Donald Trump- an opinion by Liz Smith

This short article from The New Yorker is worth a couple of "echoes", meaning reblogs of my choice:

Liz Smith is a well known and widely read gossip columnist

Liz Smith’s Trump Memories

The veteran gossip columnist recalls decades of dishing the dirt on “the Donald Trumps.” By Jeffrey Toobin

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 conversation 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.” 

♦This article appears in the print edition of the September 5, 2016, issue, with the headline “Spin.”