In an essay for the POLITICO Magazine, Tucker Carlson recalls one of his first interactions with Donald Trump, who called and left him a voice-mail bragging about his sexual conquests:

About 15 years ago, I said something nasty on CNN about Donald Trump’s hair. I can’t now remember the context, assuming there was one. In any case, Trump saw it and left a message the next day.

“It’s true you have better hair than I do,” Trump said matter-of-factly. “But I get more pussy than you do.” Click.

At the time, I’d never met Trump and I remember feeling amused but also surprised he’d say something like that. Now the pattern seems entirely familiar. The message had all the hallmarks of a Trump attack: shocking, vulgar and indisputably true.

Not everyone finds it funny. On my street in Northwest Washington, D.C., there’s never been anyone as unpopular as Trump. The Democrats assume he’s a bigot, pandering to the morons out there in the great dark space between Georgetown and Brentwood. The Republicans (those relatively few who live here) fully agree with that assessment, and they hate him even more.

In 1990, the New York Post ran a cover featuring a sheepishly grinning Trump and the headline “Best Sex I Ever Had”—a quote attributed to the woman who would become his second ex-wife, Marla Maples, for whom he had left his first wife. (Another girlfriend later agreed with the statement.) However, in his 1993 book Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump, journalist Harry Hurt III reported that, during a deposition in the early ‘90s, amidst divorce proceedings, Ivana Trump accused her soon-to-be-ex-husband of sexually assaulting her.

She’d recommended a plastic surgeon to him to remove a bald spot, but the painful scalp reduction went badly. When he came home, he yelled, “Your fucking doctor has ruined me!” According to Hurt, as quoted by The Daily Beast, a “violent assault” followed.

Trump reportedly ripped out fistfuls of Ivana’s hair and stripped her naked. “Then he jams his penis inside her for the first time in more than sixteen months. Ivana is terrified…It is a violent assault,” Hurt writes. “According to versions she repeats to some of her closest confidantes, ‘he raped me.’”

Anyway. Carlson goes on to argue that Trump’s vulgarity is an extension of his populism, and that establishment Republican criticism of the leading GOP candidate is elitist. “He’s not just a reformer; like most effective populists, he’s a whistleblower, a traitor to his class,” Carlson writes. “Deriding Trump is an act of class solidarity, visible evidence of refinement and proof that you live nowhere near a Wal-Mart.”

As it happens, the nearest Wal-Mart to Trump Tower, where Trump lives, is just over 7 miles away, in Secaucus, New Jersey. The nearest Wal-Mart to Georgetown, in Washington, D.C., which Carlson identifies as epicenter of urban Republicanism, is just over three miles away.

Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.