Howard Stern has been brought into this election cycle because of his long history of interviewing the New York-based Donald Trump on the various iterations of the Howard Stern show over the years. Whether it was Stern’s co-host Robin Quivers calling Trump a “sexual predator,” or Trump lamenting—in the most crass way possible—how much he has to pay women to stand being around him, the Howard Stern show has provided a decades-long document of Trump at his most presidential. Stern was interviewed about Trump in Billboard magazine recently. And while Howard Stern said he wasn’t interested in re-releasing all of the Trump episodes, he also wasn’t about to equate the “locker room” talk on his show with the predatory conversation Donald Trump was recorded having with Billy Bush.
After decades of pumping out thousands of hours of the most explicit "locker room talk" ever heard on radio, Stern also weighed in on that phrase, which Trump used in last week's second presidential debate to explain his vulgar comments on the now-infamous Access Hollywood hot mic recording. But, because he's still got a radio show to do, not before he played a Clinton-focused parody of the hot mic moment (as well as a series of explicit parody songs). "Do you think this is locker room talk?" asked Stern's longtime sidekick Robin Quivers. "A lot of the show that I've been doing for my entire life, radio show publicly, is an effort to sort of do 'locker room talk,' to express all kinds of s--t and just not even care what anyone thinks," said Stern.
"But this idea of 'locker room talk'... all the times I've been around guys -- and believe me when I'm around guys 85 percent of the times you're talking about p---y-- but I have never been in the room when someone has said 'grab them by the p---y," said Stern, repeating Trump's boast from the bus. "No one's ever advocated going that step where you get a little bit, 'hey I'm going to invade someone's space.' ... A lot of [locker room banter is] real kind of desperate talk. The reason it's in a locker room is because no one's proud of it."
Whether you like Howard Stern or loathe him, he is one hundred percent right. Saying assholish things behind closed doors may make you an asshole but bragging about assaulting people makes you a criminal.