Let's summarize what the New York Times told us Sunday about Donald Trump and women.
First let me advise: These matters should not be discounted. While Trump is not likely to lose support on account of them, he is hampered by them in his vital task of becoming more palatable and gaining voters. Forty-one percent won't win.
More than that, this issue provides a vivid microcosm of the Trump phenomenon and the current American political mood.
Here is the Trump as described: He is maturity-arrested, stuck in a high-end frat house. He is obsessed with the female physical form. He objectifies women. He rates them, even his daughter, on the time-honored one-to-10 scale.
He demeans them, either by ogling them or referring to them as unattractive. He is too forward. A kiss on the lips is not the appropriate way to accept introduction to a beauty pageant contestant.
But he hires women at high managerial levels and has done so since the dark ages of 1980, saying that women, by having more to prove, tend to work harder than men. He then supports them in those high positions.
Imagine: a person as a matter of flaw and nuance.
Now let me tell you what's showing up in my email and in social media contacts in response to that article: Well, yeah, but did Trump ever drive a woman into the water and leave her to die? That's a Ted Kennedy reference. Or: Well, yeah, but did anyone in that article accuse Trump of exposing himself and making a crude or rough advance, even, in one case, getting accused of rape? That's a Bill Clinton reference.
In these contexts, Kennedy and Clinton represent the disdained state of our general modern politics--hypocritically different in private reality from the public fraud, and excused and forgiven by the media and in history.
And Trump represents the upturning of that disdained state of our modern politics.
Here's what else I'm hearing: We have in Trump a case of knowing what we're getting. People tell me, and here I must meekly concur, that Trump's behavior is a version, albeit exaggerated, of what we've always called--or until very recently called--a red-blooded American male.
Some say Trump is indeed over-the-top, a caricature, but that he's getting smeared for mostly common attitudes while reigning political giants get passes for behaving worse and lying about it.
The Times tells of a young model attending a pool party at Trump's resort. Trump escorts her to a room and asks her to go into that room and put on a bikini. She does so and emerges from the room in her scantiness. He says "wow." He takes her back to the pool party and shows her off as a "Trump girl."
She now says she wasn't demeaned, which raises an interesting question. Is the issue of whether a woman is demeaned a matter of her own, shall we say, choice? Or may the rest of us see the obvious and deem her demeaned--not only by Trump, but herself--whether she thinks so or not?
I tried out that question Wednesday morning on an audience including scores of women. Many of them told me only she can say whether she was demeaned.
So men shouldn't ever objectify. But it's up to a woman whether she is offended by being objectified.
Alas, I have wandered into a minefield.
But to iterate: Trump does not stand accused of leaving the woman in question, demeaned or not, to drown. Nor does he stand accused of entering the room with her to take controverted behind-closed-door liberties, as has been alleged of Trump's opponent's husband by Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick.
The conclusion to be drawn from the Times piece is the same as the already prevailing conclusion applied to the Trump phenomenon generally.
It's that he gets away with behavior that has typically destroyed politicians because he tends to be transparent in his misbehavior and is thus the pre-eminent anti-politician at a time America has grown ill over standard politics and its raging hypocrisy and fraud.
He is judged not by his own behavior, but by the pattern of phoniness of others.
Trump himself has said he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and not lose voters.
I think that's wrong. I think he'd drop 15 points in the polls, from the low-40s to the high-20s, give or take, depending on the nature of the person shot.
What's too bad is that this rule-breaking transparency Trump represents, and which has so remarkably jumbled America's political culture, is not, in that transparency, more mature and reasonable and responsible and attractive.
Transparency is a good thing. But it can't forgive what is revealed.
If what you see is what you get, then beware of what you see. You see.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 05/19/2016