Perhaps you’ve heard: former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and fellow Trump adviser David Bossie have written a book entitled Let Trump Be Trump cataloging Mr. Trump’s rise to the presidency which—as of this article’s publication—will be out on December 5th, published by the Hachette Book Group. According to a statement that the duo shared with the press upon releasing information about the title and cover of the new book, “Let Trump Be Trump is a book destined to be beloved by Trump supporters and cited by even Trump critics as the first and most definitive insider account of the 2016 campaign.”
The book supposedly chronicles the “juicy” details inside the Trump campaign, including lots of quotations of expletives said on Trump’s part, records of fast food orders, and the famous denial that Trump’s “grab them by the p---y” comment was nothing more than “locker room talk.” While I can say nothing further about the content of the book, other than recount what various online news stories and reports have been able to share at this point, I would like to point out the disturbing message that these brief “excerpts” and this title send to the world.
Let Trump Be Trump, hmm, where have I heard a phrase similar to that before? Ah, yes, “let boys be boys,” or as it is likely familiar to you, “boys will be boys.” Explicitly evoked by Australian singer-songwriter Stella Donnelly in her 2017 single with the same name (of which I encourage you to listen to), the phrase “boys will be boys” is commonly used to defend younger men who sexually assault women, typically in conjunction with some good’ol American victim shaming because “she shouldn’t have been wearing a skirt that short anyways, honestly, what did she expect?”
I know what you may be thinking: “Don’t you think it’s a bit of a stretch to connect the title of a book to a statement used to perpetuate rape culture?” No. Nope. Not at all. Words matter, and when words evoke rhetorical echoes of other words, that’s not a pattern that you can just ignore and pretend doesn’t exist. When I hear “let Trump be Trump” what I’m really hearing is “Who cares if he has assaulted women, or committed fraud or perjury, or racially profiled Mexicans or African Americans? He’s a man, he’s the President, he’s Trump; it’s fine.” It’s not fine.
During an interview with John Dickerson on Face The Nation on Sunday morning, December 3rd, Cory Lewandowski said that he wasn’t upset about being removed from his position as campaign manager because Trump demanded perfection, deserved perfection, and he [Lewandowski] wasn’t able to deliver. This is frightening language to hear a former top political aide say of a man who considers expletives and name calling part of a normal conversational vocabulary. The Office of the President does deserve some things, like respect, even in disagreement, but does a man who just last month used the name Pocahontas as a derogative shot at Senator Elizabeth Warren while he was supposed to be honoring Native American Code Talkers “deserve perfection?”
The only thing I imagine that a man like Trump deserves is to be held accountable for his use of derogative, insulting, racist, sexist, xenophobic, and offensive language. Letting Trump be Trump means letting the President of the United States be an offensive, vulgar, and uneducated man who is in the business of defending his ego at all times—even when it’s completely inappropriate.