Listen: The why isn’t important here, but Tom Arnold—right, the comedian—has become deeply, deeply involved in trying to find tapes of President Donald Trump saying or doing terrible things, and Arnold’s quest is now a show on VICELAND that premiered Tuesday night.
In advance of each episode, we’ll be taking a look at what exactly Arnold is searching for and answering some basic questions you may have about his quarry.
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Q: What Are the Trump Tapes?
Donald Trump has been a celebrity for a long, long time, and that means he’s been on camera, interviewed, and mic’d up much more than the average human. We’ve heard one horrendous backstage tape involving Trump and we’ve seen hours upon hours of other TV and radio programming featuring the man, so one can only assume other noteworthy things have been said and captured behind the scenes, right?
The OG trump tape is the Access Hollywood tape that came out a month before the general election in 2016 and found Trump bragging to Billy Bush about sexually assaulting women. That’s the tape that got Arnold interested in this in the first place.
Q: What Tapes Is Tom Arnold Looking For?
After the Access Hollywood tape came out people who had made appearances on Trump’s own shows—The Apprentice and the Miss Universe shows—came forth to attest that Trump had all but certainly said upsetting things on those two sets that the American people should know about. Then there’s the rumors of a “pee pee tape”—a video made by Russian intelligence from 2013 reportedly showing Trump at a Ritz Carlton in Moscow watching two prostitutes pee on a bed Barack and Michelle Obama supposedly slept in. That alleged video is at the center of a whole host of theories about Trump being blackmailed by Russia, but its existence has never been proven.
There’s also a rumored elevator tape of Trump doing something bad in a Trump Tower elevator.
Q: Why Are These Tapes Important?
By now, hardly anyone is under the impression that Trump is exactly a model of restraint and Christian virtue behind closed doors, but it’s one thing to hear stories about Trump behaving badly and another to hear and see that for yourself. If, for instance, it turned out that Trump was caught on tape throwing around the N-word, as his former aide Omarosa Manigault Newman has alleged, that would make it a lot harder for people to deny that Trump is a straight-up racist.
Q: Wait, So Why Is Tom Arnold Doing This Again?
We told you: The why isn’t important.
Tune into The Hunt for the Trump Tapes with Tom Arnold Tuesday nights on VICELAND.
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