” “becomes a sanctuary of enhanced femininity, a ‘little girl’s room’ to which one retreats to powder one’s nose or fix one’s hair.” (Also, to spar.) Masculinity has fewer hidden physical rites, but many men believe that they deserve the privileges of tribal privacy all the same. This privilege, robbed of function, can turn dark. Trump’s idea of the locker room, or locker bus, holds that certain men, in certain contexts, can express to one another hidden thoughts that others would misunderstand, were they to hear. It’s a protective sphere with its own vernacular, unquestioned by the world outside.

Another term for this arrangement is “safe space.” Since this spring, when campus disputes carried across the country, safe spaces have received criticism from both the established left, which fears that they stifle free expression, and the right, which regards them as Kumbaya-ism of the worst kind. It is surprising to find Trump, who jets between politically incorrect centrism and the right’s conspiratorial hinterland, alighting on that turf. And yet his devotion to the locker-room safe space makes some sense. The idea that similar experience brings protection to common identity and freer discussion—a safe-space tenet—has been basic to his campaign from the start.

I have written in the past about the loosening effects that this election cycle has had on public language, and the influence that loosened public language has, in turn, on the campaigns. But the locker-room excuse brings the premises of Trumpism into particular focus, because Trump’s outlook, from the start, has rested on a strangely inarticulable group identity. When he speaks about “good patriots” (as opposed to bad ones) or claims that “we lose on everything” (this of the world's most influential economy), a goal is identity recognition: an unum among the pluribus which is addressed but never named. When he talks of people “plotting” secretly (a “cancer from within”), he gathers the like-minded. The Trump campaign is often accused of “dog-whistling”: communicating with a subset of the population through its concerns, if not directly through its language. “Watch other communities, because we don’t want this election stolen from us,” the candidate told a mostly white crowd in suburban Pennsylvania this week. The premise of such efforts is a shared cultural, perhaps even ethnic, identity, protected from the incursions of the politically correct élites, minorities, immigrants, and other un-greats. With his walls and border tests, Trump seeks to make a safe space of the U.S. as a whole.

That idea was plangent on Sunday night. “It’s just words, folks. It’s just words,” Trump purred in response to Hillary Clinton’s catalogue of his misogynistic-seeming behaviors—implying that his supporters knew something that was unquestionable through language. Instead, he offered a threat based on Clinton’s record, suggesting that, as President, he’d put her “in jail,” though she has not been charged with a crime. It was a case of safe-space thinking in its most aggressive form: “we,” united in our shared experience, are uncomfortable with things that she, an outsider, has done, and so she must be punished and prevented from repeating her offense. The debate was a reminder that Trumpism, for all of its bravado, is a politics of victimhood.

On campuses, which are notoriously precarious and unmyelinated ecosystems, victimization can be as real as the predations of the high-school locker room. The notion that aborning trans people can meet for candid conversation with other young trans people, briefly free from broader social scrutiny, does not strike me as inherently crazy; it seems a feasible transition tool for historically cloistered schools seeking new pluralisms. But the risk of safe spaces is the hardening of identity-based resentment—the “we” against the “they”—which can feed off itself in base groupthink.

To believe in protection from the processes of an elected government, even in its checks and balances, or to think that extrajudicial jailings are required to preserve an unnamed “us”: these mark the place where concerns of safety turn into hegemony. American leadership, like American life, is imperfect, unfair, and often oppressive. But the solution is not to claim an entire country as a protected realm, or to fall back on the shared identity of one of many groups that it comprises. Locker rooms, or the confidences that they carry, shouldn’t be sacred ground for bonds of fear, rage, and vindictiveness. And whole nations oughtn’t be protected territories for the uncontested world view of a few. This election, which proves the democratic possibility of change, is the country's surest safe space. Let us—all of us—look forward to gathering there instead.