Republican Stephanie Grisham says Vice-President Harris "has my vote" in DNC speech

Stephanie Grisham rose from being a junior press wrangler on the Trump campaign in 2016, to assuming top positions in the administration as White House press secretary and communications director, while at the same time acting as First Lady Melania Trump’s communications director and eventually chief of staff. Few members of the Trump inner circle served longer or were as close to the first family

Echo report published in the Washington Post by Amy B. Wang:

In brief remarks at the beginning of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, on Tuesday night’s programming, Grisham first laid out her Trump bona fides: She wasn’t just a supporter of the former president, she said, but “a true believer” and one of his closest advisers.

Former Trump press secretary says he mocked his supporters as ‘basement dwellers’ Stephanie Grisham was one of several Republicans to address the Democratic National Convention and urge a vote for Kamala Harris.

“The Trump family became my family. I spent Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s at Mar-a-Lago. I saw him when the cameras were off,” Grisham said.

Grisham claimed that, behind closed doors, Trump mocked his supporters as “basement dwellers” and once, on a hospital visit, he was upset that cameras were focused on intensive care unit patients rather than on him.

“He has no empathy, no morals and no fidelity to the truth,” she said. “He used to tell me, ‘It doesn’t matter what you say, Stephanie. Say it enough, and people will believe you.’”

Grisham said her last straw was the January 6, 2021, insurrection, when a pro-Trump mob overran the U.S. Capitol seeking to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral win. The violent attack resulted in the death of five people, including a police officer and a woman shot by police. Two other officers who were on duty that day later died by suicide, and more than 100 officers were injured.

“On January 6, I asked Melania Trump if we could at least tweet that, while peaceful protest is the right of every American, there’s no place for lawlessness and violence. She replied with one word: ‘No,’” Grisham said. Behind her, an image of the alleged text conversation flashed on a screen.

Grisham said she became the first senior Trump staffer to resign that day because she “couldn’t be part of the insanity any longer.” There would be several more Trump staffers who cited the Capitol attack as reason to quit the administration.

Grisham said Tuesday she was advocating for a Democrat at the convention because she loved her country more than her party.

“Kamala Harris tells the truth, she respects the American people and she has my vote,” Grisham said.

Her remarks received a warm reception and loud applause from the Democratic crowd — as well as a rebuke from the Trump campaign.

Trump campaign responded...

“Stephanie Grisham is a stone cold loser who clearly suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome and many other mental issues,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in an email, in response to her speech. “She’s a liar and a fraud, and it’s laughable she’s willing to step behind a podium at the DNC but was too scared to step behind the podium at the White House.”

The Trump family has distanced themselves from Grisham since she left the Trump administration, but especially after Grisham published a memoir in 2021 in which she called working for the former president a “classic abuse relationship.” 

At the time, a Trump spokeswoman dismissed the book as an attempt to “cash in … and sell lies about the Trump family,” while a representative for Melania Trump called Grisham “a deceitful and troubled individual who doesn’t deserve anyone’s trust.”

Grisham has been among several Republicans to agree to speak at the convention to encourage people to vote for Harris over Trump. Others have included John Giles, the mayor of Mesa, Ariz., and former Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger, one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump.

Donald Trump is still dealing with the horrible Access Hollywood Tape

Echo opinion letter published in the Citrus County Chronicle, a Crysal River Florida newspaper:

The criminal trial of ex-President Donald Trump says a lot more about his character than his criminal activity. Trump has a low opinion of women, as referenced in the "Access Hollywood tape," and his affair with a porn star while married to Melania. 

According to a new report, Melania remains "angry" at her husband over the alleged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels. The former first lady "wants to ignore" the whole thing and "hopes it will pass," but "doesn’t sympathize with Donald’s plight." Not only that, but the former FLOTUS really wouldn’t be put out if her spouse did time behind bars.

Melania Trump 

Even if Trump is not convicted of campaign finance law violations and cooking the books, he's broken the law 10 times by attacking jurors, judges, and witnesses. Trump knowingly breaks the law, and people are taking notice. It looks like the other criminal cases will be postponed until after the election, with Trump-appointed judge Eileen Cannon blocking or delaying obvious procedural issues. And Trump's Supreme Court is kicking the can down the road on absolute immunity.

The Georgia case is delayed because of a love affair that has nothing to do with the criminal liability of those who were indicted, two pleading guilty. Delay, delay, delay. 😳😠Americans want the truth on these serious matters that affect national security and whether coups are the "new normal" if you don't like the election results. Putting a man in office who can't even obey a judge's gag order 10 times and thinks he's above the law has to be a serious consideration.

Trust is important, ❗and Mr. Trump has a problem with the truth. 

Do you want to be lied to for the next four years? Is that fine with you? With all the crazy things happening around the world, this is terrifying. Trump said he's not going to accept the results of the 2024, election unless he wins, and a bloodbath if he doesn't. We should all bleach our eyes if this turns out to be true. This is not just an election for president; it's about whether we want to live in a democracy or not.

From Ben Benassi, in Inverness, Florida

Donald Trump and his immigrant family

Donald Trump's immigrant ancestry: published in the History News Network (HNN) and reprinted from The Washington Post

The story of Donald Trump’s grandfather, who came to the U.S. as an unaccompanied minor ~ by Kristine Phillips
(Two of Donald Trump's three wives have been immigrants ~ Ivanka and Melania. His mother Mary Anne MacLeod Trump was a Scottish immigrant. Melania Trump's parents are the beneficiaries of chain migration and holders of US "Green Cards")

The story of Donald Trump’s grandfather, who came to the U.S. as an unaccompanied minor

The packed steamship S.S. Eider arrived in New York City’s Castle Garden, the country’s first immigration center, on Oct. 17, 1885. 

Friedrich Trump and Elizabeth Trump (Donald Trump’s grandparents) are shown in a journal reviewed by historian Roland Paul in Kallstadt, Germany, on March 29, 2016. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post

Hundreds of would-be Americans from Germany had traveled for 10 days across the North Atlantic to their new home. 

Among them was a skinny, light-haired 16-year-old boy who had left his hometown, a small winemaking village where working hard meant just getting by.

Friedrich Trump stood on the deck, “waiting for his first glimpse of the New York Harbor,” author Gwenda Blair wrote in her 2001 book, “The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire.”
He did not have much; the young barber’s apprentice had brought only some clothes crammed in a small suitcase.

“He didn’t know English. He couldn’t possibly have known English,” Blair told The Washington Post. “He didn’t have anything like a high school diploma. He was literate, but in German.”

But his arrival marked the beginning of the Trump family’s life, adventure and misadventure in the United States. Years later, the teenager would begin amassing his fortune. 

He would marry Elizabeth Christ, a girl from his hometown. Together they would have three children. Their second child, Frederick Christ Trump, would expand the family’s real estate portfolio by building housing developments in the 1940s and 1950s. He would marry Mary Anne MacLeod, (a Scottish immigrant) and together, they would have five children. 

Their fourth child, Donald Trump, would become the most famous in the family, the 45th president of the United States whose hard-line immigration policies would have prevented his family’s patriarch from coming to the United States.

Trump family members have repeatedly tried to conceal their German heritage; but Thursday, during a news conference at a NATO summit in Brussels, President Trump told reporters that his father was “from Germany.”

Frederick Christ Trump was, in fact, born in New York 20 years after the president’s grandfather, Friedrich Trump, first arrived in the United States.

Under today’s policies, Friedrich Trump would have been considered an unaccompanied minor, or an “unaccompanied alien child,” experts say, unless his older sister, who was his only relative in the United States when he arrived, had been appointed as his guardian. 

But generally, said Ohio immigration attorney David Leopold, many unaccompanied minors arrive with relatives already in the country.

“Under President Obama, he would’ve been put into what people in the immigration world called the rocket docket. They would expedite his removal and prioritize it,” said New York immigration lawyer Matthew Kolken. The same would have happened under his grandson’s administration.

Trump was born on March 14, 1869, in Kallstadt, a village of less than 1,000 people in the Pfalz region in southwest Germany. 

