In recent years, I have come to grips with the fact that the Steele dossier outlining unproven rumors about Donald Trump and Russia — a thing I spent years of my life writing and speculating about — has been debunked. Even the general idea that “Donald Trump colluded with Russians to steal the presidency in 2016” has been discredited to the point that it was categorized as a conspiracy theory in a fun little quiz published by the Washington Post earlier this month alongside “Barack Obama faked his citizenship to become president” and “President John F. Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy rather than by a lone gunman.”
But if the Steele dossier’s most notorious claim is false — that there is a so-called pee tape that shows Trump watching prostitutes engage in a certain sex act at the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow — then why is the former president still bringing it up in the most suspicious way possible?
Trump informed a room full of GOP senators this week that he’s not into that sort of thing, although absolutely no one had asked about it. Here’s what he said while “relitigating” various grievances during his address at the National Republican Senatorial Committee retreat, according to the Post:
Unprompted, he brought up an unsubstantiated claim he had interactions with prostitutes in Moscow before he ran for president.
“I’m not into golden showers,” he told the crowd. “You know the great thing, our great first lady — ‘That one,’ she said, ‘I don’t believe that one.’”
This attempt to resolve any lingering confusion over whether our former commander-in-chief derives sexual pleasure from peeing on other people, or watching others do so, only raises more questions. First, if this is the “one” allegation Melania doesn’t believe, what are the wild rumors about her husband she does believe? And if Melania was so quick to reject this report about her husband’s sexual proclivities, why did he previously raise concerns that she would believe the story?
In his 2018 book, former FBI director James Comey claimed that Trump asked him to investigate the pee tape, specifically because he was worried about what Melania might think. Comey wrote:
He said, “If there’s even a one percent chance my wife thinks that’s true, that’s terrible.” And I remember thinking, how could your wife think there’s a one percent chance you were with prostitutes peeing on each other? I’m a flawed human being, but there is literally zero chance that my wife would think that was true. So what kind of marriage to what kind of man does your wife think there’s only a 99 percent chance you didn’t do that?
As the Cut noted at the time, Comey also claimed that Trump brought up the pee tape on four separate occasions. While the Mueller Report did not find any evidence that the footage existed, Comey told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos that he had no idea if this sexual encounter took place, regardless of whether it was captured on surveillance video.
Similarly, “the lady doth protest too much” are words Shakespeare wrote that he probably never thought would be applicable to a national leader accused of urolagnia, but here we are. Am I saying that I think the pee tape exists or that Trump is definitely a golden-shower enthusiast? Absolutely not. If James Comey doesn’t know, I sure as hell don’t. But am I going to spend the rest of the day pondering whether Trump brought up the pee-tape story because (a) it’s untrue and he’s determined to prove it, (b) it’s 100 percent true and he’s deeply ashamed that we all know about his kink, or (c) he believes it will pull former “peelievers” like myself into a conspiracy-theory rabbit hole that ends with me thinking he has a point about windmills causing cancer? Yes.
