Annals of Trump - "Spin": Christian voters alert

This is all the news fit to print about the life and times of "The Donald Trumps".  Although Christians don't typically seek out political advice by reading The New Yorker. Yet, if there could be one article people everywhere would take a short moment to read, they would learn all they need to know about Donald Trump, this is the one I'd highly recommend. Honestly, I wish a genie in a bottle would magically bring this Jeffrey Toobin column in The New Yorker (Sept. 5, 2016), to every Christian assembly in America, before November. This first person story is all we need to know.

LIZ SMITH’S*- TRUMP MEMORIES

By Jeffrey Toobin- an American lawyer, author, and legal analyst for CNN and The New Yorker.

Liz Smith- The veteran gossip columnist recalls decades of dishing the dirt on “the Donald Trumps.”

One day in the mid-nineteen-eighties, Liz Smith was in a car with her friend Arnold Scaasi, the fashion designer. “He said, ‘Have you met the Donald Trumps?’ ” 

Smith recalled the other day, in a Manhattan town house. 

“And I said, ‘What are the Donald Trumps?’ ” At the time, Smith, who worked at the Daily News, was the city’s reigning gossip columnist. Trump and his wife, Ivana, were wealthy arrivistes on the New York social scene. Smith followed up on Scaasi’s tip, and it was in part through her column that Trump became known for something more than the shiny building on Fifth Avenue that bore his name. (In 1986 and 1987, Spy magazine’s Liz Smith Tote Board tallied between four and six Trump mentions a month.)

Smith is now ninety-three years old and a little creaky (she had a minor stroke a few months ago), but she is still churning out copy (for the Web site New York Social Diary) and making wisecracks in a Texas twang undiminished by six decades of living in Manhattan. “Donald had a wonderful family in those days, and I started going to their anniversary and birthday dinners,” Smith said. “I liked Ivana, too, even though I could never understand what she was saying in that Czech accent. She would just chatter on like a machine gun.” Smith remembered Donald being a vaporous presence at those social occasions. “He would appear with a camel-hair coat over his shoulders, and he’d greet us and then say he had to be off,” she said. “He had no attention span.”

One day, Ivana invited Smith to visit her at the Plaza Hotel, which Donald then owned and Ivana managed. “She threw herself into my arms crying. She said, ‘Donald has a girlfriend,’ ” Smith recalled. Accustomed to helping the city’s rich and powerful spin their complicated personal lives, she offered her assistance. “I asked her if she wanted me to write something, and she said no. She just wanted a sympathetic shoulder,” Smith said. “So I told her she should see a psychiatrist. I said, ‘It’ll take you two years to get over it if you see an analyst and five years if you don’t.’ ” Smith also wrote Trump a letter (“Can you believe people wrote letters in those days? Ha!”) advising him to make an official comment about his rumored marital problems in her column. 

Eventually, he called Smith from a plane. “And he said, ‘I like Ivana; I might get back with her.’ I couldn’t believe it: ‘I like Ivana,’ ” Smith said. “Everyone had misjudged Donald. People thought he would be alarmed if it was revealed that he was having an affair. But it turned out he didn’t give a shit if people knew.”

When the Post published a front-page story quoting Marla Maples calling her affair with Trump “the best sex I ever had,” Smith wrote a column urging Ivana to “stop sobbing over Donald Juan,” and observing that Trump “still relishes his macho-man publicity.” 

The Trumps’ divorce, followed by Donald’s brief marriage to Maples, gave Smith the story of her career. At the time, she was a regular on WNBC’s “Live at Five,” in addition to writing her column. She parlayed the Trump story into a big contract to move her column to New York Newsday, which is now defunct, like a number of the seven newspapers she’s worked for.

During the eighties, Smith enjoyed a good deal of Trump’s hospitality, including visits to his Mar-a-Lago estate, in Palm Beach. “I was left holding the bag, ethically, because I had foolishly appeared to have accepted a lot of favors from him,” she said. “The truth was I thought I could get him to give me money for my charities. He never gave me a dime. And I got the criticism I deserved.” 

As a journalist, Smith never displayed much of a killer instinct; cozy chattiness was her signature. But now that Trump is the Republican nominee for President, her views have taken on a harder edge. “In the old days, Donald reminded me of my brothers in Texas,” she said. “He was attractive and dynamic and took up all the oxygen in the room. When he saw me, he’d give me a big hug and tell me I was the greatest. I never took him seriously. I didn’t even think he would last in New York, because people hated him once they got to know him. He was a horse’s ass. Still is.” ♦

*Smith was born in Fort Worth, Texas. She married her college sweetheart, George Edward Beeman, a World War II bombardier, in 1944. But she left him to enroll in the University of Texas where all her papers and memorabilia are in the Dolph Brisco Center. They were divorced several years later.

Smith graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in journalism in 1949, where she wrote for The Daily Texan, then moved to New York where she worked as a typist, a proofreader and a reporter before she broke into the media world as a news producer for Mike Wallace at CBS Radio. She spent five years as a News producer for NBC-TV. She also worked for Allan Funt on "Candid Camera."

In the late 1950s Smith worked as a ghostwriter for the popular "Cholly Knickerbocker" gossip column that appeared in the Hearst newspapers. After leaving that column in the early 1960s she went to work for Helen Gurley Brown as the entertainment editor for the American version of Cosmopolitan magazine, later working simultaneously as Sports Illustrated entertainment editor as well.

Liz Smith is one of the founding members, along with Lesley Stahl, Mary Wells Lawrence and Joni Evans of wowOwow.com. It's a website for women to talk culture, politics and gossip.

From  Maine Writer: To those Christian voters who might vote for Donald Trump because they somehow believe "we don't have to like our political candidates", shame on you.