🕷️ Crawler Inspector

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Direct Parameter Lookup

Raw Queries and Responses

1. Shard Calculation

Query:

Response:

Calculated Shard: 133 (from laksa013)

2. Crawled Status Check

Query:

curl -X POST \
  'http://laksa133.int.ahrefs:8124/' \
  -H 'Content-Type: text/plain' \
  -H 'X-ClickHouse-Database: crawler3' \
  -H 'Authorization: Basic YXBpOg==' \
  -d 'SELECT getAhrefsURLFromUnparsed(src_unparsed) AS found_url, ifNull(toUnixTimestamp(download_stamp), 0) AS crawl_time, ifNull(toUnixTimestamp(props_url_first_seen), 0) AS first_indexed_time, download_http_code AS http_code, src_unparsed AS src_unparsed, src_root_hash AS src_root_hash, history_drop_reason AS history_drop_reason, meta_title AS meta_title, meta_descriptions AS meta_descriptions, attrs_boilerpipe_text AS attrs_boilerpipe_text, attrs_markdown AS attrs_markdown, attrs_readable_markdown AS attrs_readable_markdown, meta_canonical AS meta_canonical FROM crawler3.page_info_local FINAL PREWHERE (src_root_hash, src_unparsed) IN ((getAhrefsRootHashFromUnparsed(getAhrefsUnparsedNoserviceFromURL(\'https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/trumps-locker-room-is-his-safe-space\')), getAhrefsUnparsedNoserviceFromURL(\'https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/trumps-locker-room-is-his-safe-space\'))) FORMAT JSONEachRow'

Response:

{"found_url":"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/cultural-comment\/trumps-locker-room-is-his-safe-space","crawl_time":1776104164,"first_indexed_time":1521825915,"http_code":200,"src_unparsed":"com,newyorker!www,\/culture\/cultural-comment\/trumps-locker-room-is-his-safe-space s443","src_root_hash":"16027205805525588333","history_drop_reason":null,"meta_title":"Trump’s Locker Room Is His Safe Space | The New Yorker","meta_descriptions":["Nathan Heller writes about Donald Trump’s “locker-room talk,” and what his idea of safe spaces shares with progressive college students."],"attrs_boilerpipe_text":"Illustration by Edward Steed\nWhat Donald Trump has taken to calling his “locker room remarks”—a strange series of boasts about being able to sexually assault women whenever he wants—are proving the undoing of his campaign, although the comments are just half of the offense. Trump has made a career of opportunism and cruelty; traits regrettable in leaders make for energetic business in the real-estate trade. The deeper perversity rides on his suggestion that discussing stranger-groping, in stark language, is a thing that men do when they’re left alone in gyms, private clubs, or, apparently, a bus. “Let’s be honest—we’re living in the real world,” Trump said in a wan video apology. He elaborated during Sunday’s debate: “Certainly, I’m not proud of it, but this is locker-room talk.”\nThe phrase has galled many people, not least denizens of locker rooms. In the days after Trump’s apology, professional athletes \ndenied\n hearing such talk in any gym or arena they’d known. Trump, though, had some basis even if he had no grounds. According to pop culture, locker rooms are places where untempered maleness, like tile mildew, thrives. In “Moneyball,” the locker room was a \nsite\n of ribaldry and discipline; in “Goon,” it \nintroduced\n hazing with a helmet; in “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” it \nbrought us\n counselling on chivalry and Ryan Gosling’s domineering “schwanz.” Conceivably, Trump sought to evoke the last Republican President, whose locker-room affinities were marked enough to title at least one \nbook\n: “Towel Snapping the Press: Bush’s Journey from Locker-Room Antics to Message Control.” Or perhaps Trump’s allusive goal was simpler. Locker rooms, for boys who are nerdy or effeminate or weak, are traditional sites of shame and bullying as pack order is marked out by the “\nalpha\n” elect.\nThere are, of course, as many women’s locker rooms as men’s. And yet the more traditional female counterpart to the Trumpian locker room is the restroom, which, as Judith Halberstam put it in her influential 1998 book, “Female Masculinity,” “becomes a sanctuary of enhanced femininity, a ‘little girl’s room’ to which one retreats to powder one’s nose or fix one’s hair.” (Also, to \nspar\n.) Masculinity has fewer hidden physical rites, but many men believe that they deserve the privileges of tribal privacy all the same. This privilege, robbed of function, can turn dark. Trump’s idea of the locker room, or locker bus, holds that certain men, in certain contexts, can express to one another hidden thoughts that others would misunderstand, were they to hear. It’s a protective sphere with its own vernacular, unquestioned by the world outside.\nAnother term for this arrangement is “safe space.” Since this spring, when campus disputes \ncarried across the country\n, safe spaces have received criticism from both the established left, which fears that they stifle free expression, and the right, which regards them as Kumbaya-ism of the worst kind. It is surprising to find Trump, who jets between politically incorrect centrism and the right’s conspiratorial hinterland, alighting on that turf. And yet his devotion to the locker-room safe space makes some sense. The idea that similar experience brings protection to common identity and freer discussion—a safe-space tenet—has been basic to his campaign from the start.\nI have \nwritten in the past\n about the loosening effects that this election cycle has had on public language, and the influence that loosened public language has, in turn, on the campaigns. But the locker-room excuse brings the premises of Trumpism into particular focus, because Trump’s outlook, from the start, has rested on a strangely inarticulable group identity. When he \nspeaks\n about “good patriots” (as opposed to bad ones) or \nclaims\n that “we lose on everything” (this of the world's most influential economy), a goal is identity recognition: an unum among the pluribus which is addressed but never named. When he \ntalks\nof people “plotting” secretly (a “cancer from within”), he gathers the like-minded. The Trump campaign is often accused of “dog-whistling”: communicating with a subset of the population through its concerns, if not directly through its language. “Watch other communities, because we don’t want this election stolen from us,” the candidate \ntold\n a mostly white crowd in suburban Pennsylvania this week. The premise of such efforts is a shared cultural, perhaps even ethnic, identity, protected from the incursions of the politically correct élites, minorities, immigrants, and other un-greats. With his walls and border tests, Trump seeks to make a safe space of the U.S. as a whole.\nThat idea was plangent on Sunday night. “It’s just words, folks. It’s just words,” Trump \npurred\n in response to Hillary Clinton’s catalogue of his misogynistic-seeming behaviors—implying that his supporters knew something that was unquestionable through language. Instead, he offered a threat based on Clinton’s record, suggesting that, as President, he’d put her “in jail,” though she has not been charged with a crime. It was a case of safe-space thinking in its most aggressive form: “we,” united in our shared experience, are uncomfortable with things that she, an outsider, has done, and so she must be punished and prevented from repeating her offense. The debate was a reminder that Trumpism, for all of its bravado, is a politics of victimhood.\nOn campuses, which are notoriously precarious and unmyelinated ecosystems, victimization can be as real as the predations of the high-school locker room. The notion that aborning trans people can meet for candid conversation with other young trans people, briefly free from broader social scrutiny, does not strike me as inherently crazy; it seems a feasible transition tool for historically cloistered schools seeking new pluralisms. But the risk of safe spaces is the hardening of identity-based resentment—the “we” against the “they”—which can feed off itself in base groupthink.\nTo believe in protection from the processes of an elected government, even in its checks and balances, or to think that extrajudicial jailings are required to preserve an unnamed “us”: these mark the place where concerns of safety turn into hegemony. American leadership, like American life, is imperfect, unfair, and often oppressive. But the solution is not to claim an entire country as a protected realm, or to fall back on the shared identity of one of many groups that it comprises. Locker rooms, or the confidences that they carry, shouldn’t be sacred ground for bonds of fear, rage, and vindictiveness. And whole nations oughtn’t be protected territories for the uncontested world view of a few. This election, which proves the democratic possibility of change, is the country's surest safe space. Let us—all of us—look forward to gathering there instead.","attrs_markdown":"[Skip to main content](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/cultural-comment\/trumps-locker-room-is-his-safe-space#main-content)\n\n[![The New Yorker](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/verso\/static\/thenewyorker-us\/assets\/logo.svg)](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/)\n\n- [Newsletter](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/newsletters?sourceCode=navbar)\n\n[Sign In](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/auth\/initiate?redirectURL=%2Fculture%2Fcultural-comment%2Ftrumps-locker-room-is-his-safe-space&source=VERSO_NAVIGATION)\n\nSearch\n\n- [The