One staple of the Donald Trump playbook is to portray his abhorrent views and deviant behavior as somehow normal. So when finally obliged to confirm that he has paid no federal income taxes for many years after claiming nearly a billion dollars in losses in 1995, he contended that tax evasion on a large but legal scale is simply “smart,” and suggested during last Sunday’s debate that many of Hillary Clinton’s wealthy supporters were similarly exploiting the tax code.

 He pointed in particular to billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who released information the next day giving the lie to Trump’s attempt to slime him. “My federal income tax for the year (2015) was $1,845,557. Returns for previous years are of a similar nature in respect to contributions, deductions and tax rates,” he said. Two-thirds of Buffett’s total deductions of $5,477,694 represented actual charitable giving, he said, with most of the rest related to state income tax payments.

Not all such dubious claims by Trump are so easily laid to rest. His claim that his lewd and crude boasting about groping women, which surfaced in a 2005 video, was just so much “locker-room talk” resonated with some women interviewed by the news media, who indeed seemed convinced that such comments are commonly made in all-male enclaves. While we cannot shed any light on the tax habits of the super wealthy, we can attest that in 50 years of frequenting locker rooms inhabited by secondary school, college and professional athletes and members of fitness clubs, we have never heard anyone boast of committing a sexual assault, or anything even close to it. This is not to say that comments such as Trump’s are never made, only that it is unlikely that they are as common as he suggests in his blanket dismissal. After all, the actions he described are a crime.

Distasteful, crude comments certainly are sometimes made in male locker rooms, and women’s physical attributes sometimes discussed. But in our experience it is much rarer than might be thought, and many men simply shun those who persist in talking this way. In recent months, we also have heard women discussed in locker rooms in these contexts: as a spouse of many years who is undergoing experimental treatment for cancer; as a teenage granddaughter in California who is coming in to her own as a student and an athlete; as a new life partner and mother of a new baby for whom an athlete is giving up a sport he loves partly because the time commitment precludes his being home with them after work; as an attentive daughter-in-law who makes sure that her father-in-law is always welcome when he visits.

Other topics of locker-room conversation? Securities and insecurities, the kind that require, respectively, a broker and a therapist; the weather; various physical ailments, some real and others perhaps imagined; the weather; movies, television shows and other matters of popular cultural interest; sports; the weather; weekend plans; and all the other quotidian matters that absorb the greater part of life. And did we mention the weather? (Politics and religion are not popular topics, being considered likely to raise temperatures in a confined space.)

Those who think that this experience, and not the Trump version, is the unusual one, need only to consult the internet to find the comments of the many professional athletes and sportswriters who have repudiated the idea that such boasts about women are common. Atlanta Falcons tight end Jacob Tamme, for example, spoke for many when he wrote, “The attempt to normalize it as any type of ‘talk’ is wrong. I refuse to let my son think that this is ‘just how men speak.’ ”

Alas, we nonetheless fear that a certain number of sons and many women will think it is, which is a hallmark of Trump’s demoralizing and de-moralizing campaign. He manages to demean everything he discusses and reduce it to its basest level. He is truly the barbarian at democracy’s gate.