After The Washington Post released a 2005 leaked hot mic video catching Donald Trump’s saying about how he assault women, he issued an apology.
You can see the leaked video, in case you missed it:
In a statement, Trump said:
“This was locker room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago. Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course — not even close,” Trump said in a statement released by his campaign.
“I apologize if anyone was offended.”
According to Edwin Battistella, a linguist at Southern Oregon University and the author Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology — an apology expert, he told that Trump’s response to the video was the exact opposite of an apology.
In this case, he was “reframing the comments as ‘private, as ‘banter,’ and as a past action to try to lessen the impact, and bringing Bill Clinton into the discussion as a type of distraction,” Battistella explained.
Battistella points out that it normalized an extraordinarily degrading kind of banter, attempted to deflect the attention to a rival public figure in Bill Clinton, and used “if anyone was offended” as conditional placing “the ones on others to react” — to claim that they were offended or not”.
“A morally serious apology would respond to the content of way he said — demeaning women — and the effects of his comments.”
It depicts that Trump makes this as a strategy. That when pushed on his shortcomings or his own failings, he tries to deflect on others. It’s simply a sorry behavior, but it’s not an apology.
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