Mother was his queen, but he loves to make women cry

IHOPE Donald Trump’s toxic objectification of women – recorded on a bus when he thought he was talking privately – has finally derailed his bid for the White House.

Trump’s behaviour and his grovelling video apology have revolted even his own supporters. We can only imagine the force with which Hillary Clinton will plunge the knife into him at their second live television debate later tonight.

I have my own experience of Trump, of both his charm and his misogynist bullying – and of his quite extraordinary devotion to one woman in his life, his mother, Mary MacLeod.

When I made a documentary about him for ITV back in the 1990s, Trump gave me unlimited access to his private life that he had never allowed before, and significantly has never allowed since. He took me to the penthouse in Trump Tower overlooking Manhattan to meet his mother.

It was like an audience with a queen. She sat in a gilded chair surrounded by priceless paintings and antiques in a room that seemed to have been modelled on a Hollywood idea of a Renaissance palace.

Mary, a crofter’s daughter from the Hebrides, sat easily, dressed elegantly in designer clothes, her hair coiffed, nails perfectly manicured. Trump made a great fuss of her in front of the cameras. She was on a pedestal. He was the loving son.

Only Trump knows how his attitude to other women could be so toxic. It is instructive, however, that around the same time he was proudly showing off his mother to me, he was denigrating a former Miss Universe, Alicia Machado, who had won the competition he owned.

I have often wondered about the darker recess of Trump’s mind. What kind of man uses that language? And what would Mary MacLeod make of his uncontrollable rages at women he perceives to have done him wrong by sending personal attacks to them in the middle of the night, as he did with Miss Machado, twenty years after he first

called her Miss Piggy. And indeed as he did with me.

It almost seems he gets some kind of perverse sexual gratification from his denigration of women. Thanks partly to this and other disgraceful revelations about his character, Hillary is again pulling ahead of Trump in the polls, although only by some four percentage points.

To be beaten by a woman in this election would be a severe injury to his psyche.

He knows how to make women cry and clearly loves it.

Mary MacLeod would weep at that.