AP Photo Fourth Estate The Least Surprising ‘Surprise’ of the Campaign Anyone paying attention knows that Trump's sexist behavior has been documented—over, and over, and over. Here's the record.

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

For anyone watching, it's been there the whole time.

The 24/7 panic on cable news about the Donald Trump tape—and the growing sentiment among concerned Republicans that their candidate is an undisciplined, impulsive lout who doesn't deserve their nomination—is understandable, given how graphic the new revelations have been.


But how can they be surprised? Trump has never seemed capable of adapting to modern mores about sex and respect. That's not just a drive-by shot at his character: It's a quality that has been as thoroughly and completely documented by reporters as his tax-dodging and his litigiousness.

As the owner of beauty pageants, Trump had a long history of sexually harassing his paid beauties, draping himself with them as if they were living mink jackets—a history documented well before Hillary Clinton brought out the damning story of how he treated one of his Miss Universes, Alicia Machado. His first wife, Ivana, accused him of rape in a deposition, a charge that was widely covered at the time and which she later withdrew. For better than a decade he has feuded with comedian Rosie O’Donnell, engaging in ugly name-calling and defending it when challenged. In 2012, he placed a call to TMZ, telling the site how impressed feminist Gloria Allred would be with his penis if she saw it. Trump has amply demonstrated on Howard Stern’s show and elsewhere his retrograde views. When his daughter Tiffany was just one year old, he speculated about what sort of bod she would have—would she inherit mother Marla’s breasts? Another time he joked about dating daughter Ivanka, which should have earned him ejection from the public sphere long ago, if not the presidential race. Also on Stern’s show, he declared the age of 35 as “check-out time” for women.

As the campaign developed, Trump stayed true to form. Proving himself a schoolyard bully of the lowest order, he trashed opponent Carly Fiorina’s looks. At one point, he broke all the rules of campaign politics to attack the wife of an opponent, retweeting an unflattering picture of Heidi Cruz, Ted Cruz’s spouse, and threatened to “spill the beans” on her—presumably meaning that he would air embarrassing details about her private life.

None of them caused the 24/7 machine of cable and Web news to chase him like a hellhound. What coverage the press produced didn’t upset his juggernaut as it steamrolled to the nomination. But then yesterday afternoon, when the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold broke his story about the 2005 recording in which Trump “bragged in vulgar terms about kissing, groping and trying to have sex with women,” the line was crossed. It seems you can call name-call women and grade them like cattle and people will look the other way. Once you counsel other men to sexually assault women, something changes.

“Grab them by the pussy,” Trump infamously says on the tape. “You can do anything” if you’re a celebrity like him. Elsewhere on the tape, Trump describes an equally smooth move he uses with the ladies. Upon meeting an attractive piece of flesh, he takes a few Tic Tacs—“just in case I start kissing her,” he says. And then, “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.”

Advise men to grab women by the crotch and claim you can get away with it because you’re a celebrity. Force your candy-flavored kisses on the unsuspecting. These are the sexual tactics of a baboon, not a presidential candidate, and the comments seem to have unleashed the pent-up loathing of Trump that has been building since he first announced his candidacy but never could find an adequate purchase. This time around he’s losing Republican supporters by the hour as Republican women and elected Republican officials, who previously stuck with him, are peeling off, leaving him with the dead-enders and the evangelicals still entranced by Mike Pence's place on the ticket. Unless the North Koreans strike us with a nuclear device, the news cycle won’t drag this one out to sea to be semi-forgotten. Trump has found the line and crossed it, and there aren’t enough days between now and Election Day to undo what he said, no matter how profusely he apologizes. He can atone all he wants. Forgiveness will not come.

It’s eerie how Trump’s undoing parallels that of Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, the protagonist of the 1957 film A Face in the Crowd, which chronicles the rise of cornpone entertainer into a media and political force. Rhodes gets his comeuppance when his spurned lover turns on a microphone during the credit sequence of Rhodes’ TV show to capture and broadcast the ugly things he’s saying on set about his fans. It destroys him.

In the case of both Trump and Rhodes, the hot mic drop doesn’t really tell anybody anything new. “The tape is less October surprise than October confirmation,” New York Times reporter Jonathan Mahler offered on Twitter this morning. And as many of his defenders are pointing out, Trump is not the only American man who talks this way: The sentiments he expresses in the tape aren't uncommon among boys and men of sub-basic maturity. You’ll hear what Trump said in locker rooms, factory break rooms, construction sites, Marine barracks, the bar, the frat house and on rap songs. Michael Bloomberg was accused in a sexual harassment suit settled in 2000 of expressing many of the same troglodyte ideas about women, although there is no evidence Bloomberg ever urged other men to grab women by the genitalia or force their kisses on them—an important distinction. See also the seduction style of Arnold Schwarzenegger or the boasting of Lyndon Baines Johnson, of whom biographer Robert Dallek once wrote, he claimed to have “had more women by accident than Kennedy ever had on purpose.” In this anecdote, Johnson awkwardly propositions Washington Star journalist Mary McGrory.

In describing these behaviors as common I make no attempt to “normalize” them. The behaviors are those of unsocialized, pre-civilized louts. But if you know where to look for them, they’ve always been with us and probably always will be. What’s changed since the John F. Kennedy and Johnson’s time is that we can't, officially or unofficially, look the other way indefinitely. Although we have more liberal ideas about marriage and fidelity than we once did—Ronald Reagan was our first and, so far, our only divorced president—there are new and legitimate demands in the political marketplace that disparagement of women comes at a price, and that price is defeat. The transitional figure in this shift from lechers like Kennedy and Johnson to straighter shooters like Jimmy Carter, the Bushes, and Barack Obama is, of course, Bill Clinton, somebody who projects as a modern man but is really a lech throwback. In entering the presidential race, Trump probably thought he could pull off a Bill Clinton-type fusion of the modern and the lech just long enough to get elected. But he was wrong.

What Trump said rightly repulses us. They are expressions that now heard disqualifying him from being president (as if he were qualified otherwise!). But our reactions tell us more about us than they do about him. We knew all along that he was this way. He told us he was this way. In 1999, he explained to Chris Matthews on Hardball that he had a woman problem. “Can you imagine how controversial I’d be?” Trump said. “You think about him [Clinton] and the women. How about me with the women? Can you imagine?” In previous statements and speeches and broadcasts, he gave us generous dollops of the worldview that is fully shaped in the tapes. Were we not listening?

The biggest shocker is not what Trump said on the tape but that it took us so long to wake up to the sort of person he is. If it was possible, the voters who allowed him to get this far should tender their resignations with his.

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This is one of those times I don’t feel like writing a snippy send-off. My email is [email protected]. My email alerts await your subscription, my Twitter feed would like you to follow, and my RSS feed exists for those who don’t want to miss a beat of my heart.