Donald Trump, a horsehair mattress stuffed with molding copies of Hustler, is deeply upset by a New York Times story suggesting he can be sexist and somewhat creepy in his private dealings with women. After petulantly tweeting about the story for a while, then calling CNN to yell about it, he moved on to the part where he pretends like he’s going to sue, although his lawyers almost immediately walked that threat back. The Times’ story was, shall we say, not exactly a shocker, depicting a range of interactions from casually sexist to overtly sexist. But Trump has gone into full freakout, launching many aggrieved tweets in the Times’ direction:The Times story was written by Michael Barbaro and Megan Twohey, one of whom is a woman. Trump’s tweets suggest that a man did the whole thing. No symbolism there, no sir. Trump’s ex-girlfriend Rowanne Brewer Lane, also told Fox & Friends Monday that she didn’t find Trump’s behavior demeaning, a statement which I’m sure Trump did not solicit from her or anything.
Trump called the control room of CNN’s New Day to make sure they’d seen it. And now that all of that hasn’t worked to take the wind out of the story’s sails, a Trump Organization attorney named Jill Martin told CNN’s Erin Burnett that a lawsuit was “a distinct possibility.” She added, “I haven’t talked to him about it personally, but, you know, when he’s attacked like that and things are said falsely, he definitely fires back.” Yeah, but most of that “firing back” tends to happen on Twitter, where concepts like being under oath don’t apply. By late Monday night, Trump had moved on to attacking the women quoted in the story directly. Meanwhile, a different Trump lawyer, Michael Cohen, told CNN that he understands there’s a “high bar” for suing media organizations: “It’s a very high bar,” Cohen said. “I don’t think that this is going to end up in litigation. The truth is that The New York Times owes both Ms. Brewer and they owe Donald Trump an apology.”
Cohen added, “They need to do a retraction and they need to actually be fair, because they’re destroying their paper.”Seems unlikely, but worth a shot! This post was updated one minute after publication, and its headline changed, to reflect that different Trump Organization lawyers have different ideas about whether or not anybody’s getting sued here. The biggest pain about buying a new mattress is … well, just about everything. You spend an hour in the store, awkwardly flopping on and off beds trying to find the one that meets the Goldilocks standard of “just right.” Then you have to lug the winning mattress across the parking lot, onto your car roof, up stairs, and into your home. I recently transplanted from New York City to San Francisco, and the first major purchase I made — hesitantly — was a new mattress. But I did things a little differently this time. Casper, called “the Warby Parker of mattresses,” sells mattresses on its website and delivers them to your door in a box not much bigger than a nightstand.
The Manhattan-based sleep startup raised $13 million in Series A funding last August, and famously generated $1 million in its first 28 days after launch. My shopping experience began online, and was over and done with in fewer than 10 minutes. Casper sells just one type of mattress, dubbed “The Casper Mattress,” because the company prefers to “put all our energy into building the ideal bed … rather than confuse you with tens (or hundreds) of models that all start to feel the same after a while.” It combines latex foam for cooling and bounce, and memory foam for support. A hand-sewn, custom-designed cover seals the layers. I ordered a full-sized mattress for $750, comforted by the knowledge that I could return my Casper mattress for any reason within 100 days. Plus, it was free to ship! Less than one week later, it arrived! My roommates wheeled the box on a cart into my room. We turned it upright and cut open the box. Inside, a cloth bag held instructions and …
… the most adorable little letter opener. I held the box at a 45-degree angle as my boyfriend wiggled the mattress out. It weighed about 60 pounds. We cut the mattress free from its felt binding using the letter opener. Then came time for the “unfurling.” The 10-inch-thick mattress expanded and flattened as it filled with air. My boyfriend cut through the plastic and the mattress sprung to life. In seconds, it was ready for sleeping. Here it is, all done up. I’ve slept in the bed for a few nights now, and here are my takeaways. The Casper Mattress is surprisingly springy, even for an experienced Tempur-Pedic-sleeper like myself. Its latex-and-memory-foam combination absorbs and contours to my body like a sponge. That said, the sinkage is minimal. Thanks to the surface layer’s high foam density, I don’t feel like I’m climbing out of a manhole everytime I get out of bed. Does it meet the Goldilocks standard of “just right”? How could it, when ever sleeper’s needs are different?
I would have preferred a slightly firmer mattress, and I hope a variation is available in the future. Still, the convenience and low costs associated with Casper trump all other mattress-buying experiences. It was infinitely easier to maneuver this cardboard box around my apartment building than it would have been to burden it on our backs and strap it to the car’s roof on the way home from the store. Plus, by ordering online, I avoided paying for delivery, shipping, and tip. In the on-demand era, laziness is king. NOW WATCH: Ikea Says Its New Furniture Takes Only 5 Minutes To Assemble — Here’s The TruthHILLARY'S ADVANTAGE: THE MEDIA; TRUMP'S ADVANTAGE: THE ISSUES Say, does anyone remember when Trump was the lightweight with no "policy specifics"? I have an entire chapter in my book, In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!, quoting media savants complaining about Trump's lack of "policy specifics," interspersed, by date, with his major policy speeches and papers.
At this point, the only "policy specific" Trump hasn't given us is which company will supply rebar for the wall. But now, the media's entire campaign against Trump is to prevent him from talking about policy. They would rather talk about fat-shaming than trade, immigration and jobs. Sometimes, it seems like Trump is cheating by taking the vastly more popular side of every issue. The official GOP used to send its candidates out with ankle weights, a 75-pound backpack and blinders. But Trump didn't agree to take any staggeringly unpopular positions, however much the Business Roundtable loved them. He's against amnesty, for building a wall, against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, for Social Security, against the Iraq War and for extreme vetting of Muslim immigrants. That's why the media have to change the subject to something flashy that will capture the attention of the most down-market, easily fooled voters. Trump is a groper! The media's interest in sex scandals goes back and forth, depending on their needs at the moment.
