Former NFL player and LGBT rights activist Chris Kluwe eviscerated Donald Trump in a new op-ed.
Kluwe went after the Republican presidential nominee for attempting to write-off his remarks about sexually assaulting women as mere ‘locker room talk.’
Said Kluwe in his piece published on Vox, “I was in an NFL locker room for eight years, the very definition of the macho, alpha male environment you’re so feebly trying to evoke to protect yourself, and not once did anyone approach your breathtaking depths of arrogant imbecility.”
Kluwe added, “Oh, sure, we had some dumb guys, and some guys I wouldn’t want to hang out with on any sort of regular basis, but we never had anyone say anything as foul and demeaning as you did on that tape, and, hell, I played a couple years with a guy who later turned out to be a serial rapist. Even he never talked like that.”
Calling Trump “an over-tanned ham hock” who has plummeted “past the morass of gross incivility into the abyss of depraved sociopathy,” “a Hitler wannabe who can’t even string together a coherent statement on domestic policy”, and “a Russian-backed presidential candidate whose foreign policy agenda can best be described as ‘gross negligence mixed with a spicy dash of treason'”, Kluwe schooled Trump on what actually does get talked about in the locker room: family, travel, money and even some crude jokes–but never bragging about sexual assault.
Wrote Kluwe,
We talk about women (and sex!). We talk about wives, sisters, mothers, daughters, fans, and groupies. Most guys respect women, some guys don’t, but never have I heard anyone use your particularly disgusting brand of sadism that refers to women as objects and not people. Even the most debauched club-hopping party animal talks about women more civilly than you. We don’t let each other talk like that about women, because it lessens our humanity, and even though we’re modern-day gladiators, we still hold ourselves accountable to the idea of basic human decency.
Kluwe addressed off-color remarks that do sometimes take place in locker rooms, saying,
We talk about jokes. Clean jokes, dirty jokes, jokes that are in between. Hell, I made a joke about Penn State that got me in trouble years later, because someone thought I was attacking the victims instead of the institution that allowed such depravity to happen. You know what I did? I apologized. I said I was sorry. I didn’t apologize with “if your feelings were hurt by it”; I didn’t try to deflect it by attacking someone else, or their spouse; I didn’t lie to an entire nation on live TV and say, “Nope, that never happened.” I simply said, “I’m sorry, I made a mistake, I’m accountable, I’ll do better next time.”
Kluwe closed with some advice for the Donald:
The next time you want to claim that something is “locker room talk,” take a moment to recognize the fact that were you in an actual locker room, you would be universally reviled as a cancerous, egotistical train wreck of a disgrace that no team could possibly find the time to employ and, honestly, would never even have on their draft board to begin with.
I’ve been in locker rooms, Donald, and you’re the type of narcissistic, pants-soiling fecal eruption that just doesn’t belong. Even football players are smart enough to know that.