Latest](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/latest)\n- [News](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news)\n- [Books & Culture](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture)\n- [Fiction & Poetry](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/fiction-and-poetry)\n- [Humor & Cartoons](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/humor)\n- [Magazine](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/archive)\n- [Puzzles & Games](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/crossword-puzzles-and-games)\n- [Video](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/video)\n- [Podcasts](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/podcasts)\n- [Goings On](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/goings-on)\n- [Shop](https:\/\/store.newyorker.com\/)\n\nOpen Navigation Menu\n\n[![The New Yorker](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/verso\/static\/thenewyorker-us\/assets\/logo-header.svg)](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/)\n\n[Cultural Comment](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/cultural-comment)\n\n# Trump’s Locker Room Is His Safe Space\n\n![](https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/59097b792179605b11ad8f18\/1:1\/w_270%2Cc_limit\/heller-nathan.png)\n\nBy [Nathan Heller](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/contributors\/nathan-heller)\n\nOctober 12, 2016\n\nSave this story\n\nSave this story\n\n![Illustration by Edward Steed](https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/59097adb019dfc3494ea35b7\/master\/w_2560%2Cc_limit\/Heller-Trump-Locker-Room.jpg)\n\nIllustration by Edward Steed\n\nWhat Donald Trump has taken to calling his “locker room remarks”—a strange series of boasts about being able to sexually assault women whenever he wants—are proving the undoing of his campaign, although the comments are just half of the offense. Trump has made a career of opportunism and cruelty; traits regrettable in leaders make for energetic business in the real-estate trade. The deeper perversity rides on his suggestion that discussing stranger-groping, in stark language, is a thing that men do when they’re left alone in gyms, private clubs, or, apparently, a bus. “Let’s be honest—we’re living in the real world,” Trump said in a wan video apology. He elaborated during Sunday’s debate: “Certainly, I’m not proud of it, but this is locker-room talk.”\n\nThe phrase has galled many people, not least denizens of locker rooms. In the days after Trump’s apology, professional athletes [denied](http:\/\/video.foxnews.com\/v\/5165250290001\/pro-athletes-disavow-trumps-locker-room-talk-excuse\/?%2523sp=show-clips) hearing such talk in any gym or arena they’d known. Trump, though, had some basis even if he had no grounds. According to pop culture, locker rooms are places where untempered maleness, like tile mildew, thrives. In “Moneyball,” the locker room was a [site](https:\/\/youtu.be\/o9Q0kp8CMFQ) of ribaldry and discipline; in “Goon,” it [introduced](https:\/\/youtu.be\/GMUiNUcxTX0) hazing with a helmet; in “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” it [brought us](https:\/\/youtu.be\/Tzj_-wIBl4k) counselling on chivalry and Ryan Gosling’s domineering “schwanz.” Conceivably, Trump sought to evoke the last Republican President, whose locker-room affinities were marked enough to title at least one [book](https:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=x-sI8w2ozkMC&lpg=PP1&dq=Towel%2520Snapping%2520the%2520Press%253A%2520Bush%2527s%2520Journey%2520from%2520Locker-room%2520Antics&pg=PP1%2523v=onepage&q&f=false): “Towel Snapping the Press: Bush’s Journey from Locker-Room Antics to Message Control.” Or perhaps Trump’s allusive goal was simpler. Locker rooms, for boys who are nerdy or effeminate or weak, are traditional sites of shame and bullying as pack order is marked out by the “[alpha](http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2016\/10\/11\/politics\/eric-trump-alpha-unacceptable\/)” elect.\n\nThere are, of course, as many women’s locker rooms as men’s. And yet the more traditional female counterpart to the Trumpian locker room is the restroom, which, as Judith Halberstam put it in her influential 1998 book, “Female Masculinity,” “becomes a sanctuary of enhanced femininity, a ‘little girl’s room’ to which one retreats to powder one’s nose or fix one’s hair.” (Also, to [spar](https:\/\/youtu.be\/LuK9jZHM7zM).) Masculinity has fewer hidden physical rites, but many men believe that they deserve the privileges of tribal privacy all the same. This privilege, robbed of function, can turn dark. Trump’s idea of the locker room, or locker bus, holds that certain men, in certain contexts, can express to one another hidden thoughts that others would misunderstand, were they to hear. It’s a protective sphere with its own vernacular, unquestioned by the world outside.\n\nAnother term for this arrangement is “safe space.” Since this spring, when campus disputes [carried across the country](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2016\/05\/30\/the-new-activism-of-liberal-arts-colleges), safe spaces have received criticism from both the established left, which fears that they stifle free expression, and the right, which regards them as Kumbaya-ism of the worst kind. It is surprising to find Trump, who jets between politically incorrect centrism and the right’s conspiratorial hinterland, alighting on that turf. And yet his devotion to the locker-room safe space makes some sense. The idea that similar experience brings protection to common identity and freer discussion—a safe-space tenet—has been basic to his campaign from the start.\n\nVideo From The New Yorker\n\n[The Quest for the Perfect Crossword Clue](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/video\/watch\/the-quest-for-the-perfect-crossword-clue)\n\nI have [written in the past](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/cultural-comment\/trump-the-university-of-chicago-and-the-collapse-of-public-language) about the loosening effects that this election cycle has had on public language, and the influence that loosened public language has, in turn, on the campaigns. But the locker-room excuse brings the premises of Trumpism into particular focus, because Trump’s outlook, from the start, has rested on a strangely inarticulable group identity. When he [speaks](https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/blogs\/plum-line\/wp\/2016\/06\/07\/donald-trumps-revealing-quote-about-american-exceptionalism\/?utm_term=.17d73841744f) about “good patriots” (as opposed to bad ones) or [claims](http:\/\/crooksandliars.com\/2016\/09\/donald-trumps-12-big-moments-lost-debate) that “we lose on everything” (this of the world's most influential economy), a goal is identity recognition: an unum among the pluribus which is addressed but never named. When he [talks](http:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/news\/article-3796519\/Trump-warns-terror-attacks-happen-country-says-U-S-gentle-enemies-calls-immigrants-vicious-cancer-within.html) of people “plotting” secretly (a “cancer from within”), he gathers the like-minded. The Trump campaign is often accused of “dog-whistling”: communicating with a subset of the population through its concerns, if not directly through its language. “Watch other communities, because we don’t want this election stolen from us,” the candidate [told](http:\/\/www.slate.com\/blogs\/the_slatest\/2016\/10\/10\/donald_trump_again_pushes_conspiracy_theory_that_other_communities_trying.html) a mostly white crowd in suburban Pennsylvania this week. The premise of such efforts is a shared cultural, perhaps even ethnic, identity, protected from the incursions of the politically correct élites, minorities, immigrants, and other un-greats. With his walls and border tests, Trump seeks to make a safe space of the U.S. as a whole.\n\n###\nLooking for new books, TV, and music? Get the Goings On newsletter for picks from our writers and critics.\n\nBy signing up, you agree to our [user agreement](https:\/\/www.condenast.com\/user-agreement) (including [class action waiver and arbitration provisions](https:\/\/www.condenast.com\/user-agreement#introduction-arbitration-notice)), and acknowledge our [privacy policy](https:\/\/www.condenast.com\/privacy-policy).\n\nThat idea was plangent on Sunday night. “It’s just words, folks. It’s just words,” Trump [purred](https:\/\/youtu.be\/tzEzG89QhTU) in response to Hillary Clinton’s catalogue of his misogynistic-seeming behaviors—implying that his supporters knew something that was unquestionable through language. Instead, he offered a threat based on Clinton’s record, suggesting that, as President, he’d put her “in jail,” though she has not been charged with a crime. It was a case of safe-space thinking in its most aggressive form: “we,” united in our shared experience, are uncomfortable with things that she, an outsider, has done, and so she must be punished and prevented from repeating her offense. The debate was a reminder that Trumpism, for all of its bravado, is a politics of victimhood.\n\nOn campuses, which are notoriously precarious and unmyelinated ecosystems, victimization can be as real as the predations of the high-school locker room. The notion that aborning trans people can meet for candid conversation with other young trans people, briefly free from broader social scrutiny, does not strike me as inherently crazy; it seems a feasible transition tool for historically cloistered schools seeking new pluralisms. But the risk of safe spaces is the hardening of identity-based resentment—the “we” against the “they”—which can feed off itself in base groupthink.