Indeed, his family was not wealthy, not even middle class by modern standards. They owned and ran a small vineyard, but when Friedrich’s father, Johannes Trump, died when he was 8, the family of six children was left deeply in debt. The siblings who were old enough to work helped in the vineyard, and Katherina Trump scraped more money by baking bread while caring for her children, according to Blair. But the family was still barely surviving.
Friedrich, the youngest of the sons, was too frail to work in the vineyard. So his mother sent him to a neighboring town to learn to become a barber. He worked seven days a week, opening the barbershop every morning and sweeping the day’s cuttings every evening, Blair said. Two and a half years later, he went back home as a man with a trade and ready to work, only to realize that Kallstadt was too small to need another barber. He could (and should) serve in the military, a requirement by the German government, but he wanted something else.

“The stifling lack of opportunity in the village seemed to close in on him. Without any apparent opportunity for a better life, he saw what lay ahead was dreary, difficult, and poor,” Blair wrote. “He seemed to have no choice but to leave.”

One night, he wrote a note to his mother explaining that he was going to the New World, according to Blair’s account of family lore. When Katherina woke up the next morning, her son was gone. Friedrich traveled nearly 350 miles to Bremen, the port city where he paid the equivalent of $20 for a steerage class ticket on the S.S. Eider.

Steerage class ticket holders were offered barely one meal a day. There were no baths and hardly any drinking water. By the time S.S. Eider arrived at the Castle Garden immigration center in Manhattan 10 days later, the stench was so bad that a shipping and railroad tycoon who lived across the street complained about the smelly immigrants, Blair said.

Nevertheless, Blair surmised that Trump must have felt very excited.

“America was dazzling in the imagination. … This country had welcomed immigrants. It’s the land of opportunity where people — where it’s possible to make an immense fortune, which was somewhere around zero chance of doing that in Germany in this little wine-growing village,” she said.

Trump came to the country during the big wave of German immigration to the United States. The 1880s to the early 1900s was a period of high immigration for young migrants under adult age, said Manuel Orozco, a migration expert at the Dialogue, a think tank on Latin American issues. 

Immigrants, particularly Northern Europeans, were not only welcome; they were needed.

Although immigration was relatively free and open during the 18th and early 19th centuries, the federal government began placing restrictions as the number of immigrants rose. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, for example, was enacted both because of economic fears and racist attitudes against Chinese workers. Other laws were also enacted to keep certain laborers from coming to the country.

In 1897, President Grover Cleveland vetoed legislation that would have restricted immigration by requiring a literacy test that would require immigrants to read five lines from the Constitution. In his veto message, Cleveland said:

President Grover Cleveland (1837-1908)

"Heretofore we have welcomed all who came to us from other lands except those whose moral or physical conditions or history threatened danger to our national welfare and safety…. We have encouraged those coming from foreign countries to cast their lot with us and join in the development of our vast domains, securing in return a share in the blessings of American citizenship."

New York City was, in many respects, a German city. Trump lived with his older sister, who had moved to the United States the year before he did, in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. His neighbors spoke his language, and the familiar smell of German bread, like his mother made back home, filled the air on Sundays, Blair wrote.

Although he worked as a barber, that was not enough for Trump. He moved to the Pacific Northwest years later to make a name and fortune for himself during the Gold Rush era. He opened businesses — hotels, taverns and restaurants, usually located in red-light districts — in frontier mining towns.

“He was already shrewd enough and focused enough to realize that the money was mining the miners and not mining itself,” said Blair, who was careful not to say that Trump ran brothels. “I think we don’t quite know that.”

By the early 1900s, he was a wealthy and married man and an American citizen. But his wife, Elizabeth Christ Trump, was never able to call the United States her home. The family went back to Germany in 1904. The town welcomed them with open arms, but high-ranking government officials did not. They ordered Trump to be deported because he avoided serving in the military when he was a teenager.

Trump brought his pregnant wife and young daughter back to New York, where they lived in an apartment in a German neighborhood in the South Bronx. 

Months later, Elizabeth gave birth to Frederick Christ Trump, who would become the president’s father.

Friedrich Trump died at age 49 in 1918. His famous grandson would be born nearly 30 years later.

Echo from The Baltimore Sun ~ stop immigrant cruelty and child abuse

A letter to the editor of the Baltimore Sun from Patricia Ranney in Millersville, Maryland ~ echo opinion.

Beata Mariana de Jesus Mejia-Mejia, reunited with her 7-year-old son Darwin at BWI Marshall Airport Fri, June 22.

MILLERSVILLE, MD - I am deeply troubled by the treatment of children who have been separated from their families (at the US border with Mexico).

Since the “correct” port of entry for asylum seekers has been closed, this leaves all asylum seekers forced to enter a “door” that creates a “crime,” a stunning (and fearfully imaged) feature of the Donald Trump zero tolerance policy. Americans must pressure our government to establish humane due process at our southern border.

Children who were separated and placed elsewhere without their parents are kept away from access by the press, their families, lawyers and even elected officials. There is no way to know if they are being cared for. 

Melania Trump’s visit to a detention center was intended to quiet the voices of public wanting to see for themselves how the children are doing. I'm sure Ms. Trump’s intention was good and there may be some adequate (detention) centers, although not enough to cover the need.  Just as we celebrate the 7-year-old who was reunited at BWI airport — which took legal action and persistence — we do not absolve our government of this separation policy.

The bond between parent and child is a basic human right, and no humane country would separate them when families are seeking asylum at their border.

If this practice was done by any adult in society — a coach, teacher or religious leader — it would result in criminal charges. 

Kidnapping, child abuse and endangerment come to mind.

Let’s keep demanding human rights for those who come to our door. We would want no less if we were in their shoes. Due process matters.

Patricia Ranney, Millersville

Classy First Ladies in unison opposing immigrant family separations

All First Ladies

Here are statements from America's First Ladies, about the horrific actions against immigrant children, supported by the Donald Trump administration and opposed by all humanitarians and human rights advocates:

Mrs. Laura Bush: Laura Bush pens a scathing column on child separation as part of immigration policy- Former first lady Laura Bush spoke out Sunday night about the separation of families on the US border, writing a harsh criticism of the current zero-tolerance immigration policy being enforced under the Trump administration.

Mrs. Bush, whose opinion piece ran in The Washington Post, decries the separation of children from parents entering the United States illegally as "cruel" and "immoral." It's a rare public admonishment of current administration policy from Mrs. Bush, who has seldom weighed in on politics since her husband left office.

"I live in a border state. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart," Bush writes.

"Our government should not be in the business of warehousing children in converted box stores or making plans to place them in tent cities in the desert outside of El Paso," she continues. "These images are eerily reminiscent of the Japanese American internment camps of World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history."


Bush, who as first lady championed a formal platform of childhood education and literacy programs, blasts the current immigration situation unfolding in the headlines and on television news channels as not representative of the values of the United States.

"Americans pride ourselves on being a moral nation, on being the nation that sends humanitarian relief to places devastated by natural disasters or famine or war," she writes. "We pride ourselves on believing that people should be seen for the content of their character, not the color of their skin. We pride ourselves on acceptance. If we are truly that country, then it is our obligation to reunite these detained children with their parents — and to stop separating parents and children in the first place."

Bush calls for "good people at all levels of government who can do better to fix this." She also invoked the name and memory of her mother-in-law, former first lady Barbara Bush, who died in April. Barbara Bush was also an advocate for children while her husband, George H.W. Bush, was in office. In one particularly memorable moment during her tenure almost three decades ago, Barbara Bush spent time with babies who had HIV/AIDS, picking them up and holding them.

"My mother-in-law never viewed her embrace of that fragile child as courageous. She simply saw it as the right thing to do in a world that can be arbitrary, unkind and even cruel," writes Bush. "She, who after the death of her 3-year-old daughter knew what it was to lose a child, believed that every child is deserving of human kindness, compassion and love. In 2018, can we not as a nation find a kinder, more compassionate and more moral answer to this current crisis? I, for one, believe we can."

Bush's op-ed comes on the heels of current first lady Melania Trump's spokeswoman weighing in on the issue on her behalf.

Melania Trump 'hates to see' children separated from their families at borders - Just hours before Bush's piece was published, Trump's communications director Stephanie Grisham told CNN, "Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform. She believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart."

