It’s not every day you see the leader of the free world boast that vaginas are like “landmines.”
Clearly, Donald Trump has no idea what he’s talking about when it comes to STIs and sexual education. In a recently unearthed 1997 interview with Howard Stern, Trump bragged about not having contracted STIs during his bachelor years — at one point he calls himself a “brave soldier” and that vaginas were like “landmines.”
When Stern asked how he managed to not contract STIs from the women he slept with, Trump replied, “It’s amazing, I can’t even believe it. I’ve been so lucky in terms of that whole world, it is a dangerous world out there. It’s like Vietnam, sort of. It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave solider.” He later compared vaginas to “potential landmines” and that “there’s some real danger there.”
Now this week, in his second State of the Union address, the president is expected to issue a directive on the topic of HIV by announcing a national commitment to ending the virus in the United States by 2030.
The plans were welcomed by Cecilia Chung, co-director of policy and strategic projects at the Oakland-based Transgender Law Center, reports Washington Post. Chung previously sat on the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS — a body that went unstaffed for a year, after all of its members finished their terms, resigned or were fired in 2017.
Chung expressed concerns with the Post, explaining that Trump might be the wrong messenger “because his administration’s policies and his prior comments point in the opposite direction," adding, “I’m afraid that the promise will be in vain."
Cung's concerns are valid. Trump's history on bragging about dodging STIs is clear.
In another 1993 interview with Howard Stern, People magazine mentions the fact that he said he didn’t go to Vietnam, and that men who dodged going to fight in the war needn’t feel guilty because dating during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s was just as dangerous.
“You know, if you’re young, and in this era, and if you have any guilt about not having gone to Vietnam, we have our own Vietnam — it’s called the dating game,” Trump said in the 1993 interview. “Dating is like being in Vietnam. You’re the equivalent of a soldier going over to Vietnam.”
Here’s an excerpt below of Stern asking Trump whether he gave the women he slept with "AIDS tests," to which he replied: "Not really."
Without a doubt, these are more examples of what Trump refers to as “locker room talk,” parallel to the leaked 2005 Access Hollywood tape where he was overheard bragging grabbing women “by the p*ssy” and that he can do “whatever” he wants to them because he’s famous.
Very presidential indeed.