The 2016 campaign for the U.S. presidency will likely always be remembered as the first time (and, let’s hope, the last) that a candidate’s genitals became an issue.
The candidate in question is Donald Trump, of course. And for everyone who is familiar with Trump’s history before he entered the presidential race, it is hardly surprising that he’s dragged presidential political discourse down to this unprecedented level of vulgarity.
– Trump, speaking to the Washington Post editorial board
In fact, Trump has been obsessed with the size of his hands at least as long as he’s been a celebrity. In the 1980s, Graydon Carter, the editor today of Vanity Fair, was an editor at Spy magazine, a satiric monthly that poked fun at celebrities, especially including Trump. Carter somehow found out that bullyboy Trump was sensitive about his preternaturally small hands.
“I took to referring to him as a ‘short-fingered vulgarian’ in the pages of Spy magazine,” Carter wrote recently. “That was more than a quarter of a century ago,” Carter continued. “To this day, I receive the occasional envelope from Trump. There is always a photo of him—generally a tear sheet from a magazine. On all of them he has circled his hand in gold Sharpie in a valiant effort to highlight the length of his fingers. I almost feel sorry for the poor fellow because, to me, the fingers still look abnormally stubby.”
And now Trump’s stubby fingers have become a presidential campaign issue. It’s a strange turn of events, for a multitude of reasons, especially since his 16 (or whatever) opponents could have gone after Trump six months ago on any number of faults and foibles, like his well-documented mob ties, his serial adulteries and affairs with porn stars or his many spectacular business failures.
It wasn’t until eight months into the campaign that — finally — Sen. Marco Rubio landed a blow that knocked Trump off his footing. At a campaign event in Virginia, Rubio attacked Trump’s hands.
“And you know what they say about guys with small hands,” Rubio said, smiling impishly. As his offense to propriety registered to the shocked conservatives in the room, Rubio added, “You can’t trust ’em!”
These not-so-veiled inferences about the size of Trump’s junk did not — could not — save Rubio’s failing campaign. There was never any chance that he was going to be elected president, in the first place.
But Rubio’s attack stung The Donald. At the next debate, on March third, he sought to assure his followers that he was well-endowed.
“Look at those hands, are they small hands?” Trump said, showing his hands to the cameras at the outset of the Fox News debate. “And, he referred to my hands — ‘if they’re small, something else must be small.’ I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee.”
Rubio later expressed regret about making Trump’s penis size a campaign issue. But on Monday, at a meeting with the editorial board of the Washington Post, when Trump was given an opportunity to put the issue to rest, he instead went into a 500-word rant about his genitals:
[FRED HIATT, editorial page editor]: Just back to the campaign. You are smart and you went to a good school. Yet you are up there and talking about your hands and the size of private …
TRUMP: No …
HIATT: … your private parts.
TRUMP: No, no. No, no. I am not doing that.
HIATT: Do you regret having engaged in that?
TRUMP: No, I had to do it. Look, this guy. Here’s my hands. Now I have my hands, I hear, on the New Yorker, a picture of my hands.
[Columnist RUTH MARCUS]: You’re on the cover.
TRUMP: A hand with little fingers coming out of a stem. Like, little. Look at my hands. They’re fine. Nobody other than Graydon Carter years ago used to use that. My hands are normal hands. During a debate, he was losing, and he said, “Oh, he has small hands and therefore, you know what that means.” This was not me. This was Rubio that said, “He has small hands and you know what that means.” Okay? So, he started it. So, what I said a couple of days later … and what happened is I was on line shaking hands with supporters, and one of supporters got up and he said, “Mr. Trump, you have strong hands. You have good-sized hands.” And then another one would say, “You have great hands, Mr. Trump, I had no idea.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “I thought you were like deformed, and I thought you had small hands.” I had fifty people … Is that a correct statement? I mean people were writing, “How are Mr. Trump’s hands?” My hands are fine. You know, my hands are normal. Slightly large, actually. In fact, I buy a slightly smaller than large glove, okay? No, but I did this because everybody was saying to me, “Oh, your hands are very nice. They are normal.” So Rubio, in a debate, said, because he had nothing else to say … now I was hitting him pretty hard. He wanted to do his Don Rickles stuff and it didn’t work out. Obviously, it didn’t work too well. But one of the things he said was “He has small hands and therefore, you know what that means, he has small something else.” You can look it up. I didn’t say it.
MARCUS: You chose to raise it …
TRUMP: No, I chose to respond.
MARUS: You chose to respond.
TRUMP: I had no choice.
MARCUS: You chose to raise it during a debate. Can you explain why you had no choice?
TRUMP: I don’t want people to go around thinking that I have a problem. I’m telling you, Ruth, I had so many people. I would say 25, 30 people would tell me … every time I’d shake people’s hand, “Oh, you have nice hands.” Why shouldn’t I? And, by the way, by saying that I solved the problem. Nobody questions … I even held up my hands, and said, “Look, take a look at that hand.”
MARCUS: You told us in the debate ….
TRUMP: And by saying that, I solved the problem. Nobody questions. Everyone held my hand. I said look. Take a look at that hand.
MARCUS: You told us in the debate that you guaranteed there was not another problem. Was that presidential? And why did you decide to do that?
TRUMP: I don’t know if it was presidential, honestly, whether it is or not. He said, ‘Donald Trump has small hands and therefore he has small something else.’ I didn’t say that. And all I did is when he failed, when he was failing, when he was, when Christie made him look bad, I gave him the– a little recap and I said, and I said, and I had this big strong powerful hand ready to grab him, because I thought he was going to faint. And everybody took it fine. Whether it was presidential or not I can’t tell you. I can just say that what he said was a lie. And everybody, they wanted to do stories on my hands; after I said that, they never did. And then I held up the hand, I showed people the hand. You know, when I’ve got a big audience. So yeah, I think it’s not a question of presidential …
MARCUS: He said he regrets …
HIATT: Okay, let’s move on here. Let’s move on.
TRUMP: I did feel I should respond. Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know. But I felt I should respond because everybody was talking about it.
Cruz and Trump are now shocked about bringing wives into the discussion, someone should remind them how they called Mrs Obama all kinds of names, like angry black woman and monkey etc.