When the last name of the perp is "Kennedy" or "Clinton," they're not interested. When it's "the Duke lacrosse team": Guilty. The fact that a lacrosse team at an elite college had hired a couple of strippers, who -- THANK GOD ALMIGHTY -- turned out to be black, was all the evidence our media needed to conclude that the athletes had committed a gang-rape, based on centuries of entitlement. By contrast, when former U.S. senator John Edwards was cheating on his dying wife -- while he was running for president, paying his mistress with campaign funds and lying to the American people about it, between lecturing us about morality with the unctuous sanctimony that passes for policy in the Democratic Party -- the media primly refused to cover it. That is, until Edwards was out of the race, at which point the media refused to cover it because he wasn't a candidate. (You guys are the best! I love the media.) For more than a year, the National Enquirer had the entire Edwards story to itself.
Finally, its reporters chased Edwards into a hotel bathroom at 2:40 in the morning, after having caught him spending the evening with his mistress and their love-child at the Beverly Hilton. At that moment, when the affair was plastered in photos all over the Enquirer, Los Angeles Times editor Tony Pierce emailed his bloggers, instructing them not to mention the "alleged affair," explaining, "We have decided not to cover the rumors or salacious speculations," since "the only source has been the National Enquirer" -- he might have added, "a vastly more interesting and accurate publication than the L.A. Times.” A few years passed, and suddenly we were back to Duke lacrosse standards of proof. As a rule of thumb, the only sex stories our media believe are the false ones. Emma Sulkowicz, or "Mattress Girl," claimed she had been raped by a fellow student at Columbia University and that college administrators refused to take action against her rapist. Columbia, to refresh your memory, is the institution that invited Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak.
University administrators are constantly changing mascot names and canceling traditional celebrations because some feminist yelps. But, somehow, Mattress Girl's claim that administrators at Columbia turned a deaf ear to her brutal rape was completely believable to our media and political class. You could see the corporate recruiters lining up! Among the many, many articles in The New York Times about brave Mattress Girl, art and culture writer Roberta Smith said her art project -- carrying a mattress around campus to symbolize the weight carried by rape victims -- raised "analogies" to Christ's Stations of the Cross (especially to writers at the Times, where not a minute goes by without their thinking about the Passion). Mattress Girl made the Times' "Quotation of the Day" for this humdinger: "I've never felt more shoved under the rug in my life.” Even as the charges were unraveling, easily fooled U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand brought Mattress Girl as her special guest to President Obama's State of the Union address.
(If only Clinton had known it was possible to invite girls with mattresses to the State of the Union!) After Mattress Girl had spent a couple of years accepting awards, her alleged rapist finally released her texts to him, both before and after the alleged rape. Here are a few from before the alleged rape: "f**k me in the butt” And here are a few after: "I wanna see yoyououoyou” "I love you Paul. Unlike Trump's secretly recorded hot-mic conversation 11 years ago, the Times never thought it worthwhile to quote any of Sulkowicz's messages to Paul -- much less on its front page, sans asterisks. The closest the Times came to acknowledging these texts was to delicately note that the two had "traded mutually affectionate messages.” Continuing the media's winning streak, about the same time as Mattress Girl was sitting for her Smithsonian portrait, Rolling Stone's Sabrina Rubin Erdely was all over the news, reaping accolades for a story about a gang-rape at the University of Virginia even more preposterous than the Duke lacrosse case.
Sadly for the media, the victim wasn't black. But, on the other hand, the alleged perps were "frat boys." (As far as our media are concerned, the lowest circle of hell is reserved for "frat boys.”) Erdely was the toast of the town ... until a few weeks later, when her story completely fell apart. Rolling Stone retracted the article, the Columbia Journalism Review investigated, and there are currently three defamation lawsuits proceeding against the magazine. Now, the same people who brought us the Duke lacrosse case, Mattress Girl and the Rolling Stone abomination -- but who discreetly left John Edwards' sex scandal to the National Enquirer; Bill Clinton's serial sexual assaults to private litigant Paula Jones; and the Kennedy family's whoring to investigative journalists Seymour Hersh (30 years later) and Leo Damore (20 years later) -- these are the people who tell us they're pretty sure Donald Trump is a groper. Three weeks before a major presidential election. Trump has been a rich celebrity for 40 years, employing thousands of women, but this is the first time he has been seriously accused of any sexual impropriety.
You will recall that, just this May, The New York Times conducted a major investigation into Trump's treatment of women -- and came up empty-handed. Trump denies the allegations, but don't expect a "Correction" like this one from the Chicago Tribune, dated Sept. 5, 1996: "In her Wednesday Commentary page column, Linda Bowles stated that President Clinton and the former campaign adviser Dick Morris both were 'guilty of callous unfaithfulness to their wives and children.' Neither man has admitted to being or been proven to have been unfaithful. The Tribune regrets the error.” Strangely, the allegations against Trump don't even tell a larger story about the (apocryphal) "campus rape culture." Trump's not a member of the Duke lacrosse team. He isn't a "frat boy.” The only reason for these 11th-hour claims is that the ruling class doesn't want voters thinking about the immigration policies, trade deals and wars that are destroying their way of life. Ever since Trump started raising the issues that no one else would, the media and the political class have done everything in their power to try to stop our movement.