Melania Trump weighed in through her spokeswoman on the immigration crisis taking place at America's borders.

"Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform," her communications director, Stephanie Grisham, told CNN on Sunday. "She believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart."

Trump, who has made helping children the crux of her official "Be Best" platform as first lady, had yet to discuss the state of families and immigration, a topic that has been prominent in headlines for days.

Rosalynn Carter: Separating families at border is ‘a shame to our country'

Former first lady Rosalyn Carter ripped the Trump administration for separating migrant families at the border, calling the “zero tolerance” policy “disgraceful” and “a shame to our country.”
“When I was first lady, I worked to call attention to the plight of refugees fleeing Cambodia for Thailand, I visited Thailand and witnessed firsthand the trauma of parents and children separated by circumstance beyond their control,” Carter said in a statement obtained by ABC News.

“The practice and policy today of removing children from their parents’ care at our border with Mexico is disgraceful and a shame to our country," the statement continued.

Mrs. Michelle Obama referenced Mrs. Laura Bush's opinion published in The Washington Post. Mrs. Obama retweeted a link to Washington Post op-ed, writing, "Sometimes truth transcends party." 

Mrs. Hillary Clinton posted a message on Twitter: "What’s happening to families at the border right now is a humanitarian crisis. Every parent who has ever held a child in their arms, every human being with a sense of compassion and decency, should be outraged."

Additionally, Mrs. Laura Bush included her mother in law Barbara Bush in the opinion she wrote for The Washington Post.

In my opinion, our American First Ladies, as a group, are worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.

Trump family immigration

The United States has always been a country of immigrants. Donald Trump's family  is the leading example. His mother Mary Anne MacLeod Trump was a Scottish immigrant.

An echo letter to the editor ~ opinion published in the Delmarva now. com newspaper, in Salisbury, Maryland.

Regarding legal immigration, it is time for Americans to get on the same page when defining terms. 

Let's learn about legal immigration by example. One case study, the First Family, (the Trump family) provides us with nearly every variation on the legal immigration theme. 

FLOTUS Melania (nee Knaus) arrived in 1996 on a series of student and/or work visas. She began dating now-POTUS Donald Trump in 1998, two years later applying for the coveted EB-1 status, nicknamed the "Einstein visa," as it is limited to those of extraordinary achievement in their chosen field, who will have something of value to offer their new nation.

Melania, with an exceptional gift for nude modeling, applied in 2000 and was quickly granted EB-1 status in 2001 — one of only five Slovenians to earn that privilege.

Just a year after marrying Donald Trump, she was able to obtain U.S. citizenship, that was in 2006, and subsequently bring her parents to join her — the actual definition of "chain migration."

Meanwhile, Trump-built condos in Florida, predominantly Russian-owned, offer maternity-themed vacation packages for the purpose of giving birth to "anchor babies" endowed with dual Russian-U.S. citizenship.

So there we have it — lottery visa, chain migration and anchor babies — all of which define family Trump, yet he rails against them.

The draconian measures he wishes to impose upon the "little guys" apply to every family except his own.

Strangely, the purported evangelicals who have given Trump a perpetual mulligan do not seem to recognize Biblical warnings against moral hypocrisy. Shame on all of them.

Sharon Dorsey lives in Ocean Pines, Maryland.

Donald Trump study in failed leadership

"No, seriously!", it's completely incongruous to rational thought for First Lady Melania Trump to speak out against bullying, while her husband Donald kicks ass with everybody, except for Russians.  

Donald Trump's "Trumpertantrums" are part of his daily morning Twitter ritual. Sadly, they are symptomatic of his failed leadership abilities.

In other words, it's safer to be a Russian in America, than it is to be the brunt of presidential incoherent Twitter rants.  All Americans who dare to exercise our Constitutional rights (Second Amendment notwithstanding) are subject to suffer from the bullying spewed by Donald Trump, during his relentless Twitter tirades.  

These outrageous outbursts are the most serious symptom of Donald Trump's failed leadership.  A real leader, a person with visionary attributes and charisma, has no reason to belittle people, especially in the rude manner that Donald Trump practices doing, every day.  It's like Trump has his morning rant, a "Trumpertantrum", before taking daily medication.

Rather than praise people for their accomplishments, Donald Trump takes pride in demeaning his colleagues. Senator John McCain, Senator Ted Cruz's father, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Health and Human Services former director, Tom Price, FBI former director, James Comey, Senator Bob Corker and, so, the list goes on, I'm certain there's no real end to the names. Regardless of how the "Trumpertantrum" list is created, whether the criticisms are deserved or not, the role of the President is to rise above the negativity. Rather, he has never learned how to lead decisive actions, without causing a brouhaha about every tangential thought that floats into his head.

Only Russians are exempt from Trump's Twitter venom, and cruel, un-constructive (in fact, "destructive") criticisms.  Ambassador 
Kislyak, Vladimir Putin, Russian oligarchs....none of them are ever criticized.

Flag draped coffins deserve dignity and grieving families will carry their bereavement memories for generations.

Unfortunately, Trump can't envision how he would gain more respect from the American people if he took the time he wastes destroying people, to instead, honor the sacrifices of the US Military who have lost their lives in defense of our nation. Tragically, Trump doesn't realize how his immature rants and bizarre behaviors are causing generational harm to military families, by demeaning them during their grieving. 

In other words, the hurtful words and weird Tweets expressed today will reverberate for many years.  They will extend into generations of the families, who have been harmed by Trump's stupidity.

For example, what in the universe of possibilities could be difficult about having a prepared statement for each bereavement call? Donald Trump could easily have practiced, "Dear Mrs. Johnson, I am grieving with you at this sad time. Your husband LaDavid was a hero. My deepest sympathy to you and your family."  There is no rocket science to this prepared verbal expression of human compassion.

An inability to relate to the human condition, like throwing paper towels at desperate Puerto Rico hurricane victims, or telling Mrs. Myeshia Johnson, "Well, you husband knew what he signed up for," are completely missing the point about how to respond to the human condition. Rather than throw paper towels at the Puerto Rico people, Donald Trump should have been part of a work team to distribute water.  Rather than lecture Mrs. Johnson about her husband's duty to the Army, he should have congratulated her on his bravery. These human attributes are part of the fabric of being a leader. 

Obviously, Donald Trump never took a leadership class; but, if he did, take leadership 101, I'm certain he hardly made a passing grade - or any grade. He's a failed leader.

Meanwhile, my advice to Mrs. Melania Trump is to begin her anti-bullying campaign at home, beginning with her husband.

Donald Trump needs to study the attributes of successful leaders. There must be an on-line course he can sign up for, ASAP!

Donald Trump and the degrading paper towel volley

Republicans have to somehow stop the leadership cycle of stirring fear, causing intimidation and creating bigotry coming from Donald Trump. In fact, Donald Trump's abysmal behavior in Puerto Rico was beneath the dignity of any human being, while he was supposed to be offering help and support for their devastated human condition. Moreover, beautifully coiffed Melania Trump looked like she was a Greek stone statue standing next to her insensitive husband. She should be ashamed of herself for standing stoically by, while Trump created a toxic environment for the Puerto Rican people, who need help. Trump tossed rolls of paper towels over their heads in a degrading act, to signify their responsibility to clean up their island. Meanwhile, the Puerto Rican people were desperate for drinking water.

Disgusting degrading behavior when the Puerto Rican people are desperate for drinking water

I'm wondering if Education Secretary Betsy DeVos took note of the brand name on those disgusting paper towels Donald Trump threw at water needy Puerto Rico people.  I'm sure she'd have preferred to see him throw her company's logo, by using Amway products.

It's beyond my comprehension as a human being to try and understand how Republicans continue to tolerate this humiliating behavior by Donald Trump. Paper towel volley ball is no way to show Puerto Rico people how they are valued as American citizens.

My advice to all Republicans is to get out from under the evils being perpetrated by the Donald Trump administration before your legacies are glued like dark shadows to his worsening behaviors.

Somebody in the Republican party must show moral leadership and tell the American people that Donald Trump is unfit to be President of the United States. Please.

Bumpity Trump-Trump Bumpity Trump

Apprentice #POTUS takes the oath

Bitterness and resentment at Trump's "bumpity Trump-Trump" transition and inauguration. Republicans continue in vain in their attempts to smooth out a rocky administration transition and to make up stories about the Donald Trump flopped inauguration.