\n\nTo believe in protection from the processes of an elected government, even in its checks and balances, or to think that extrajudicial jailings are required to preserve an unnamed “us”: these mark the place where concerns of safety turn into hegemony. American leadership, like American life, is imperfect, unfair, and often oppressive. But the solution is not to claim an entire country as a protected realm, or to fall back on the shared identity of one of many groups that it comprises. Locker rooms, or the confidences that they carry, shouldn’t be sacred ground for bonds of fear, rage, and vindictiveness. And whole nations oughtn’t be protected territories for the uncontested world view of a few. This election, which proves the democratic possibility of change, is the country's surest safe space. Let us—all of us—look forward to gathering there instead.\n\n[![](https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/59097b792179605b11ad8f18\/1:1\/w_270%2Cc_limit\/heller-nathan.png)](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/contributors\/nathan-heller)\n\n[Nathan Heller](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/contributors\/nathan-heller) began contributing to The New Yorker in 2011 and joined the magazine as a staff writer in 2013.\n\nMore:[2016 Election](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/tag\/2016-election)[Donald Trump](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/tag\/donald-trump)[Hillary Clinton](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/tag\/hillary-clinton)[Language](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/tag\/language)\n\n### The Goings On Newsletter\nWhat we're watching, listening to, and doing this week in N.Y.C, and beyond\n\nRead More\n\n[![Donald Trump: Narcissist, Creep, Loser](https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/59097ab42179605b11ad8d74\/4:3\/w_640%2Cc_limit\/Gopnik-Trump-Tape.jpg)](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/news-desk\/donald-trump-narcissist-creep-loser)\n\nNews Desk\n\n[Donald Trump: Narcissist, Creep, Loser](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/news-desk\/donald-trump-narcissist-creep-loser)\n\nBy Adam Gopnik\n\n[![Donald Trump, the Great Embarrassment](https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/59097abf8b51cf59fc423acf\/4:3\/w_640%2Cc_limit\/Lepore-Great-Embarrassment.jpg)](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/cultural-comment\/donald-trump-the-great-embarrassment)\n\nCultural Comment\n\n[Donald Trump, the Great Embarrassment](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/cultural-comment\/donald-trump-the-great-embarrassment)\n\nBy Jill Lepore\n\n[![Donald Trump’s Case for War Fails to Mention How to Win It](https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/69ce50d03765620566de2bf7\/4:3\/w_640%2Cc_limit\/undefined)](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/letter-from-trumps-washington\/trumps-case-for-war-fails-to-mention-how-to-win-it#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\nLetter from Trump’s Washington\n\n[Donald Trump’s Case for War Fails to Mention How to Win It](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/letter-from-trumps-washington\/trumps-case-for-war-fails-to-mention-how-to-win-it#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\n[![Donald Trump’s Case for War Fails to Mention How to Win It](https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/69ce50d03765620566de2bf7\/4:3\/w_640%2Cc_limit\/undefined)](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/letter-from-trumps-washington\/trumps-case-for-war-fails-to-mention-how-to-win-it#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\nThe President poses an existential question: Can everything be going according to the plan with Iran if there is no plan?\n\nBy Susan B. Glasser\n\n[![The Global Stakes of Hungary’s Pivotal Election](https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/69d7d9f5a713b0aba8e0c2e1\/4:3\/w_640%2Cc_limit\/undefined)](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/the-lede\/the-global-stakes-of-hungarys-pivotal-election#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\nThe Lede\n\n[The Global Stakes of Hungary’s Pivotal Election](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/the-lede\/the-global-stakes-of-hungarys-pivotal-election#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\n[![The Global Stakes of Hungary’s Pivotal Election](https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/69d7d9f5a713b0aba8e0c2e1\/4:3\/w_640%2Cc_limit\/undefined)](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/the-lede\/the-global-stakes-of-hungarys-pivotal-election#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\nWhat the fate of Viktor Orbán, a pioneer of strongman politics and a darling of right-wing movements across the world, might mean for Europe, Russia, *MAGA*, and beyond.\n\nBy Kapil Komireddi\n\n[![The Return of Staten Island’s Secession Movement](https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/69bdd7bbe9dfc3ee2ef2579a\/4:3\/w_640%2Cc_limit\/undefined)](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/the-lede\/the-return-of-staten-islands-secession-movement#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\nThe Lede\n\n[The Return of Staten Island’s Secession Movement](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/the-lede\/the-return-of-staten-islands-secession-movement#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\n[![The Return of Staten Island’s Secession Movement](https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/69bdd7bbe9dfc3ee2ef2579a\/4:3\/w_640%2Cc_limit\/undefined)](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/the-lede\/the-return-of-staten-islands-secession-movement#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\nFor more than a hundred years, the city’s most isolated borough has threatened to leave. After the election of Zohran Mamdani, some on the island think it’s time.\n\nBy Naaman Zhou\n\n[![What Was Behind the T.S.A. Meltdown?](https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/69c714c05ad1071d577c10f3\/4:3\/w_640%2Cc_limit\/undefined)](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2026\/04\/06\/what-was-behind-the-tsa-meltdown#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\nComment\n\n[What Was Behind the T.S.A. Meltdown?](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2026\/04\/06\/what-was-behind-the-tsa-meltdown#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\n[![What Was Behind the T.S.A. Meltdown?](https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/69c714c05ad1071d577c10f3\/4:3\/w_640%2Cc_limit\/undefined)](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2026\/04\/06\/what-was-behind-the-tsa-meltdown#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\nThe present mess has roots in two entangled, defining White House projects: *DOGE* and the mind-bending expansion of *ICE*.\n\nBy Benjamin Wallace-Wells\n\n[![The New Faces of Christian Nationalism](https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/69b2df8062dacedbb32118cb\/4:3\/w_640%2Cc_limit\/undefined)](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/letter-from-the-southwest\/the-new-faces-of-christian-nationalism#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\nLetter from the Southwest\n\n[The New Faces of Christian Nationalism](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/letter-from-the-southwest\/the-new-faces-of-christian-nationalism#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\n[![The New Faces of Christian Nationalism](https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/69b2df8062dacedbb32118cb\/4:3\/w_640%2Cc_limit\/undefined)](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/letter-from-the-southwest\/the-new-faces-of-christian-nationalism#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\nTrump has hollowed out the Johnson Amendment, which prohibited churches from endorsing candidates. Mercy Culture, in Fort Worth, has sprung into action.\n\nBy Rachel Monroe\n\n[![Zohran Mamdani, Perpetual Student of the City](https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/69d84bb3d76bda7a69914abf\/4:3\/w_640%2Cc_limit\/undefined)](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/new-york-journal\/zohran-mamdani-perpetual-student-of-the-city#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\nNew York Journal\n\n[Zohran Mamdani, Perpetual Student of the City](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/new-york-journal\/zohran-mamdani-perpetual-student-of-the-city#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\n[![Zohran Mamdani, Perpetual Student of the City](https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/69d84bb3d76bda7a69914abf\/4:3\/w_640%2Cc_limit\/undefined)](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/new-york-journal\/zohran-mamdani-perpetual-student-of-the-city#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\nThe Mayor, along with some teen-agers from Bronx Science, takes stock of his first hundred days.