Trump Says “Everyone’s Gay for Pay,” Adds That He Would Be “the Best Gay” Because of All the Money He Would Make

The remarks were made on Tuesday afternoon in a hangar in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, forty-one minutes into a scheduled fifty-minute address on manufacturing. They lasted six minutes and twenty seconds. They were not in the prepared text, a copy of which this newspaper obtained from the campaign before the event and has compared line by line against the transcript.

Nothing in the prepared text concerns the subject. The prepared text concerns tooling.

Reality Daily is printing the remarks in full, at length, with the arithmetic, because the arithmetic is the part that has been left out of every account we have read.

I. The Premise

The subject arrived without visible provocation. The preceding sentence concerned an axle plant in Ohio. The following sentence also concerned the axle plant in Ohio, which is what has made the passage difficult to excerpt responsibly and easy to excerpt irresponsibly.

“Everyone’s gay for pay. Everybody. That’s just a fact, nobody says it, I’m saying it.”— the former president, Bucks County, 2:41 p.m.

There was applause. The Standards Desk has reviewed the audio and characterises it as partial and delayed, beginning approximately 1.9 seconds after the sentence ended, which our audio log notes is longer than this crowd’s median response interval of 0.4 seconds.

He then developed the thought.

“If I were gay for pay, I’d be the best gay. No one would be gayer than me, because of all the money I’d make.”— the former president, 2:42 p.m.

This newspaper has spent nine days on that sentence, and the Standards Desk asks readers to notice what it actually claims, because it is not the claim most coverage has attributed to it. It does not assert a preference. It asserts a ranking, and it derives the ranking from revenue. The gayness is downstream of the money. Grammatically there is no other available reading, and we have looked for one.

II. The Rates

He did not stop at the premise. Over the following four minutes he priced it.

This is the portion of the remarks that has gone unreported, and it is the portion this newspaper considers newsworthy, because it is specific, it is numeric, and it is internally consistent — which is more than can be said for the manufacturing figures in the same address, three of which we have already corrected in a separate story.

Reality Daily will not be describing the acts. We have the transcript, the Standards Desk has read it, and the descriptions are not going in this newspaper. What is going in this newspaper is the schedule, because a rate is a number and a number can be reported.

The Data Desk notes the following about the schedule, and offers no interpretation of it beyond the arithmetic:

• Every figure is a round number in millions. There is no line priced below eight.
• The figures are not proportionate to anything the Data Desk can identify — not duration, not participants, not any ordering a reader might expect. The most expensive item is not the one most readers would guess. It is the eleventh.
• He returned to the schedule twice more, unprompted, and revised two figures upward. Both revisions were to items he had priced early in the sequence, and both were made after he had stated a higher figure for a later item, which suggests the schedule is being kept in his head as a ranking rather than a price list.

At no point did anyone on the stage attempt to redirect the address back to the axle plant.

III. The Discount

The schedule is not fixed. He was explicit about this, and he volunteered the exception without being asked, at 2:46 p.m., after a pause our audio log measures at two and a half seconds.

“Now if the man looked nice, I wouldn’t charge him so much. Maybe Tom Hardy.”— the former president, 2:46 p.m.

He did not elaborate. He did not name a second individual. He returned to the axle plant in the following sentence and did not revisit the subject for the remaining four minutes of the address.

Reality Daily wrote to Mr. Hardy’s representatives on 26 August, and again on 28 August, 1 September, and 3 September, seeking comment on whether Mr. Hardy was aware of the discount, had sought the discount, or wished the discount withdrawn. We have received one reply, on 2 September, of four words, which we reproduce in full:

We have not stopped writing. Our fifth request was sent this morning. Under the standard of this newspaper we publish after twelve, and we intend to reach twelve.

IV. The Campaign Response

A campaign spokesman, reached Thursday, said that the remarks were “obviously a joke” and that the media was “doing what it always does.” Asked whether the figures in the schedule were also a joke, the spokesman said that they were. Asked whether the figures were therefore inaccurate, the spokesman said that they were accurate. Asked to reconcile those two answers, the spokesman ended the call.

We called back. A second spokesman said the first spokesman was not authorised. Asked who was authorised, the second spokesman named the first spokesman.

Both spokesmen were sent this paragraph before publication. Neither disputed it. One asked that we note he was on a plane, which we are noting.

V. What We Are Not Saying

We are not saying the former president is gay. He did not say that. He said the opposite of that, twice, in the conditional, and the conditional is doing a great deal of load-bearing work that this newspaper declines to remove for him.

We are not saying he has performed any act on the schedule, been offered payment for any act on the schedule, or been approached by anybody regarding the schedule. We have asked. We have been told no. We have printed the no.

We are not saying the schedule is real. We are saying it was stated aloud, in a hangar, into forty-one microphones, at a volume the audio log measures at 78 decibels, and that a thing said that loudly into that many microphones has been said.

We are saying that a man who was asked about axles priced eleven distinct acts in ascending millions from memory, revised two of them upward without prompting, and then offered one named individual a discount on the basis of appearance. Every part of that sentence is a direct report of the recording. We would prefer to be reporting on the axle plant.

VI. As of Press Time

The campaign has not withdrawn the remarks. The former president has not repeated them, though he has been asked to on three occasions by reporters who this newspaper feels should know better.

The axle plant in Ohio, which employs 340 people and was the announced subject of the address, has received no coverage of any kind arising from it. We telephoned the plant. The plant said it had noticed.