"...caustic bitterness and metallic taste..."- Amy Davidson

A well written report about Donald Trump's not so celebratory inauguration day in The New Yorker by Amy Davidson

It rained on the inauguration parade- no, seriously!

A couple of hours before Barack Obama became a former President, he was walking along the White House colonnade. 

A reporter called out to him, “Any final words for the American people?” He had just two. “Thank you,” he said, without breaking his stride. Donald and Melania Trump were expected for coffee, and he had run out of time. There were no more speeches to deliver, no more warnings that he could issue. In language, deed, and demeanor, Obama had done his part to make the transfer of power an orderly one. It might have been reasonable for him to hope that, at least for the next few hours, the progression of Inaugural rituals would provide some semblance of civic grace to what had been a notably unsettling time of transition in America. 

The causes extremists to unschooled plutocrats. There was the matter, too, of financial conflicts and nepotism, an autonomic reflex of aspiring authoritarians. At a pre-Inaugural black-tie dinner, Trump said to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, “If you can’t produce peace in the included the talk of Russian hacking and the antic appointment to many of the most important Cabinet posts of dubious executives, men and women who are tragically unfit, from ideological Middle East, nobody can.” 

When the Trumps arrived at the White House, Michelle Obama, wearing a dark-red dress, hugged Melania, in impeccable powder blue. Michelle, a practiced performer, smiled warmly. Still, then and later in the day, there were moments when her expression lost focus, as if she had finally exhausted her supply of forced cheer. The two women rode to the Capitol together; their husbands were in a separate car, as were the incoming and outgoing Vice-Presidents. Already seated on the Capitol steps were all of the living former Presidents and First Ladies except for George H. W. and Barbara Bush, who were too ill to travel. George W. Bush appeared to supply a stream of wisecracks. Jimmy Carter, who is ninety-two, and his wife, Rosalynn, had arrived the day before, on a commercial flight, on which he shook the hand of every passenger. When Bill and Hillary Clinton gamely walked down the steps to join them, someone could be heard to say, “We’re here for you.” Hillary’s presence was, by many measures, an act of civic courage.

Once everyone was in place, the ceremony moved quickly. Justice Clarence Thomas administered the oath of office to Vice-President Mike Pence. After an interlude of song from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, John Roberts, the Chief Justice, swore in the new President, and got the words right—he hadn’t in 2009, the first time he swore in Obama. Melania, who had been holding Abraham Lincoln’s Bible and one given to her husband when he was a child, sat down to listen to him speak. As he began his oration, she lifted an umbrella. It had started to rain.

Trump’s Inaugural Address was remarkable for its caustic bitterness, its metallic taste. He portrayed the United States as a forsaken nation—a landscape of “American carnage”—and himself as its sole redeemer. He opened by saying that the Obamas had been “magnificent,” by which he meant that they had been magnificent to him. Then, having dispensed with this gesture of courtesy, he bore in, equating Obama with a deposed dictator. January 20, 2017, would be remembered, Trump said, as “the day the people became the rulers of this nation again.” He embraced the ceremonial aspects of the day, the honor being paid to his person, while scorning the possibilities for comity and community that the occasion traditionally offers. Instead of affirming the continuity of democratic progress, he expressed his contempt for its non-Trumpian past.

In the new President’s brief oration, those who had come before him—all of “Washington”—were guilty not simply of an inability to enact good policies but of corrupt bad will, even treachery: of “refusing” to safeguard the border; of protecting only themselves, and forgetting the country’s citizens. “Their triumphs have not been your triumphs,” he said. Trumpism, by contrast, would bring riches and greatness. He spoke of the need for unity with Americans who live with “the crime and the gangs and the drugs,” terms that he has often used to describe minority communities but that in this case extended to those living among the “tombstones” of factories. 

Yet, this was not a plea for fellowship. Again and again, there was the petulant ring of Trump’s demagoguery—us versus them.

Above all, Trump asked his (IMO "cult") followers to turn their anxious gaze to foreigners, whom he portrayed as the thieves of their money and their dreams. “From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first,” he said. “America first.” Trump is, by now, well aware of the xenophobic history associated with that label. As a candidate, he seized on the darker moments of the American past to turn voters’ discontent into disdain, their doubts into conspiratorial suspicions. His speech was a warning of how deeply he might be willing to divide the country in order to deflect attention from his own policy failures, and how dangerous the resentments he blithely plays upon could be.

In 1988, Ronald Reagan, in his farewell address, noted that he had often referred to John Winthrop’s image of America as “a shining city upon a hill,” adding, “But I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it.” He tried one more time, painting a picture of a “tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds.” And, Reagan said, “if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” Trump, like many before him, attempted to emulate Reagan’s rhetoric. America would “shine as an example,” he said. “We will shine for everyone to follow.” His version had neither the poetry nor the principle. Along with the rest of his address, it provided only disquieting answers to the question of what kind of city he saw.

After Trump’s speech, the mingling of the dignitaries resumed, with a more reserved air. The Obamas climbed into a helicopter, headed to Palm Springs. The Bidens got into a car, bound for Delaware. The crowd at the Capitol dispersed onto streets already populated by protesters. Donald Trump went to an office where, surrounded by congressional leaders and his family, he began signing executive orders. ♦

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.

And so, the "bumpity-Trump-Trump" -look at him go!- ski ride, continues with more hazardous crevices expected in the dramatic episodes of an Apprentice #POTUS.

"Pushing me against the wall..." Natasha Stoynoff

Donald Trump lied about kissing women without their consent.
A response to 2nd debate response - Donald Trump has a credible accuser who accuses him of telling a lie to debate moderator Anderson Cooper.  Experience reported by NATASHA STOYNOFF

Physically Attacked by Donald Trump

 – a PEOPLE Writer’s Own Harrowing StoryIn December 2005, PEOPLE writer Natasha Stoynoff went to Mar-a-Lago to interview Donald and Melania Trump. What she says happened next left her badly shaken. Reached for comment, a spokeswoman for Trump said, “This never happened. There is no merit or veracity to this fabricated story.” What follows is Stoynoff’s experience.

Natasha Stoynoff

“Just for the record,” Anderson Cooper asked Donald Trump, during the presidential debate last Sunday, “are you saying … that you did not actually kiss women without (their) consent?”
“I have not,” Trump insisted.

I remember it differently.

In the early 2000s, I was assigned the Trump beat for PEOPLE magazine. For years I reported on all things Donald.

I tracked his hit show The Apprentice, attended his wedding to Melania Knauss and roamed the halls of his lavish Trump Tower abode. Melania was kind and sweet during our many chats, and Donald was as bombastic and entertaining as you would expect. We had a very friendly, professional relationship.

Then, in December 2005, around the time Trump had his now infamous conversation with Billy Bush, I traveled to Mar-a-Lago to interview the couple for a first-wedding-anniversary feature story.

Our photo team shot the Trumps on the lush grounds of their Florida estate, and I interviewed them about how happy their first year of marriage had been. When we took a break for the then-very-pregnant Melania to go upstairs and change wardrobe for more photos, Donald wanted to show me around the mansion. There was one “tremendous” room in particular, he said, that I just had to see.

“I just start kissing them,” he said to Bush. “It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

We walked into that room alone, and Trump shut the door behind us. I turned around, and within seconds he was pushing me against the wall and forcing his tongue down my throat.

Now, I’m a tall, strapping girl who grew up wrestling two giant brothers. I even once sparred with Mike Tyson. It takes a lot to push me. But Trump is much bigger — a looming figure — and he was fast, taking me by surprise and throwing me off balance. I was stunned. And I was grateful when Trump’s longtime butler burst into the room a minute later, as I tried to unpin myself.

The butler informed us that Melania would be down momentarily, and it was time to resume the interview.

I was still in shock and remained speechless as we both followed him to an outdoor patio overlooking the grounds. In those few minutes alone with Trump, my self-esteem crashed to zero. How could the actions of one man make me feel so utterly violated? 

I’d been interviewing A-list celebrities for over 20 years, but what he’d done was a first. Did he think I’d be flattered?

