OLD WIVES’ DE-TALES!
Book on Trump: Treat women like s--t Divorces? Merely the art of the deal
Renowned investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, author of the definitive book “Trump: The Deals and Downfall,” has done an updated version of the expose. This excerpt deals with the women in Trump’s life: Wives Ivana, Marla Maples and Melania, along with daughter Ivanka. FEW REMEMBERED that Donald had been talking about a presidential run before he dumped Ivana, telling friends that her awkward English and Czech roots might become a campaign negative.
Georgia Peach Marla Maples, on the other hand, was his Southern strategy, exuding all-American cheekiness and chestiness, but she was gone so quickly after their 1993 wedding that there was no time to test her as a viable campaign companion.
If (right-wing radio host Hugh) Hewitt’s prediction is correct, Ivanka will presumably play that role now that her third child is born, a substitute for all three wives.
Incredibly, the story of his marriages and stud life, while part of his appeal in the truck lane of his constituency, has yet to be fully told in this campaign season.
While opponents like Sen. Ted Cruz have laid out their positions on contraception, prodded by a Supreme Court case and congressional legislation championed by GOP leadership, Trump has yet to say if he supports federal funding or thinks employers should be required to cover it as part of women’s health care.
It’s hard to imagine that a man on a lifelong prowl for women, preferably in their twenties, isn’t a contraception champion. But he’s made it through most of the primaries without being asked, even though he may be carrying an ever-ready Trump Trojan in his pocket for the occasion.
Donald preaches in every speech, including the one announcing his presidential bid, about his devotion to the Second Amendment.
But it’s the Fifth Amendment that was his favorite when he was deposed in the divorce with Ivana, invoked 97 times to be exact, and mostly in response to questions about “other women.”
After meeting Marla at a tennis tournament, he started flirting with her at a Manhattan church, Marble Collegiate. That’s where he eventually married her, the great passion that blew up his family, but he waited for two years after his divorce, and even for two months after she gave birth to their daughter.
All of it is a saga that might have raised a few eyebrows on the plains, if television’s endless Trump coverage ever showed anyone the cheap drama of it, drawing on the tape in their tanks.
Marla herself said at the time, on one of the serial soap opera tapes of Donald’s life that broadcast news has chosen not to replay, that even thinking about marriage caused a “little freak-out” in Donald, or a visit from the “fear monster.”
She worked with him to “get over that fear monster” and carried a wedding dress with her when they traveled.
“You’ve got to be prepared,” said Trump’s onetime fixation, whom he had sequestered in so many love castles that Ivana had to resort to hiring an army of detectives to track them.
“I was bored when she was walking down the aisle,” Donald said years later. “I kept thinking, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’”
If his pulse only pumps when he’s on the hunt, the campaign may be more scintillating than the presidency.
As public as his own affair with Maples was, with her declaring her love for him in a Diane Sawyer interview that he helped arrange while still married to Ivana, he dumped his peach shortly after she was discovered by a cop on a closed stretch of Florida beach far from Mar-A-Lago at 4 a.m. with a bodyguard who at first lied to the police about what he was doing there.
Marla said she had to go to the bathroom, though the two were caught “hiding under a lifeguard chair,” news reports indicated. Maybe, on second thought, Donald wasn’t the best sex Marla ever had.
Later, Donald tried to disabuse anyone of the notion that he was a cuckold or, as he would put it on the business side, a “disgruntled former partner” when he got a divorce.
A source very close to him (meaning him) explained that it was all a dollars-and-cents question. Marla’s prenuptial agreement offered a mere million, plus support if they split early, but a percent of net after that.
Like his four casino bankruptcies, his divorces were, in his view, merely additional evidence of his business acumen, with Ivana and Marla strategically reduced to their prenup limits.
Both brides are still zipped shut by confidentiality clauses, especially Marla, who had the audacity to tell a London paper in 1999, when Donald was ruminating publicly about a possible presidential candidacy, that she would tell what he “is really like” if he ran.
“I will not be silent,” Marla declared. “I will feel it is my duty as an American citizen to tell the people what he is really like.”
Trump hauled her into court, where his lawyer told reporters that her statements, coming just a day before she was to receive a giant Trump check, “could well be used to test” the judgment of whether she was or wasn’t “a bimbo.”
But now Marla, whose daughter Tiffany appeared at the Tower
press conference and went to Penn on her father’s dime, is back on camera herself, on “The View” and “Dancing With the Stars,” describing Donald as a “voice for peace.”
