NOVI, Mich. ― Donald Trump was speaking to supporters here in a Detroit suburb Friday when news about his cameo in a 1999 porn film began to circulate online.
Afterwards, some of those supporters reacted to the news the same way Trump enthusiasts have reacted to pretty much every controversy surrounding the real estate mogul this year.
They shrugged.
Trump appears in the film, “Playboy Video Centerfold 2000,” for only a few seconds. He is fully clothed, as are the models who are in the scene with him.
BuzzFeed published a story about the video on Friday, the same day that Trump had tried to disgrace Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe who has criticized Trump for fat-shaming her, by saying she was the star of a lurid sex tape.
That accusation appears to be unfounded ― the latest in a long string of misleading or outright false claims that Trump has made.
But reports of Trump’s dishonesty don’t seem to faze his supporters and, based on interviews with a few of them Friday evening, Trump’s appearance in a soft-core porn film isn’t going to faze them either.
“It wouldn’t bother me,” Erin Atkins, a loan mortgage counselor from Holly, Michigan, told The Huffington Post.
Like most people at the rally, Atkins hadn’t seen or even heard of the video, which had started making the rounds on social media only minutes before Trump was done speaking. But she said supported Trump because he’s “straightforward” and not overly managed. She said she knew Trump had once been “young and dumb,” but most other people had, too.
Susan Stevens, a former Ted Cruz supporter from Livonia, Michigan, also hadn’t heard about the video ― and said it might “kind of bother me a little.” But, Stevens said, “there are so many things about Hillary that bother me a lot more.”
Celeste Cole, a longtime Republican activist from West Bloomfield, Michigan, said Trump’s appearing in a porn film was probably just a by-product of his surroundings back then. “He was moving in a crowd in New York City ― that was his lifestyle.”
Cole went on to criticize Trump’s opponents ― and the media ― for using stories like these as a ploy to distract attention from real issues facing the country, like immigration. “We have to have our priorities. We are letting our enemies in without vetting them. It’s out of control.”
Cole added that, while she was living in California many years ago, she’d actually met Playboy founder Hugh Hefner at a party for a radio station. “It wasn’t such a big deal,” she said.
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