I tried to act normal. I had a job to do, and I was determined to do it. I sat in a chair that faced Trump, who waited for his wife on a loveseat. The butler left us, and I fumbled with my tape recorder. Trump smiled and leaned forward.

“You know we’re going to have an affair, don’t you?” he declared, in the same confident tone he uses when he says he’s going to make America great again. “Have you ever been to Peter Luger’s for steaks? I’ll take you. We’re going to have an affair, I’m telling you.” He also referenced the infamous cover of the New York Post during his affair with Marla Maples.

“You remember,” he said. “‘Best Sex I Ever Had.’ ”

Melania walked in just then, serene and glowing. 

Donald instantly reverted back to doting husband mode, as if nothing had happened, and we continued our interview about their wedded bliss. I nodded at his hollow words and smiled at his jokes, but I was nauseated. It didn’t seem to register to him in the slightest that what he’d done might have hurt or offended me, or his wife.

An hour later, I was back at my hotel. My shock began to wear off and was replaced by anger. I kept thinking, Why didn’t I slug him? Why couldn’t I say anything?

The next morning, anger became fear. Earlier in my trip, I had tried to arrange a session at Mar-a-Lago’s spa for my chronic neck problem — the spa was part of a private resort separate from the Trump residence — but they were booked up. 

Trump had gotten wind of that before the interview and called himself, asking the top massage therapist if he would come in extra early to see me, as a favor to him.

I’d been up all night worrying — had I done something to encourage his behavior? 

But, I decided to keep the appointment. I was running late and rushed to the spa with my luggage in tow. I found my designated therapist in a panic.

“I’m so, so sorry,” I apologized, “Can we do 30 minutes and I’ll pay you for the whole hour?”

“Never mind that. Mr. Trump was here waiting for you!”

“What? Where?”

“Here. In the massage room. Waiting for you. He waited 15 minutes, then had to leave for a meeting.”“

But why was he here?” I asked. “Is he coming back?”

The therapist shrugged. I lay on the massage table, but my eyes were on the doorknob the entire time. He’s going to show up and this guy’s going to let him in with me half-naked on a table. I cut the session short, got dressed and left for the airport.

Back in my Manhattan office the next day, I went to a colleague and told her everything.

“We need to go to the managing editor,” she said, “And we should kill this story, it’s a lie. Tell me what you want to do.”

But, like many women, I was ashamed and blamed myself for his transgression. I minimized it (“It’s not like he raped me…”); I doubted my recollection and my reaction. I was afraid that a famous, powerful, wealthy man could and would discredit and destroy me, especially if I got his coveted PEOPLE feature killed.

“I just want to forget it ever happened,” I insisted. The happy anniversary story hit newsstands a week later and Donald left me a voicemail at work, thanking me.

“I think you’re terrific,” he said, “the article was great and you’re great.”

Yeah, I thought. I’m great because I kept my mouth shut.

I asked to be taken off the Trump beat, and I never interviewed him again. A few months later, I saw Trump at the memorial service of a mutual friend, designer Oleg Cassini. We were both giving eulogies, but I avoided him. That winter, I actually bumped into Melania on Fifth Avenue, in front of Trump Tower as she walked into the building, carrying baby Baron.

“Natasha, why don’t we see you anymore?” she asked, giving me a hug.

I was quiet and smiled, telling her I’d missed her, and I squeezed little Baron’s foot. I couldn’t discern what she knew. Did she really not guess why I hadn’t been around?

Except for a few close friends and family, I didn’t talk about the incident. In time, I chalked it up to one of the hazards of a roller coaster ride of celebrity journalism: I’d danced barefoot in Cannes with John Travolta, sang with Paul McCartney, talked about Bogie with Bacall, quoted Shakespeare with Brando and Prince Andrew yelled at me until I cried. 

Oh, and Donald Trump forced himself on me. I tried to make myself believe it was no big deal.

Only, it was.

Now he’s running for president of our country. The other day, I listened to him talk about how he treats women on the Access Hollywood tape. 

I felt a strong mix of emotions, but shock wasn’t one of them.

I was relieved. I finally understood for sure that I was not to blame for his inappropriate behavior. I had not been singled out. As he explained to Billy Bush, it was his usual modus operandi with women. I felt deep regret for not speaking out at the time. What if he had done worse to other female reporters at the magazine since then because I hadn’t warned them?

And lastly, I felt violated and muzzled all over again.

During the presidential debate, Donald Trump lied about kissing women without their consent. I should know. His actions made me feel bad for a very long time.

They still do.

Four years after the Trump incident, I left the magazine to write screenplays and books — a few are New York Times bestsellers.

I’m not sure what locker room talk consists of these days. I only know that I wasn’t in a locker room when he pushed me against a wall. I was in his home, as a professional, and his beautiful pregnant wife was just upstairs.

Talk is talk. But it wasn’t just talk in my case, it was very much action.  And, just for the record, Mr. Trump, I did not consent.

Forgettable quotes from Republican national fear convention (RNFeC)

In my opinion, Melania Trump's plagiarism fiasco, when she spoke the phrases from Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention speech, were examples of GOP campaign incompetence. In fact the Republicans are responsible for her fiasco. They don't care about fact checking or plagiarism, unless doing so pertains to intimidating somebody else.

"Your word is your bond and you do what you say you are going to do...." Melania Trump. 

I'm sorry to tell you this Mrs. Trump, but there will never be a Mexican built and paid for wall between the US & Mexico.

"Your word is your bond and you do what you say you are going to do...." NOT.

"When your essay is due in one hour but you didn't start it yet #FamousMelaniaTrumpQuotes"

"Your word is your bond and you do what you say you are going to do"....OMG, Melania Trump obviously didn't receive much consultation about her speech and the "ghost" writer likely never existed, but, rather,was a figment of Melania's imagination.

Another forgettable quote was in the repeated Pavlov Dog reflex descriptions to Donald Trump as being "a good man", made by "Charlie McCarthy" impersonator and vice presidential pick, Governor Mike Pence of Indiana.  In fact, Pence tried hard to convince attendees that they should feel good about supporting Trump, who he repeatedly called “this good man.” Nevertheless, Governor Pence never offered a compelling example of why he said Trump was a good man? As a professed Christian, how was Governor Pence coerced into telling such a big lie?  

A third forgettable quote was when Ted Cruz was criticized for failing to endorse Donald Trump, but told the "RNFeC" to "Vote Your Conscience", rather than endorse the candidate.  

As Cruz continued speaking, and the crowd began to realize that an endorsement seemed less likely, the cheers that marked the early part of the speech became boos.

Lies were laced like tangled threads into the forgettable quotes at the "RNFeC", especially about President Barack Obama, who (by the way) isn't running for re-election. For example, Senator Cruz accused President Obama of closing Guantanamo but opening US borders.  #BigLie  In fact, Guantanamo is still open and more illegal immigrants have been tragically deported under President Obama's administration than during any of his predecessor's terms.  So sad, but true and Cruz told a #BigLie.

In fact, Tim Rogers reports in fusion.net 

"When it comes to getting tough on immigration, Republican candidates talk the talk, but Obama walks the walk. President Obama has deported more people than any U.S. president before him, and almost more than every other president combined from the 20th century." Tragically true, but another in the litany of RNFeC lies.

Although the US Constitution allows unmitigated freedom of speech, there are ethical standards that clearly transcend fundamental liberties. Telling the truth, thoughtful expression without plagiarism and honesty aren't defined in our American freedoms. Yet, their absence exposes an inability to express trust, competence, leadership and respect. Americans can't support the Republican nominees to be potential world leaders, because they are clearly incapable of moral statesmanship.  Forgettable RNFeC quotes should be completely erased from political narratives, because the words, and expressions don't represent, or reflect the high standards of leadership or the values of most Americans.

Donald Trump and women- maybe, he really puts lipstick on pigs

Here's the Megyn Kelly questions that Donald Trump is still sore about.

This is a compliment: In my opinion, FoxNews pundit, Megyn Kelly, is a candidate for a journalism award, a Pulitzer, or higher as a result of her bravery stating "truth to power".