\n\nBy Molly Fischer\n\n[![The Forest Service “Reorganizes” Under Trump](https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/69d428b3951de74895c0940f\/4:3\/w_640%2Cc_limit\/undefined)](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/the-lede\/the-forest-service-a-force-across-rural-america-reorganizes-under-trump#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\nThe Lede\n\n[The Forest Service “Reorganizes” Under Trump](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/the-lede\/the-forest-service-a-force-across-rural-america-reorganizes-under-trump#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\n[![The Forest Service “Reorganizes” Under Trump](https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/69d428b3951de74895c0940f\/4:3\/w_640%2Cc_limit\/undefined)](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/the-lede\/the-forest-service-a-force-across-rural-america-reorganizes-under-trump#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\nThe agency has been a force across rural America. The changes will make lots of room for lumber lobbyists, less for forest science.\n\nBy Bill McKibben\n\n[![The Strange (Partial) End to the (Partial) Government Shutdown](https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/69d018c81d110d2fa2d23902\/4:3\/w_640%2Cc_limit\/undefined)](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/the-lede\/the-strange-partial-end-to-the-partial-government-shutdown#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\nThe Lede\n\n[The Strange (Partial) End to the (Partial) Government Shutdown](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/the-lede\/the-strange-partial-end-to-the-partial-government-shutdown#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\n[![The Strange (Partial) End to the (Partial) Government Shutdown](https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/69d018c81d110d2fa2d23902\/4:3\/w_640%2Cc_limit\/undefined)](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/the-lede\/the-strange-partial-end-to-the-partial-government-shutdown#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\nDemocrats are claiming victory. But what did they really gain?\n\nBy Jon Allsop\n\n[![How the Internet Fringe Infiltrated Republican Politics](https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/69cd3268f8f1289c024c57d1\/4:3\/w_640%2Cc_limit\/undefined)](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2026\/04\/13\/how-the-internet-fringe-infiltrated-republican-politics#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\nThe Political Scene\n\n[How the Internet Fringe Infiltrated Republican Politics](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2026\/04\/13\/how-the-internet-fringe-infiltrated-republican-politics#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\n[![How the Internet Fringe Infiltrated Republican Politics](https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/69cd3268f8f1289c024c57d1\/4:3\/w_640%2Cc_limit\/undefined)](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2026\/04\/13\/how-the-internet-fringe-infiltrated-republican-politics#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\nInside the battle for the post-*MAGA* G.O.P.\n\nBy Antonia Hitchens\n\n[![The Woman Who Made the Machine That Made Zohran Mamdani](https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/69cda327851dfc3cae81ac59\/4:3\/w_640%2Cc_limit\/undefined)](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/new-york-journal\/the-woman-who-made-the-machine-that-made-zohran-mamdani#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\nNew York Journal\n\n[The Woman Who Made the Machine That Made Zohran Mamdani](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/new-york-journal\/the-woman-who-made-the-machine-that-made-zohran-mamdani#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\n[![The Woman Who Made the Machine That Made Zohran Mamdani](https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/69cda327851dfc3cae81ac59\/4:3\/w_640%2Cc_limit\/undefined)](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/new-york-journal\/the-woman-who-made-the-machine-that-made-zohran-mamdani#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1)\n\nTascha Van Auken helped turn the D.S.A. into an electoral force. What will she do inside City Hall?\n\nBy Molly Fischer\n\n[![The New Yorker](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/verso\/static\/thenewyorker-us\/assets\/logo-reverse.svg)](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/)\n\nSections\n\n- [News](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news)\n- [Books & Culture](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture)\n- [Fiction & Poetry](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/fiction-and-poetry)\n- [Humor & Cartoons](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/humor)\n- [Magazine](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/archive)\n- [Crossword](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/crossword-puzzles-and-games)\n- [Video](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/video)\n- [Podcasts](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/podcast)\n- [100th Anniversary](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/100)\n- [Goings On](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/goings-on)\n\nMore\n\n- [Manage Account](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/account\/profile)\n- [Shop The New Yorker](https:\/\/store.newyorker.com\/)\n- [Buy Covers and Cartoons](https:\/\/condenaststore.com\/art\/new+yorker+covers)\n- [Condé Nast Store](https:\/\/condenaststore.com\/conde-nast-brand\/thenewyorker)\n- [Digital Access](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/about\/digital-access)\n- [Subscribe](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/subscribe)\n- [Newsletters](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/newsletter)\n- [Jigsaw Puzzle](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/jigsaw)\n- [RSS](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/about\/feeds)\n- [Site Map](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/sitemap)\n\n- [About](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/about\/us)\n- [Careers](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/about\/careers)\n- [Contact](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/about\/contact)\n- [F.A.Q.](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/about\/faq)\n- [Media Kit](https:\/\/www.condenast.com\/advertising)\n- [Press](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/about\/press)\n- [Accessibility Help](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/about\/accessibility-help)\n- [User Agreement](https:\/\/www.condenast.com\/user-agreement\/)\n- [Privacy Policy](http:\/\/www.condenast.com\/privacy-policy#privacypolicy)\n- [Your California Privacy Rights](http:\/\/www.condenast.com\/privacy-policy#privacypolicy-california)\n\n© 2026 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. *The New Yorker* may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. [Ad Choices](http:\/\/www.aboutads.info\/)\n\nYour Privacy Choices","attrs_readable_markdown":"![Illustration by Edward Steed](https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/59097adb019dfc3494ea35b7\/master\/w_2560%2Cc_limit\/Heller-Trump-Locker-Room.jpg)\n\nIllustration by Edward Steed\n\nWhat Donald Trump has taken to calling his “locker room remarks”—a strange series of boasts about being able to sexually assault women whenever he wants—are proving the undoing of his campaign, although the comments are just half of the offense. Trump has made a career of opportunism and cruelty; traits regrettable in leaders make for energetic business in the real-estate trade. The deeper perversity rides on his suggestion that discussing stranger-groping, in stark language, is a thing that men do when they’re left alone in gyms, private clubs, or, apparently, a bus. “Let’s be honest—we’re living in the real world,” Trump said in a wan video apology. He elaborated during Sunday’s debate: “Certainly, I’m not proud of it, but this is locker-room talk.”\n\nThe phrase has galled many people, not least denizens of locker rooms. In the days after Trump’s apology, professional athletes [denied](http:\/\/video.foxnews.com\/v\/5165250290001\/pro-athletes-disavow-trumps-locker-room-talk-excuse\/?%2523sp=show-clips) hearing such talk in any gym or arena they’d known. Trump, though, had some basis even if he had no grounds. According to pop culture, locker rooms are places where untempered maleness, like tile mildew, thrives. In “Moneyball,” the locker room was a [site](https:\/\/youtu.be\/o9Q0kp8CMFQ) of ribaldry and discipline; in “Goon,” it [introduced](https:\/\/youtu.be\/GMUiNUcxTX0) hazing with a helmet; in “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” it [brought us](https:\/\/youtu.be\/Tzj_-wIBl4k) counselling on chivalry and Ryan Gosling’s domineering “schwanz.” Conceivably, Trump sought to evoke the last Republican President, whose locker-room affinities were marked enough to title at least one [book](https:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=x-sI8w2ozkMC&lpg=PP1&dq=Towel%2520Snapping%2520the%2520Press%253A%2520Bush%2527s%2520Journey%2520from%2520Locker-room%2520Antics&pg=PP1%2523v=onepage&q&f=false): “Towel Snapping the Press: Bush’s Journey from Locker-Room Antics to Message Control.” Or perhaps Trump’s allusive goal was simpler. Locker rooms, for boys who are nerdy or effeminate or weak, are traditional sites of shame and bullying as pack order is marked out by the “[alpha](http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2016\/10\/11\/politics\/eric-trump-alpha-unacceptable\/)” elect.