Melania, too, is a window into Donald’s fluttering affections. When he teased Larry King about a possible run in 1999, shortly after his divorce from Marla was finalized (although they had been separated for years), he said he would marry Melania in 24 hours if he decided to seek the White House, guaranteeing that the country would have a First Lady.
She immediately told a reporter she’d do it. When he didn’t run, it took him nearly six years to get the job done. There was a leaked breakup along the way, a sure way to advertise his temporary availability.
Just months after this televised faux-proposal, Melania posed nude atop Donald’s bearskin rug for a British magazine, a photo that stirred an uproar in early 2016, when an anti-Trump superPAC circulated it.
She was handcuffed to a briefcase on Donald’s private plane, a now-eerie foreshadowing of the nuclear football in a wrist-cableconnected bag that always accompanies the President and seems so incongruous when combined with hair-trigger Trump.
Melania, too, has described her daily explosive sex life with Donald, a salute that may now be a prenup provision. Even the name of her 10-year-old son, Barron, who has his own floor in Trump Tower, connotes wealth or title, like Tiffany, Trump’s daughter with Marla, and so unlike the names of his three children with Ivana — Donald, Eric, and Ivanka. Of course, there were enough other models besides all three of his wives to fill an old Playboy edition, which he actually proposed at one point, dubbing it “The Girls of Trump.” He bragged that he got hit on all the time and “if you take one out of a thousand a few times a year, you know you’re doing pretty good.” It wasn’t just the endless gossip about women that he reveled in; it was the cheap shots he took (at them), ranging from “fat pig” to “slob.” “You have to treat ’em like s--t,” was his memorable motto for women. People magazine once suggested he also had an affair with a chiropractic college graduate who worked at Mar-A-Lago (he denied it).
A New Yorker reporter, who was watching with Trump while the chiropractor manipulated the back of a club member, asked where she’d done her training. In a lifetime of frat boy chatter, no comment topped Trump’s response to the school question.
He said, “I’m not sure. Baywatch Medical School? Does that sound right? I’ll tell you the truth. Once I saw Dr. Ginger’s photograph, I didn’t really need to look at her resume or anyone else’s. Are you asking, ‘Did we hire her because she’d trained at Mount Sinai for 15 years?’ The answer is no. And I’ll tell you why: because by the time she’s spent 15 years at Mount Sinai, we don’t want to look at her.”
Melania, warned but undaunted, met Donald at the Kit Kat Club shortly after the New Yorker story appeared 18 years ago.
Even with all of this baggage, Donald went into bizarrely sensitive overdrive when Hillary Clinton said he had a “penchant for sexism.”
She was responding to Trump’s declaration that she “got schlonged” by Barack Obama in 2008, and that her bathroom break at a debate was “disgusting.”
The comments were consistent with a Trump obsession about female appearance and bodily function, including his ongoing invective about candidate Carly Fiorina’s face (inset) and Megyn Kelly’s period.
Donald responded to Hillary’s restrained assessment by resurrecting Bill Clinton’s 1980s and 1990s scandals, noting that she has “one of the great women abusers of all time sitting in her house, waiting for her to come home for dinner.”
He boasted for months afterward that his countercharges shut the Clintons up about his supposed sexism. He had been much more sympathetic about Clinton’s sex life in 2001, shortly after Clinton left office, telling an Australian reporter how awful it was that Clinton had been asked if he’d had sex with Monica Lewinsky.
“What he should have done is fought for years not to answer it,” said Donald, whose penchant for projection is at least as recurrent as his penchant for sexism. “I mean isn’t it amazing and terrible that a guy — a President — is put in that position?”
While Bill and Hillary’s visit to Mar-A-Lago for the Melania wedding is attracting much media attention now, few recall that Lewinsky was noticed there herself, while she worked on her memoir in 1999.
She wound up chatting with both Donald and Ivana, who continued to travel there long after the divorce.
During Hillary’s Senate run in 2000, she frequently stayed in Steven Spielberg’s Trump Tower apartment, until her Secret Service army became an annoyance to other residents. Trump was still toying with a presidential run at the time, telling MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, “Can you imagine how controversial I’d be? You think about Clinton and the women. How about me and the women? Can you imagine?”
When Matthews mentioned Lewinsky, Donald answered, “Yeah. They might like my women better too.”