Ms. Kelly asked this question at the outset of the first GOP presidential debate:

"Mr. Trump, one of the things people love about you is you speak your mind and you don't use a politician's filter. However, that is not without its downsides, in particular, when it comes to women. You've called women you don't like 'fat pigs,' 'dogs,' 'slobs' and 'disgusting animals.' ...Your Twitter account has several disparaging comments about women's looks. You once told a contestant on 'Celebrity Apprentice' it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president, and how will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton, who was likely to be the Democratic nominee, that you are part of the war on women?"

Ivana and Donald Trump- he compensated her as a spouse

Now, The New York Times published an investigative report about Donald Trump's inappropriate experiences with women. Although there was a time when main stream journalism would never have published such graphic details, the Trumponian political debacle has driven respectable journalism to the level of this degrading, but necessary, reporting.

Crossing the Line: How Donald Trump Behaved With Women in Private- By MICHAEL BARBARO and MEGAN TWOHEY MAY 14, 2016

Donald J. Trump had barely met Rowanne Brewer Lane when he asked her to change out of her clothes.

At a pool party at Mar-a-Lago hosted by Trump, there were about 50 models and 30 men. There were girls in the pools, splashing around. For some reason, Donald seemed a little smitten with me (Rowwanne). He just started talking to me and nobody else.

He suddenly took me by the hand, and he started to show me around the mansion. He asked me if I had a swimsuit with me. I said no. I hadn’t intended to swim. He took me into a room and opened drawers and asked me to put on a swimsuit.

Ms. Brewer Lane, at the time a 26-year-old model, did as Mr. Trump asked. “I went into the bathroom and tried one on,” she recalled. It was a bikini. “I came out, and he said, ‘Wow.’ ”

Mr. Trump, then 44 and in the midst of his first divorce, decided to show her off to the crowd at Mar-a-Lago, his estate in Palm Beach, Fla.

“He brought me out to the pool and said, ‘That is a stunning Trump girl, isn’t it?’ ” Ms. Brewer Lane said.

Donald Trump and women: The words evoke a familiar cascade of casual insults, hurled from the safe distance of a Twitter account, a radio show or a campaign podium. This is the public treatment of some women by Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president: degrading, impersonal, performed. “That must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees,” he told a female contestant on “The Celebrity Apprentice.” Rosie O’Donnell, he said, had a “fat, ugly face.” A lawyer who needed to pump milk for a newborn? “Disgusting,” he said.

But the 1990 episode at Mar-a-Lago that Ms. Brewer Lane described was different: a debasing face-to-face encounter between Mr. Trump and a young woman he hardly knew. This is the private treatment of some women by Mr. Trump, the up-close and more intimate encounters.

The New York Times interviewed dozens of women who had worked with or for Mr. Trump over the past four decades, in the worlds of real estate, modeling and pageants; women who had dated him or interacted with him socially; and women and men who had closely observed his conduct since his adolescence. 

In all, more than 50 interviews were conducted over the course of six weeks.

Their accounts — many relayed here in their own words — reveal unwelcome romantic advances, unending commentary on the female form, a shrewd reliance on ambitious women, and unsettling workplace conduct, according to the interviews, as well as court records and written recollections. The interactions occurred in his offices at Trump Tower, at his homes, at construction sites and backstage at beauty pageants. They appeared to be fleeting, unimportant moments to him, but they left lasting impressions on the women who experienced them.

What emerges from the interviews is a complex, at times contradictory portrait of a wealthy, well-known and provocative man and the women around him, one that defies simple categorization. Some women found him gracious and encouraging. He promoted several to the loftiest heights of his company, a daring move for a major real estate developer at the time.

He simultaneously nurtured women’s careers and mocked their physical appearance. “You like your candy,” he told an overweight female executive who oversaw the construction of his headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. He could be lewd one moment and gentlemanly the next.

In an interview, Mr. Trump described himself as a champion of women, someone who took pride in hiring them and was in awe of their work ethic. “It would just seem,” he said, “that there was something that they want to really prove.”

Pressed on the women’s claims, Mr. Trump disputed many of the details, such as asking Ms. Brewer Lane to put on a swimsuit. “A lot of things get made up over the years,” he said. “I have always treated women with great respect. And women will tell you that.”

But in many cases, there was an unmistakable dynamic at play: Mr. Trump had the power, and the women did not. 

In fact, he had celebrity. He had wealth. He had connections. Even after he had behaved crudely toward them, some of the women sought his assistance with their careers or remained by his side.

For Ms. Brewer Lane, her introduction to Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago was the start of a whirlwind romance — a heady blur of helicopter rides and high-end hotel rooms and flashing cameras.

“It was intimidating,” she said. “He was Donald Trump, obviously.”

Boarding School ‘Ladies’ Man’

It started at the New York Military Academy, a small, severe boarding school 90 minutes’ drive north of New York City. 

Strictly enforced rules prohibited girls from setting foot on the all-boys campus unless it was a special occasion. And on those special occasions, young Donald Trump paid careful mind to the kind of girls he brought to school. They had to be gorgeous — 10s, in his future parlance.

“Donald was extremely sensitive to whether or not the women he invited to campus were pretty,” recalled George White, a fellow student in the class of 1964.  “For Donald,” he added, “it’s display.”

He steadily built an image as a young playboy amid the deprivations of a single-sex military school, where most boys craved but rarely enjoyed the company of a girl. By senior year, his classmates had crowned him “ladies’ man” in the yearbook, a nod to the volume of his dates.

He wasn’t bringing the same girl. He had a variety of girls coming up. Donald was bringing in very pretty women, very sophisticated women and very well-dressed women. You could always tell they were of a higher class.

–George White, high school classmate

Asked how he had earned the “ladies’ man” title, Mr. Trump at first demurred. “I better not tell you — I’ll get myself in trouble,” he said. He later elaborated, saying he had “a great feeling” and “a great like” for women.

The Alpha Trump

Mr. Trump grew up with an influential role model for how to deal with women: Fred C. Trump, his powerful and unyielding father.

The elder Mr. Trump exerted control no matter how big or small the decision, as Ivana Zelnickova learned over dinner one night in the late 1970s. Her boyfriend, Donald Trump, had invited her to join his siblings and parents at Tavern on the Green, the ornate restaurant in Central Park.

When the waiter came to take orders, Ivana made the mistake of asking for what she wanted. Fred Trump set her straight, she recalled in a previously unpublished interview with Michael D’Antonio, the author of “The Truth About Trump.”

Fred would order steak. Then Donald would order steak. … Everybody order steak. I told the waiter, “I would like to have fish.” O.K., so I could have the fish. And Fred would say to the waiter: “No, Ivana is not going to have a fish. She is going to have a steak.” I said, “No, I’m going to have my fish.” And Donald would come home and say, “Ivana, why would you have a fish instead of a steak?” I say, “Because I’m not going to be told by somebody to have something which I don’t want.”

–Ivana Trump, ex-wife

Mr. Trump defended his father’s conduct. “He would’ve said that out of love,” he said. If his father had overruled her fish order, Mr. Trump said, “he would have said that only on the basis that he thought, ‘That would be better for her.’ ”

The elder Mr. Trump did not hide his more traditional views on gender. When his son hired a woman, Barbara A. Res, as his head of construction in the 1980s, Fred Trump was mystified and annoyed.

Fred did not like the idea that Donald had hired me. “A woman?” Donald told me that. But I could tell by the way Fred treated me. He used to say that all the time: “You don’t know what you are talking about.” When I would complain to Donald about Fred, he would say, “Fred didn’t want me to hire you or didn’t think it was a woman’s job.”

–Barbara A. Res, former Trump executive

Mr. Trump said it was a different era. “My father,” he said, “probably never would have seen a woman in that position.”

Mr. Trump still holds up his parents as models, praising his stay-at-home mother for understanding and accommodating a husband who worked almost nonstop.

“My mother was always fine with it,” he said, recalling her “brilliant” management of the situation. “If something got interrupted because he was going to inspect a housing site or something, she would handle that so beautifully.”

“She was an ideal woman,” he said.

("The New York Times" neglected to report that Donald Trump's mother was also a Scottish immigrant.  Mary Anne MacLeod Trump from Tong, Scotland born in 1912.)

The Company of Women
With his purchase of the Miss Universe Organization, Mr. Trump was now in the business of young, beautiful women.