\n\nThere are, of course, as many women’s locker rooms as men’s. And yet the more traditional female counterpart to the Trumpian locker room is the restroom, which, as Judith Halberstam put it in her influential 1998 book, “Female Masculinity,” “becomes a sanctuary of enhanced femininity, a ‘little girl’s room’ to which one retreats to powder one’s nose or fix one’s hair.” (Also, to [spar](https:\/\/youtu.be\/LuK9jZHM7zM).) Masculinity has fewer hidden physical rites, but many men believe that they deserve the privileges of tribal privacy all the same. This privilege, robbed of function, can turn dark. Trump’s idea of the locker room, or locker bus, holds that certain men, in certain contexts, can express to one another hidden thoughts that others would misunderstand, were they to hear. It’s a protective sphere with its own vernacular, unquestioned by the world outside.\n\nAnother term for this arrangement is “safe space.” Since this spring, when campus disputes [carried across the country](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2016\/05\/30\/the-new-activism-of-liberal-arts-colleges), safe spaces have received criticism from both the established left, which fears that they stifle free expression, and the right, which regards them as Kumbaya-ism of the worst kind. It is surprising to find Trump, who jets between politically incorrect centrism and the right’s conspiratorial hinterland, alighting on that turf. And yet his devotion to the locker-room safe space makes some sense. The idea that similar experience brings protection to common identity and freer discussion—a safe-space tenet—has been basic to his campaign from the start.\n\nI have [written in the past](https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/cultural-comment\/trump-the-university-of-chicago-and-the-collapse-of-public-language) about the loosening effects that this election cycle has had on public language, and the influence that loosened public language has, in turn, on the campaigns. But the locker-room excuse brings the premises of Trumpism into particular focus, because Trump’s outlook, from the start, has rested on a strangely inarticulable group identity. When he [speaks](https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/blogs\/plum-line\/wp\/2016\/06\/07\/donald-trumps-revealing-quote-about-american-exceptionalism\/?utm_term=.17d73841744f) about “good patriots” (as opposed to bad ones) or [claims](http:\/\/crooksandliars.com\/2016\/09\/donald-trumps-12-big-moments-lost-debate) that “we lose on everything” (this of the world's most influential economy), a goal is identity recognition: an unum among the pluribus which is addressed but never named. When he [talks](http:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/news\/article-3796519\/Trump-warns-terror-attacks-happen-country-says-U-S-gentle-enemies-calls-immigrants-vicious-cancer-within.html) of people “plotting” secretly (a “cancer from within”), he gathers the like-minded. The Trump campaign is often accused of “dog-whistling”: communicating with a subset of the population through its concerns, if not directly through its language. “Watch other communities, because we don’t want this election stolen from us,” the candidate [told](http:\/\/www.slate.com\/blogs\/the_slatest\/2016\/10\/10\/donald_trump_again_pushes_conspiracy_theory_that_other_communities_trying.html) a mostly white crowd in suburban Pennsylvania this week. The premise of such efforts is a shared cultural, perhaps even ethnic, identity, protected from the incursions of the politically correct élites, minorities, immigrants, and other un-greats. With his walls and border tests, Trump seeks to make a safe space of the U.S. as a whole.\n\nThat idea was plangent on Sunday night. “It’s just words, folks. It’s just words,” Trump [purred](https:\/\/youtu.be\/tzEzG89QhTU) in response to Hillary Clinton’s catalogue of his misogynistic-seeming behaviors—implying that his supporters knew something that was unquestionable through language. Instead, he offered a threat based on Clinton’s record, suggesting that, as President, he’d put her “in jail,” though she has not been charged with a crime. It was a case of safe-space thinking in its most aggressive form: “we,” united in our shared experience, are uncomfortable with things that she, an outsider, has done, and so she must be punished and prevented from repeating her offense. The debate was a reminder that Trumpism, for all of its bravado, is a politics of victimhood.\n\nOn campuses, which are notoriously precarious and unmyelinated ecosystems, victimization can be as real as the predations of the high-school locker room. The notion that aborning trans people can meet for candid conversation with other young trans people, briefly free from broader social scrutiny, does not strike me as inherently crazy; it seems a feasible transition tool for historically cloistered schools seeking new pluralisms. But the risk of safe spaces is the hardening of identity-based resentment—the “we” against the “they”—which can feed off itself in base groupthink.\n\nTo believe in protection from the processes of an elected government, even in its checks and balances, or to think that extrajudicial jailings are required to preserve an unnamed “us”: these mark the place where concerns of safety turn into hegemony. American leadership, like American life, is imperfect, unfair, and often oppressive. But the solution is not to claim an entire country as a protected realm, or to fall back on the shared identity of one of many groups that it comprises. Locker rooms, or the confidences that they carry, shouldn’t be sacred ground for bonds of fear, rage, and vindictiveness. And whole nations oughtn’t be protected territories for the uncontested world view of a few. This election, which proves the democratic possibility of change, is the country's surest safe space. Let us—all of us—look forward to gathering there instead.","meta_canonical":null}

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URL	https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/trumps-locker-room-is-his-safe-space
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Meta Title	Trump’s Locker Room Is His Safe Space \| The New Yorker
Meta Description	Nathan Heller writes about Donald Trump’s “locker-room talk,” and what his idea of safe spaces shares with progressive college students.
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Boilerpipe Text	Illustration by Edward Steed What Donald Trump has taken to calling his “locker room remarks”—a strange series of boasts about being able to sexually assault women whenever he wants—are proving the undoing of his campaign, although the comments are just half of the offense. Trump has made a career of opportunism and cruelty; traits regrettable in leaders make for energetic business in the real-estate trade. The deeper perversity rides on his suggestion that discussing stranger-groping, in stark language, is a thing that men do when they’re left alone in gyms, private clubs, or, apparently, a bus. “Let’s be honest—we’re living in the real world,” Trump said in a wan video apology. He elaborated during Sunday’s debate: “Certainly, I’m not proud of it, but this is locker-room talk.” The phrase has galled many people, not least denizens of locker rooms. In the days after Trump’s apology, professional athletes denied hearing such talk in any gym or arena they’d known. Trump, though, had some basis even if he had no grounds. According to pop culture, locker rooms are places where untempered maleness, like tile mildew, thrives. In “Moneyball,” the locker room was a site of ribaldry and discipline; in “Goon,” it introduced hazing with a helmet; in “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” it brought us counselling on chivalry and Ryan Gosling’s domineering “schwanz.” Conceivably, Trump sought to evoke the last Republican President, whose locker-room affinities were marked enough to title at least one book : “Towel Snapping the Press: Bush’s Journey from Locker-Room Antics to Message Control.” Or perhaps Trump’s allusive goal was simpler. Locker rooms, for boys who are nerdy or effeminate or weak, are traditional sites of shame and bullying as pack order is marked out by the “ alpha ” elect. There are, of course, as many women’s locker rooms as men’s. And yet the more traditional female counterpart to the Trumpian locker room is the restroom, which, as Judith Halberstam put it in her influential 1998 book, “Female Masculinity,” “becomes a sanctuary of enhanced femininity, a ‘little girl’s room’ to which one retreats to powder one’s nose or fix one’s hair.” (Also, to spar .) Masculinity has fewer hidden physical rites, but many men believe that they deserve the privileges of tribal privacy all the same. This privilege, robbed of function, can turn dark. Trump’s idea of the locker room, or locker bus, holds that certain men, in certain contexts, can express to one another hidden thoughts that others would misunderstand, were they to hear. It’s a protective sphere with its own vernacular, unquestioned by the world outside. Another term for this arrangement is “safe space.” Since this spring, when campus disputes carried across the country , safe spaces have received criticism from both the