I don't want to spoil anyone's fun but — well, first let's acknowledge what this is all about…
Russian intelligence officers planned to blackmail Donald Trump with knowledge of his alleged "perverted sexual acts," a new report obtained by Buzzfeed alleges. The unverified report by a person claiming to be a former British intelligence official alleges that Russian officials intended to blackmail Trump with evidence of him allegedly hiring multiple sex workers to perform "golden showers" in front of him. The hotel where the acts allegedly occurred were said to be under Russian surveillance.
Is this true? I don't know. You don't know. It's highly unlikely we'll ever know for sure.
But it's true enough for jokes. I mean, Al Gore never claimed he'd invented the internet…and George W. Bush was never as dumb as thousands of jokes made him out to be…and the number of women with whom Bill Clinton had affairs stretched to absurd numbers in the jokes. There's one kind of reality for reality and another kind for jokes.
Those jokes landed because there was just enough truth in them. Gore did make some grandiose claims…Bush did say some stupid things…Clinton wasn't a faithful husband…so the jokes registered with people. If you swapped things around — say, if you did jokes about Clinton being dumb or Gore being horny — they wouldn't work. (You can make jokes about any politician claiming credit for things he didn't do…)
So do we think Donald Trump paid hookers to pee for him? We can't be sure but we know he doesn't act like a guy who would never do that. We're dealing here with a man who loves to grab pussies and walk in on beauty pageant contestants when they're getting dressed and to just plain order people around. He also doesn't act like a guy who'd pay the hookers what he'd agreed to pay them for their…er, performance, which is the only thing sleazier than ordering the performance.
This is another one of those things that I don't have to have an opinion on. I do think it's something that fits in so well with the image some (most?) people have of Trump, that it ain't going away. If anyone reading this is close to Donald, keep him away from the TV this weekend when Saturday Night Live is on, at least until the end of the cold opening.
If I absolutely have to have an opinion as to whether or not it's true, I'd go with no. I would also note that the worst part of the story would not be the sexual perversion but the idea that the new leader of our nation was and I guess still is being blackmailed.
But I'll stick with no. Why? Because the last eight years, I've seen how easy it is to believe — and even firmly believe — bullshit about people you don't like. I've met people who were as certain as certain could be that Barack Obama was a Muslim terrorist who hated America and was determined to destroy it. (Did you see his speech tonight? That's not a terrorist, folks. That's a president.)
Still, there are people out there who believed it was proven fact that he was gay, that his "First Lady" was a man, that his daughters were adopted and/or junkies, that he palled around with domestic terrorists and said many, many things he never said.
Since a lot of the people who fervently believed and spread those accusations are either now Trump supporters or Trump himself, there's the temptation to believe all the negative, wafer-thin evidence about The Donald…and I don't wanna be like them. If I have to pick, I'll pick erring on the side of not believing unproven accusations. So unless and until we have actual video of Trump and the whores in that hotel suite, I'm going to assume it's not true.
It's just true enough for jokes. Because, boy — when you're dealing with a personality like Trump and an allegation like this — they are soooo easy!