They craved his advice and approval, a fact he seemed to understand well.

Temple Taggart, the 21-year-old Miss Utah, was startled by how forward he was with young contestants like her in 1997, his first year as the owner of Miss USA, a branch of the beauty pageant organization. As she recalls it, he introduced himself in an unusually intimate manner.

He kissed me directly on the lips. I thought, “Oh my God, gross.” He was married to Marla Maples at the time. I think there were a few other girls that he kissed on the mouth. I was like “Wow, that’s inappropriate.”

–Temple Taggart, 1997 Miss Utah USA

Mr. Trump disputes this, saying he is reluctant to kiss strangers on the lips. But Ms. Taggart said it was not an isolated incident.

At the gala celebration after the show, she said, Mr. Trump immediately zeroed in on her, telling her how much he liked her style and inviting her to visit him in New York to talk about her future. Soon enough, she said, he delivered another unwelcome kiss on her lips, this time in Trump Tower. After boasting of his connections to elite modeling agencies, he advised her to lie about her age to get ahead in the industry, she said.

“ ‘We’re going to have to tell them you’re 17,’ ” Ms. Taggart recalled him telling her, “because in his mind, 21 is too old. I was like, ‘No, we’re not going to do that.’ ”

His level of involvement in the pageants was unexpected, and his judgments, the contestants said, could be harsh. Carrie Prejean, who was 21 when she participated in the Miss USA contest in 2009 as Miss California, was surprised to find Mr. Trump personally evaluating the women at rehearsal. “We were told to put on our opening number outfits — they were nearly as revealing as our swimsuits — and line up for him onstage,” she wrote in her memoir, “Still Standing.”


Donald Trump walked out with his entourage and inspected us closer than any general ever inspected a platoon. He would stop in front of a girl, look her up and down, and say, “Hmmm.” Then he would go on and do the same thing to the next girl. He took notes on a little pad as he went along. After he did this, Trump said: “O.K. I want all the girls to come forward.” …

Donald Trump looked at Miss Alabama.

“Come here,” he said.

She took one more step forward.

“Tell me, who’s the most beautiful woman here?”

Miss Alabama’s eyes swam around.

“Besides me?” she said. “Uh, I like Arkansas. She’s sweet.”

“I don’t care if she’s sweet,” Donald Trump said. “Is she hot?” …

It became clear that the point of the whole exercise was for him to divide the room between girls he personally found attractive and those he did not. Many of the girls found the exercise humiliating. Some of the girls were sobbing backstage after he left, devastated to have failed even before the competition really began to impress “The Donald.”

–Carrie Prejean, 2009 Miss California USA

Mr. Trump, in an interview, said he would “never do that.” Such behavior, he said, would bruise egos and hurt feelings. “I wouldn’t hurt people,” he said. “That’s hurtful to people.”
A Preoccupation With Bodies

Mr. Trump was not just fixated on the appearance of the women around him. He possessed an almost compulsive need to talk about it.

Inside the Trump Organization, the company that manages his various businesses, he occasionally interrupted routine discussions of business to opine on women’s figures. Ms. Res, his construction executive, remembered a meeting in which she and Mr. Trump interviewed an architect for a project in the Los Angeles area. Out of the blue, she said, Mr. Trump evaluated the fitness of women in Marina del Rey, Calif. “They take care of their asses,” he said.

“The architect and I didn’t know where he was coming from,” Ms. Res said. Years later, after she had gained a significant amount of weight, Ms. Res endured a stinging workplace observation about her own body from Mr. Trump. “ ‘You like your candy,’ ” she recalled him telling her. “It was him reminding me that I was overweight.”

Her colleague Louise Sunshine experienced similar observations from Mr. Trump when she gained weight. But she saw it as friendly encouragement, not a cruel insult. “He thought I looked much better thin,” she said. “He would remind me of how beautiful I was.”

Whenever possible, Mr. Trump wanted his visitors to see his most attractive employees, as Ms. Res learned.

We had a big meeting once. I grabbed one of the women in the office and sent her in to get lunch orders. Donald said, “Not her.” She didn’t look great. He got another woman to take the lunch orders. That was purely about looks. He wanted the people in that room to think that all the women who worked for him were beautiful.

–Ms. Res

Mr. Trump frequently sought assurances — at times from strangers — that the women in his life were beautiful. During the 1997 Miss Teen USA pageant, he sat in the audience as his teenage daughter, Ivanka, helped to host the event from onstage. He turned to Brook Antoinette Mahealani Lee, Miss Universe at the time, and asked for her opinion of his daughter’s body.

“ ‘Don’t you think my daughter’s hot? She’s hot, right?’ ” Ms. Lee recalled him saying. ‘I was like, ‘Really?’ That’s just weird. She was 16. That’s creepy.”

Ms. Brewer Lane, who dated Mr. Trump for several months in 1990 and early 1991, said it did not take long for him to solicit her view on the attractiveness of two of his previous romantic partners, Marla Maples and Ivana Trump.


He did ask me, on a scale of 1 to 10, what I thought of Marla. I thought that was very boyish of him. He asked me the same thing about Ivana. I said, obviously, she is your wife. A beautiful woman. What could you say but a 10? I am not going to judge your wife.

–Ms. Brewer Lane

Mr. Trump said he did not know Ms. Brewer Lane very well, despite dating her. “I wouldn’t have asked anybody about how they rate other women,” he said.

Kissing, and Telling Everyone

He liked to brag about his sexual prowess and his desirability as a date, no matter who was around.

Barbara J. Fife, a deputy mayor under David N. Dinkins, New York’s mayor in the early 1990s, was not especially close to Mr. Trump. But that did not stop him from telling her why he was in such a hurry one day as he sat in her office at City Hall.

“I have this great date tonight with a model for Victoria’s Secret,” Ms. Fife recalled him telling her.

“I saw it as immature, quite honestly,” she said.

At his office in Trump Tower, Mr. Trump seemed eager for his colleagues to hear about his new companion, Ms. Maples. When The New York Post feasted on her supposed satisfaction with him in bed, captured in the headline “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had,” Mr. Trump was unabashed, Ms. Res said.


He absolutely loved that. He waved it around the office. “Did you see this?” Everyone who worked there were kind of horrified. We all thought it made him look bad. He didn’t.

–Ms. Res

Mr. Trump denies boasting about the headline. He seems more bashful these days, saying he cannot recall how many women he has dated. “Not as many as people would think,” he said. “I’m not somebody that really loved the dating process.”
Women as Trusted Colleagues

To build his business, Mr. Trump turned to women for a simple reason: They worked hard — often harder than men, he told them.

When Mr. Trump hired Ms. Res to oversee the construction of Trump Tower, he invited her to his apartment on Fifth Avenue and explained that he wanted her to be his “Donna Trump” on the project, she said. Few women had reached such stature in the industry.

He said: “I know you’re a woman in a man’s world. And while men tend to be better than women, a good woman is better than 10 good men.” … He thought he was really complimenting me.

–Ms. Res

He entrusted several women in his company with enormous responsibility — once they had proven themselves worthy and loyal. Ms. Sunshine had little experience in real estate, but as a top campaign fund-raiser for Gov. Hugh Carey of New York, she had fulfilled a lifelong wish for Mr. Trump: She secured him a vanity license plate with his initials, DJT, which adorned his limousine for years.

It’s something he had wanted since his father bought him toy cars. By some gift of God, I was able to obtain it for him. He was beyond thrilled. And I became the woman in his life who could do no wrong. And he became the man in my life who was going to be my mentor.

–Louise Sunshine, former Trump executive

Ms. Sunshine worked for Mr. Trump for 15 years, becoming a major New York real estate figure in her own right. Ms. Res remained at the company for 12 years, left after a disagreement over a project and then returned as a consultant for six more years. Both expressed gratitude for the chances Mr. Trump had taken on them.

In a rough-and-tumble industry thoroughly dominated by men, Mr. Trump’s office stood out for its diversity, recalled Alan Lapidus, an influential architect who designed the Trump Plaza casino in Atlantic City.

He is a lot more complicated than the cartoon character. (Well, Looney Toons figures often misrepresent themselves, in my opinion.)