established left, which fears that they stifle free expression, and the right, which regards them as Kumbaya-ism of the worst kind. It is surprising to find Trump, who jets between politically incorrect centrism and the right’s conspiratorial hinterland, alighting on that turf. And yet his devotion to the locker-room safe space makes some sense. The idea that similar experience brings protection to common identity and freer discussion—a safe-space tenet—has been basic to his campaign from the start. I have written in the past about the loosening effects that this election cycle has had on public language, and the influence that loosened public language has, in turn, on the campaigns. But the locker-room excuse brings the premises of Trumpism into particular focus, because Trump’s outlook, from the start, has rested on a strangely inarticulable group identity. When he speaks about “good patriots” (as opposed to bad ones) or claims that “we lose on everything” (this of the world's most influential economy), a goal is identity recognition: an unum among the pluribus which is addressed but never named. When he talks of people “plotting” secretly (a “cancer from within”), he gathers the like-minded. The Trump campaign is often accused of “dog-whistling”: communicating with a subset of the population through its concerns, if not directly through its language. “Watch other communities, because we don’t want this election stolen from us,” the candidate told a mostly white crowd in suburban Pennsylvania this week. The premise of such efforts is a shared cultural, perhaps even ethnic, identity, protected from the incursions of the politically correct élites, minorities, immigrants, and other un-greats. With his walls and border tests, Trump seeks to make a safe space of the U.S. as a whole. That idea was plangent on Sunday night. “It’s just words, folks. It’s just words,” Trump purred in response to Hillary Clinton’s catalogue of his misogynistic-seeming behaviors—implying that his supporters knew something that was unquestionable through language. Instead, he offered a threat based on Clinton’s record, suggesting that, as President, he’d put her “in jail,” though she has not been charged with a crime. It was a case of safe-space thinking in its most aggressive form: “we,” united in our shared experience, are uncomfortable with things that she, an outsider, has done, and so she must be punished and prevented from repeating her offense. The debate was a reminder that Trumpism, for all of its bravado, is a politics of victimhood. On campuses, which are notoriously precarious and unmyelinated ecosystems, victimization can be as real as the predations of the high-school locker room. The notion that aborning trans people can meet for candid conversation with other young trans people, briefly free from broader social scrutiny, does not strike me as inherently crazy; it seems a feasible transition tool for historically cloistered schools seeking new pluralisms. But the risk of safe spaces is the hardening of identity-based resentment—the “we” against the “they”—which can feed off itself in base groupthink. To believe in protection from the processes of an elected government, even in its checks and balances, or to think that extrajudicial jailings are required to preserve an unnamed “us”: these mark the place where concerns of safety turn into hegemony. American leadership, like American life, is imperfect, unfair, and often oppressive. But the solution is not to claim an entire country as a protected realm, or to fall back on the shared identity of one of many groups that it comprises. Locker rooms, or the confidences that they carry, shouldn’t be sacred ground for bonds of fear, rage, and vindictiveness. And whole nations oughtn’t be protected territories for the uncontested world view of a few. This election, which proves the democratic possibility of change, is the country's surest safe space. Let us—all of us—look forward to gathering there instead.
Markdown	[Skip to main content](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/trumps-locker-room-is-his-safe-space#main-content) [![The New Yorker](https://www.newyorker.com/verso/static/thenewyorker-us/assets/logo.svg)](https://www.newyorker.com/) - [Newsletter](https://www.newyorker.com/newsletters?sourceCode=navbar) [Sign In](https://www.newyorker.com/auth/initiate?redirectURL=%2Fculture%2Fcultural-comment%2Ftrumps-locker-room-is-his-safe-space&source=VERSO_NAVIGATION) Search - [The Latest](https://www.newyorker.com/latest) - [News](https://www.newyorker.com/news) - [Books & Culture](https://www.newyorker.com/culture) - [Fiction & Poetry](https://www.newyorker.com/fiction-and-poetry) - [Humor & Cartoons](https://www.newyorker.com/humor) - [Magazine](https://www.newyorker.com/archive) - [Puzzles & Games](https://www.newyorker.com/crossword-puzzles-and-games) - [Video](https://www.newyorker.com/video) - [Podcasts](https://www.newyorker.com/podcasts) - [Goings On](https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on) - [Shop](https://store.newyorker.com/) Open Navigation Menu [![The New Yorker](https://www.newyorker.com/verso/static/thenewyorker-us/assets/logo-header.svg)](https://www.newyorker.com/) [Cultural Comment](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment) # Trump’s Locker Room Is His Safe Space ![](https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59097b792179605b11ad8f18/1:1/w_270%2Cc_limit/heller-nathan.png) By [Nathan Heller](https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/nathan-heller) October 12, 2016 Save this story Save this story ![Illustration by Edward Steed](https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59097adb019dfc3494ea35b7/master/w_2560%2Cc_limit/Heller-Trump-Locker-Room.jpg) Illustration by Edward Steed What Donald Trump has taken to calling his “locker room remarks”—a strange series of boasts about being able to sexually assault women whenever he wants—are proving the undoing of his campaign, although the comments are just half of the offense. Trump has made a career of opportunism and cruelty; traits regrettable in leaders make for energetic business in the real-estate trade. The deeper perversity rides on his suggestion that discussing stranger-groping, in stark language, is a thing that men do when they’re left alone in gyms, private clubs, or, apparently, a bus. “Let’s be honest—we’re living in the real world,” Trump said in a wan video apology. He elaborated during Sunday’s debate: “Certainly, I’m not proud of it, but this is locker-room talk.” The phrase has galled many people, not least denizens of locker rooms. In the days after Trump’s apology, professional athletes [denied](http://video.foxnews.com/v/5165250290001/pro-athletes-disavow-trumps-locker-room-talk-excuse/?%2523sp=show-clips) hearing such talk in any gym or arena they’d known. Trump, though, had some basis even if he had no grounds. According to pop culture, locker rooms are places where untempered maleness, like tile mildew, thrives. In “Moneyball,” the locker room was a [site](https://youtu.be/o9Q0kp8CMFQ) of ribaldry and discipline; in “Goon,” it [introduced](https://youtu.be/GMUiNUcxTX0) hazing with a helmet; in “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” it [brought us](https://youtu.be/Tzj_-wIBl4k) counselling on chivalry and Ryan Gosling’s domineering “schwanz.” Conceivably, Trump sought to evoke the last Republican President, whose locker-room affinities were marked enough to title at least one [book](https://books.google.com/books?id=x-sI8w2ozkMC&lpg=PP1&dq=Towel%2520Snapping%2520the%2520Press%253A%2520Bush%2527s%2520Journey%2520from%2520Locker-room%2520Antics&pg=PP1%2523v=onepage&q&f=false): “Towel Snapping the Press: Bush’s Journey from Locker-Room Antics to Message Control.” Or perhaps Trump’s allusive goal was simpler. Locker rooms, for boys who are nerdy or effeminate or weak, are traditional sites of shame and bullying as pack order is marked out by the “[alpha](http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/11/politics/eric-trump-alpha-unacceptable/)” elect. There are, of course, as many women’s locker rooms as men’s. And yet the more traditional female counterpart to the Trumpian locker room is the restroom, which, as Judith Halberstam put it in her influential 1998 book, “Female Masculinity,” “becomes a sanctuary of enhanced femininity, a ‘little girl’s room’ to which one retreats to powder one’s nose or fix one’s hair.” (Also, to [spar](https://youtu.be/LuK9jZHM7zM).) Masculinity has fewer hidden physical rites, but many men believe that they deserve the privileges of tribal privacy all the same. This privilege, robbed of function, can turn dark. Trump’s idea of the locker room, or locker bus, holds that certain men, in certain contexts, can express to one another hidden thoughts that others would misunderstand, were they to hear. It’s a protective sphere with its own vernacular, unquestioned by the world outside. Another term for this arrangement is “safe space.” Since this spring, when campus disputes [carried across the country](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/the-new-activism-of-liberal-arts-colleges), safe spaces have received criticism from both the established left, which fears that they stifle free expression, and the right, which regards them as Kumbaya-ism of the worst kind. It is surprising to find Trump, who jets between politically incorrect centrism and the right’s conspiratorial hinterland, alighting