Bad baby

The intoxicating scent of early-autumn Schadenfreude!

— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) October 8, 2016

I loved the suggestion in the "apology" that the Trumpian misbehavior was dredged out of the distant past:

“I’ve said and done things I regret, and the words released today on this more-than-a-decade-old video are one of them,” Mr. Trump said of the hot-mike recording of him bragging to Billy Bush, then the host of NBC’s “Access Hollywood,” about his groping and uninvited kissing of women.

.@BraddJaffy "More than a decade-old video" I was only 60 back then. Boys will be boys!

— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) October 8, 2016

Actually I guess he was only 59. This morning old Christian baby Ralph Reed was reinforcing that theme on the radio: "It was eleven years ago", like how can you even talk about something so remote?

“Anyone who knows me knows these words don’t reflect who I am,” Mr. Trump continued.

No, I think they reflect very precisely who we've long thought he is—as we always say, for lack of a non-medical term, a psychopath. Someone with a limitless sense of entitlement, an inability to imagine the perspective of another person, and at the same time an insatiable need to be admired and praised. Things we've mostly been noticing about his attitude toward money, and social bonds, but why shouldn't they extend to his attitude toward sex? And of course we already knew they did, it's been thoroughly reported.

Temple Taggart, Miss Utah in 1997, was uncomfortable with how forward Mr. Trump was with young contestants like her in his first year as the owner of Miss USA, a branch of the beauty pageant organization. As she recalls it, he introduced himself in an unusually intimate manner.

“He kissed me directly on the lips. I thought, ‘Oh, my God. Gross.’ He was married to Marla Maples at the time,” she said. “I think there were a few other girls that he kissed on the mouth. I was like, “Wow, that’s inappropriate.”

And while we think of him as a dirty old man, and at least a would-be rapist if not necessarily a practicing one, there's an infantile character to it:

“You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them,” Mr. Trump says. “It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.”

Not like a real toddler I've ever met, but a sickly toddler in an early Victorian novel, maybe (where they wouldn't name the grabbing at the genitals), hysterically needy and unrestrained. That unfiltered egotistical quality in little kids is really kind of lovely, too, but only because you know they'll grow out of it, and because they're so genuinely dependent on you, for the time being, and they do know you're a person.

Image via Brain,Child.