Trunp's top company executives were women, like Barbara Res. For any company to hire a woman as chief of construction was actually startling. I don’t know of a single other developer who had a woman in that position. The respect for women was always there. That’s why, in spite of the comments he makes now — and God knows why he says these things — when he was building his empire, the backbone was women.

–Alan Lapidus, architect

Dismissive Nicknames

To women who had climbed to positions of power outside his company, Mr. Trump’s behavior could feel like a jarring throwback.

Alair A. Townsend was for a time the highest-ranking woman inside New York’s City Hall during the Koch administration, with the title of deputy mayor for economic development. But when Mr. Trump called her, she said, her position seemed less relevant to him than her gender.

He was dismissive. It was always, “Hon,” “Dear.” Things he wouldn’t have said to a man. It was designed to make you feel small. And he did that repeatedly.

–Alair A. Townsend, former deputy mayor

It was an unthinking habit when he interacted with women, colleagues said. “At Trump Tower,” said Ms. Res, his longtime colleague, “he called me Honey Bunch.”

Wife and Partner, and Regret

No single figure better encapsulated the paradoxes of Mr. Trump’s treatment of women in the workplace than his first wife, Ivana.

He entrusted her with major pieces of a corporate empire and gave her the titles to match. She was the president of Trump’s Castle, a major casino in Atlantic City, and the Plaza Hotel, the storied complex on Central Park South in Manhattan. “She ran that hotel,” Ms. Res said. “And she ran it well.”

But he compensated her as a spouse, not a high-level employee, paying her an annual salary of $1 for the Trump’s Castle job, according to her tax documents. And he grew to resent her outsize role. By the end of their marriage, Mr. Trump wrote in his 1997 book, “The Art of the Comeback,” he regretted having allowed her to run his businesses.

My big mistake with Ivana was taking her out of the role of wife and allowing her to run one of my casinos in Atlantic City, then the Plaza Hotel. The problem was, work was all she wanted to talk about. When I got home at night, rather than talking about the softer subjects of life, she wanted to tell me how well the Plaza was doing, or what a great day the casino had.

I will never again give a wife responsibility within my business.

–Donald J. Trump, presumptive Republican nominee

He seems to have kept his word. His current wife, Melania, has marketed her own lines of beauty products and jewelry. But Mr. Trump remains mostly uninvolved in her work. After calling it “very successful,” he struggled to describe it.

“What is it on television with the sales?” he asked. “What do they call that? Not Home Shopping, the other one.”

Accusations and Denials

Once his first marriage started to collapse, Mr. Trump faced his most serious allegations of aggression toward women.

When “Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump,” by the journalist Harry Hurt III, was released in 1993, it included a description of a night in which Mr. Trump was said to have raped Ivana in a fit of rage. It also included a statement from Ivana that Mr. Trump’s lawyers insisted be placed in the front of the book. In the statement, she described an occasion of “marital relations” during which “I felt violated, as the love and tenderness, which he normally exhibited toward me, was absent.”

“During a deposition given by me in connection with my matrimonial case, I stated that my husband had raped me,” the statement said. “I referred to this as a ‘rape,’ but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”

Mr. Trump denied raping Ivana, and she did not respond to a request for comment. After the allegation re-emerged in the news media last year, Ivana said in a statement, “The story is totally without merit.”

In the early 1990s, Jill Harth and her boyfriend at the time, George Houraney, worked with Mr. Trump on a beauty pageant in Atlantic City, and later accused Mr. Trump of inappropriate behavior toward Ms. Harth during their business dealings. In a 1996 deposition, Ms. Harth described their initial meeting with Mr. Trump at Trump Tower.

Donald Trump stared at me throughout that meeting. He stared at me even while George was giving his presentation. … In the middle of it he says to George, “Are you sleeping with her?” Meaning me. And George looked a little shocked and he said, “Well, yeah.” And he goes, “Well, for the weekend or what?”

–Jill Harth, former pageant promoter

Mr. Houraney said in a recent interview that he was shocked by Mr. Trump’s response after he made clear that he and Ms. Harth were monogamous.

“He said: ‘Well, there’s always a first time. I am going after her,’ ” Mr. Houraney recalled, adding: “I thought the man was joking. I laughed. He said, ‘I am serious.’ ”

By the time the three of them were having dinner at the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel the next night, Mr. Trump’s advances had turned physical, Ms. Harth said in the deposition.

“Basically he name-dropped throughout that dinner, when he wasn’t groping me under the table,” she testified. “Let me just say, this was a very traumatic thing working for him.”

Ms. Harth, who declined to comment, gave the deposition in connection with a lawsuit that alleged Mr. Trump had failed to meet his obligations in a business partnership. Mr. Trump settled that case but denied wrongdoing. Ms. Harth withdrew her own lawsuit against Mr. Trump alleging unwanted advances, but she has stood by her original claims.

Mr. Trump said it was Ms. Harth who had pursued him, and his office shared email messages in which Ms. Harth, over the past year, thanked Mr. Trump for helping her personally and professionally and expressed support for his presidential candidacy.
Defending His Record

Mr. Trump says the world misunderstands his relationship with women.

He sees himself as a promoter of women — a man whose business deals, like the purchase of the struggling Miss Universe pageant, have given them untold opportunities for employment and advancement. “Hundreds and hundreds of women, thousands of women, are the better for it,” he said.

He has groomed his daughter, Ivanka, to run his company. And as a chief executive, he said, he admires women for a work ethic that can exceed that of the men around them. Mr. Trump recalled a telling exchange with a female worker.


I’ve said, “Why don’t you go home and take it easy now, just go relax.” “No, Mr. Trump, I have to finish this job.” And I said, “Boy, you really are a worker.” And it would just seem that there was something, that they want to really prove something, which is wonderful.

–Mr. Trump

Several women who have held positions of power within the Trump Organization in recent years said they had never known Mr. Trump to objectify women or treat them with disrespect.

“I think there are mischaracterizations about him,” said Jill Martin, a vice president and assistant counsel at the company. Ms. Martin said Mr. Trump had enthusiastically supported her decision to have two children over the past five years, even when it meant working from home and scaling back on business travel.

“That’s hard with women lawyers,” she said. “For me, he’s made it a situation where I can really excel at my job and still devote the time necessary for my family.”

After competing in the 2009 Miss USA pageant, Laura Kirilova Chukanov, a Bulgarian immigrant who lived in Utah, met with Mr. Trump in his New York office and explained that she wanted to make a documentary about her home country. Mr. Trump encouraged the project and followed through on a promise to put her in touch with his production company.

“He genuinely wanted to know what I wanted to do with my life and how he could help,” Ms. Chukanov said.

A Damaging Critique
But when Mr. Trump lost confidence in women, he could inflict lasting damage on their lives.

After Alicia Machado won the 1996 Miss Universe title, something very human happened: She gained weight. Mr. Trump did not keep his critique of her changing body quiet — he publicly shamed her, she said.

I told the president of Miss Universe, a very sweet woman, I said I need some time to recuperate, to rest, to exercise, to eat right. 

I asked them to bring me a doctor to help me — to have a special diet and get exercise, and they said yes. They took me to New York, installed me in a hotel. The next day, they took me to the gym, and I’m exposed to 90 media outlets. Donald Trump was there. I had no idea that would happen.

I was about to cry in that moment with all the cameras there. I said, “I don’t want to do this, Mr. Trump.” He said, “I don’t care.”

–Alicia Machado, 1996 Miss Universe

Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe.

Mr. Trump said he had pushed her to lose weight. “To that, I will plead guilty,” he said, expressing no regret for his tactics.

But the humiliation, Ms. Machado said, was unbearable. “After that episode, I was sick, anorexia and bulimia for five years,” she said. “Over the past 20 years, I’ve gone to a lot of psychologists to combat this.”

In conclusion, Donald Trump has treated women either of two ways. They're either "trophies" or they're "pigs". There's no "in between", except, if you happen to be an architect, who worked harder than a man, in the same occupation, or you were his wife who he paid like a spouse. I guess, you can't call an architect either a "trophy" or a "pig", but it's possible she was a quasi "professional" slave laborer.  As for Ivana, she's done much better since dumping Trump, just like the American voters must do.