on that turf. And yet his devotion to the locker-room safe space makes some sense. The idea that similar experience brings protection to common identity and freer discussion—a safe-space tenet—has been basic to his campaign from the start. Video From The New Yorker [The Quest for the Perfect Crossword Clue](https://www.newyorker.com/video/watch/the-quest-for-the-perfect-crossword-clue) I have [written in the past](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/trump-the-university-of-chicago-and-the-collapse-of-public-language) about the loosening effects that this election cycle has had on public language, and the influence that loosened public language has, in turn, on the campaigns. But the locker-room excuse brings the premises of Trumpism into particular focus, because Trump’s outlook, from the start, has rested on a strangely inarticulable group identity. When he [speaks](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/06/07/donald-trumps-revealing-quote-about-american-exceptionalism/?utm_term=.17d73841744f) about “good patriots” (as opposed to bad ones) or [claims](http://crooksandliars.com/2016/09/donald-trumps-12-big-moments-lost-debate) that “we lose on everything” (this of the world's most influential economy), a goal is identity recognition: an unum among the pluribus which is addressed but never named. When he [talks](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3796519/Trump-warns-terror-attacks-happen-country-says-U-S-gentle-enemies-calls-immigrants-vicious-cancer-within.html) of people “plotting” secretly (a “cancer from within”), he gathers the like-minded. The Trump campaign is often accused of “dog-whistling”: communicating with a subset of the population through its concerns, if not directly through its language. “Watch other communities, because we don’t want this election stolen from us,” the candidate [told](http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/10/10/donald_trump_again_pushes_conspiracy_theory_that_other_communities_trying.html) a mostly white crowd in suburban Pennsylvania this week. The premise of such efforts is a shared cultural, perhaps even ethnic, identity, protected from the incursions of the politically correct élites, minorities, immigrants, and other un-greats. With his walls and border tests, Trump seeks to make a safe space of the U.S. as a whole. ### Looking for new books, TV, and music? Get the Goings On newsletter for picks from our writers and critics. By signing up, you agree to our [user agreement](https://www.condenast.com/user-agreement) (including [class action waiver and arbitration provisions](https://www.condenast.com/user-agreement#introduction-arbitration-notice)), and acknowledge our [privacy policy](https://www.condenast.com/privacy-policy). That idea was plangent on Sunday night. “It’s just words, folks. It’s just words,” Trump [purred](https://youtu.be/tzEzG89QhTU) in response to Hillary Clinton’s catalogue of his misogynistic-seeming behaviors—implying that his supporters knew something that was unquestionable through language. Instead, he offered a threat based on Clinton’s record, suggesting that, as President, he’d put her “in jail,” though she has not been charged with a crime. It was a case of safe-space thinking in its most aggressive form: “we,” united in our shared experience, are uncomfortable with things that she, an outsider, has done, and so she must be punished and prevented from repeating her offense. The debate was a reminder that Trumpism, for all of its bravado, is a politics of victimhood. On campuses, which are notoriously precarious and unmyelinated ecosystems, victimization can be as real as the predations of the high-school locker room. The notion that aborning trans people can meet for candid conversation with other young trans people, briefly free from broader social scrutiny, does not strike me as inherently crazy; it seems a feasible transition tool for historically cloistered schools seeking new pluralisms. But the risk of safe spaces is the hardening of identity-based resentment—the “we” against the “they”—which can feed off itself in base groupthink. To believe in protection from the processes of an elected government, even in its checks and balances, or to think that extrajudicial jailings are required to preserve an unnamed “us”: these mark the place where concerns of safety turn into hegemony. American leadership, like American life, is imperfect, unfair, and often oppressive. But the solution is not to claim an entire country as a protected realm, or to fall back on the shared identity of one of many groups that it comprises. Locker rooms, or the confidences that they carry, shouldn’t be sacred ground for bonds of fear, rage, and vindictiveness. And whole nations oughtn’t be protected territories for the uncontested world view of a few. This election, which proves the democratic possibility of change, is the country's surest safe space. Let us—all of us—look forward to gathering there instead. [![](https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59097b792179605b11ad8f18/1:1/w_270%2Cc_limit/heller-nathan.png)](https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/nathan-heller) [Nathan Heller](https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/nathan-heller) began contributing to The New Yorker in 2011 and joined the magazine as a staff writer in 2013. More:[2016 Election](https://www.newyorker.com/tag/2016-election)[Donald Trump](https://www.newyorker.com/tag/donald-trump)[Hillary Clinton](https://www.newyorker.com/tag/hillary-clinton)[Language](https://www.newyorker.com/tag/language) ### The Goings On Newsletter What we're watching, listening to, and doing this week in N.Y.C, and beyond Read More [![Donald Trump: Narcissist, Creep, Loser](https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59097ab42179605b11ad8d74/4:3/w_640%2Cc_limit/Gopnik-Trump-Tape.jpg)](https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/donald-trump-narcissist-creep-loser) News Desk [Donald Trump: Narcissist, Creep, Loser](https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/donald-trump-narcissist-creep-loser) By Adam Gopnik [![Donald Trump, the Great Embarrassment](https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59097abf8b51cf59fc423acf/4:3/w_640%2Cc_limit/Lepore-Great-Embarrassment.jpg)](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/donald-trump-the-great-embarrassment) Cultural Comment [Donald Trump, the Great Embarrassment](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/donald-trump-the-great-embarrassment) By Jill Lepore [![Donald Trump’s Case for War Fails to Mention How to Win It](https://media.newyorker.com/photos/69ce50d03765620566de2bf7/4:3/w_640%2Cc_limit/undefined)](https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/trumps-case-for-war-fails-to-mention-how-to-win-it#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1) Letter from Trump’s Washington [Donald Trump’s Case for War Fails to Mention How to Win It](https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/trumps-case-for-war-fails-to-mention-how-to-win-it#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1) [![Donald Trump’s Case for War Fails to Mention How to Win It](https://media.newyorker.com/photos/69ce50d03765620566de2bf7/4:3/w_640%2Cc_limit/undefined)](https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/trumps-case-for-war-fails-to-mention-how-to-win-it#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1) The President poses an existential question: Can everything be going according to the plan with Iran if there is no plan? By Susan B. 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By Kapil Komireddi [![The Return of Staten Island’s Secession Movement](https://media.newyorker.com/photos/69bdd7bbe9dfc3ee2ef2579a/4:3/w_640%2Cc_limit/undefined)](https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-return-of-staten-islands-secession-movement#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1) The Lede [The Return of Staten Island’s Secession Movement](https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-return-of-staten-islands-secession-movement#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1) [![The Return of Staten Island’s Secession Movement](https://media.newyorker.com/photos/69bdd7bbe9dfc3ee2ef2579a/4:3/w_640%2Cc_limit/undefined)](https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-return-of-staten-islands-secession-movement#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1) For more than a hundred years, the city’s most isolated borough has threatened to leave. After the election of Zohran Mamdani, some on the island think it’s time. By Naaman Zhou [![What Was Behind the T.S.A. Meltdown?](https://media.newyorker.com/photos/69c714c05ad1071d577c10f3/4:3/w_640%2Cc_limit/undefined)](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/06/what-was-behind-the-tsa-meltdown#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1) Comment [What Was Behind the T.S.A. Meltdown?](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/06/what-was-behind-the-tsa-meltdown#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1) [![What Was Behind the T.S.A. 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Mercy Culture, in Fort Worth, has sprung into action. By Rachel Monroe [![Zohran Mamdani, Perpetual Student of the City](https://media.newyorker.com/photos/69d84bb3d76bda7a69914abf/4:3/w_640%2Cc_limit/undefined)](https://www.newyorker.com/news/new-york-journal/zohran-mamdani-perpetual-student-of-the-city#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1) New York Journal [Zohran Mamdani, Perpetual Student of the City](https://www.newyorker.com/news/new-york-journal/zohran-mamdani-perpetual-student-of-the-city#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1) [![Zohran Mamdani, Perpetual Student of the City](https://media.newyorker.com/photos/69d84bb3d76bda7a69914abf/4:3/w_640%2Cc_limit/undefined)](https://www.newyorker.com/news/new-york-journal/zohran-mamdani-perpetual-student-of-the-city#intcid=_the-new-yorker-article-bottom-recirc_6780e37f-ae90-4a5d-a53e-eed50173dcd6_roberta-similarity1) The Mayor, along with some teen-agers from Bronx Science, takes stock of his first hundred days. 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The changes will make lots of room for lumber lobbyists, less for forest science. 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But what did they really gain? 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What will she do inside City Hall? 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Readable Markdown	![Illustration by Edward Steed](https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59097adb019dfc3494ea35b7/master/w_2560%2Cc_limit/Heller-Trump-Locker-Room.jpg) Illustration by Edward Steed What Donald Trump has taken to calling his “locker room remarks”—a strange series of boasts about being able to sexually assault women whenever he wants—are proving the undoing of his campaign, although the comments are just half of the offense. Trump has made a career of opportunism and cruelty; traits regrettable in leaders make for energetic business in the real-estate trade. The deeper perversity rides on his suggestion that discussing stranger-groping, in stark language, is a thing that men do when they’re left alone in gyms, private clubs, or, apparently, a bus. “Let’s be honest—we’re living in the real world,” Trump said in a wan video apology. He elaborated during Sunday’s debate: “Certainly, I’m not proud of it, but this is locker-room talk.” The phrase has galled many people, not least denizens of locker rooms. In the days after Trump’s apology, professional athletes [denied](http://video.foxnews.com/v/5165250290001/pro-athletes-disavow-trumps-locker-room-talk-excuse/?%2523sp=show-clips) hearing such talk in any gym or arena they’d known. Trump, though, had some basis even if he had no grounds. According to pop culture, locker rooms are places where untempered maleness, like tile mildew, thrives. In “Moneyball,” the locker room was a [site](https://youtu.be/o9Q0kp8CMFQ) of ribaldry and discipline; in “Goon,” it [introduced](https://youtu.be/GMUiNUcxTX0) hazing with a helmet; in “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” it [brought us](https://youtu.be/Tzj_-wIBl4k) counselling on chivalry and Ryan Gosling’s domineering “schwanz.” Conceivably, Trump sought to evoke the last Republican President, whose locker-room affinities were marked enough to title at least one [book](https://books.google.com/books?id=x-sI8w2ozkMC&lpg=PP1&dq=Towel%2520Snapping%2520the%2520Press%253A%2520Bush%2527s%2520Journey%2520from%2520Locker-room%2520Antics&pg=PP1%2523v=onepage&q&f=false): “Towel Snapping the Press: Bush’s Journey from Locker-Room Antics to Message Control.” Or perhaps Trump’s allusive goal was simpler. Locker rooms, for boys who are nerdy or effeminate or weak, are traditional sites of shame and bullying as pack order is marked out by the “[alpha](http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/11/politics/eric-trump-alpha-unacceptable/)” elect. There are, of course, as many women’s locker rooms as men’s. And yet the more traditional female counterpart to the Trumpian locker room is the restroom, which, as Judith Halberstam put it in her influential 1998 book, “Female Masculinity,” “becomes a sanctuary of enhanced femininity, a ‘little girl’s room’ to which one retreats to powder one’s nose or fix one’s hair.” (Also, to [spar](https://youtu.be/LuK9jZHM7zM).) Masculinity has fewer hidden physical rites, but many men believe that they deserve the privileges of tribal privacy all the same. This privilege, robbed of function, can turn dark. Trump’s idea of the locker room, or locker bus, holds that certain men, in certain contexts, can express to one another hidden thoughts that others would misunderstand, were they to hear. It’s a protective sphere with its own vernacular, unquestioned by the world outside. Another term for this arrangement is “safe space.” Since this spring, when campus disputes [carried across the country](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/the-new-activism-of-liberal-arts-colleges), safe spaces have received criticism from both the established left, which fears that they stifle free expression, and the right, which regards them as Kumbaya-ism of the worst kind. It is surprising to find Trump, who jets between politically incorrect centrism and the right’s conspiratorial hinterland, alighting on that turf. And yet his devotion to the locker-room safe space makes some sense. The idea that similar experience brings protection to common identity and freer discussion—a safe-space tenet—has been basic to his campaign from the start. I have [written in the past](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/trump-the-university-of-chicago-and-the-collapse-of-public-language) about the loosening effects that this election cycle has had on public language, and the influence that loosened public language has, in turn, on the campaigns. But the locker-room excuse brings the premises of Trumpism into particular focus, because Trump’s outlook, from the start, has rested on a strangely inarticulable group identity. When he [speaks](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/06/07/donald-trumps-revealing-quote-about-american-exceptionalism/?utm_term=.17d73841744f) about “good patriots” (as opposed to bad ones) or [claims](http://crooksandliars.com/2016/09/donald-trumps-12-big-moments-lost-debate) that “we lose on everything” (this of the world's most influential economy), a goal is identity recognition: an unum among the pluribus which is addressed but never named. When he [talks](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3796519/Trump-warns-terror-attacks-happen-country-says-U-S-gentle-enemies-calls-immigrants-vicious-cancer-within.html) of people “plotting” secretly (a “cancer from within”), he gathers the like-minded. The Trump campaign is often accused of “dog-whistling”: communicating with a subset of the population through its concerns, if not directly through its language. “Watch other communities, because we don’t want this election stolen from us,” the candidate [told](http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/10/10/donald_trump_again_pushes_conspiracy_theory_that_other_communities_trying.html) a mostly white crowd in suburban Pennsylvania this week. The premise of such efforts is a shared cultural, perhaps even ethnic, identity, protected from the incursions of the politically correct élites, minorities, immigrants, and other un-greats. With his walls and border tests, Trump seeks to make a safe space of the U.S. as a whole. That idea was plangent on Sunday night. “It’s just words, folks. It’s just words,” Trump [purred](https://youtu.be/tzEzG89QhTU) in response to Hillary Clinton’s catalogue of his misogynistic-seeming behaviors—implying that his supporters knew something that was unquestionable through language. Instead, he offered a threat based on Clinton’s record, suggesting that, as President, he’d put her “in jail,” though she has not been charged with a crime. It was a case of safe-space thinking in its most aggressive form: “we,” united in our shared experience, are uncomfortable with things that she, an outsider, has done, and so she must be punished and prevented from repeating her offense. The debate was a reminder that Trumpism, for all of its bravado, is a politics of victimhood. On campuses, which are notoriously precarious and unmyelinated ecosystems, victimization can be as real as the predations of the high-school locker room. The notion that aborning trans people can meet for candid conversation with other young trans people, briefly free from broader social scrutiny, does not strike me as inherently crazy; it seems a feasible transition tool for historically cloistered schools seeking new pluralisms. But the risk of safe spaces is the hardening of identity-based resentment—the “we” against the “they”—which can feed off itself in base groupthink. To believe in protection from the processes of an elected government, even in its checks and balances, or to think that extrajudicial jailings are required to preserve an unnamed “us”: these mark the place where concerns of safety turn into hegemony. American leadership, like American life, is imperfect, unfair, and often oppressive. But the solution is not to claim an entire country as a protected realm, or to fall back on the shared identity of one of many groups that it comprises. Locker rooms, or the confidences that they carry, shouldn’t be sacred ground for bonds of fear, rage, and vindictiveness. And whole nations oughtn’t be protected territories for the uncontested world view of a few. This election, which proves the democratic possibility of change, is the country's surest safe space. Let us—all of us—look forward to gathering there instead.
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