As a young man in the 1970s, Trump hit Manhattan clubs and filled the gossip columns with his jokes, all in keeping with his effort to shed the appearance of being just a rich kid. Queens who works for his father’s real estate company.
The magazine’s March 1990 cover featured a younger Donald Trump.
He got married Ivan Zelnickova, a Czech model, in 1977 and focused on making his mark in high-stakes real estate. But their relationship was founded in 1989 when she discovered what others already knew: that Trump had a relationship with a model and actress named Marla Maples.
The tit-for-tat squabbling that followed was the tabloid gift that kept on giving, with a highlight – or lowlight – being a New York Post front page in 1990 that featured a smiling Trump and a headline that read, “Marla brags to Donald’s friends, ‘BEST SEX YOU’VE EVER HAD.’
Lou Colasuonno, the Post The editor who submitted that first page, he remembered thinking, “He’s never going to make a case for this title.”
The circumstances behind the headline are part of the controversial newspaper tradition. But Maples, whose marriage to Trump ended in 1999, later denied saying those words, and Barbara Res, a former Trump Organization executive, later said that although she was concerned about his impact on Trump’s children, their father “thought it was the greatest thing.”.
The perception of sexual prowess seemed central to the persona Trump cultivated.
Linda Stasi, novelist and former columnist for both Post and The Daily Newshe recalled in an email that Trump once left a message on his mail, pretending to be someone else – as he often did – and saying in a fake voice that Trump was having lunch at such a restaurant and was surrounded by beautiful models. .
“You have to write about it,” he recalled the tipster saying.
“His fake accent was almost as real as his orange tan,” wrote Stasi, who added that the first time he met Trump, he said, “Well, you’re beautiful, aren’t you?”
“I think I said, ‘What?’ Really?”
And Colasuonno, a former editor-in-chief for both Post and The Daily Newsrecalled sharing two private dinners with Trump in the early 1990s, at a time when the real estate developer was frantically denying his very obvious and deep financial problems.
“The conversation was 50 percent about the ‘babes’ – he used this archaic term – and the other half were lies about his financial situation,” said Colasuonno.
At times, it seemed like Trump judged the world based on some frat-boy ranking system of hotness. While serving as editor of Vanity Fair in 1993, Graydon Carter invited Trump to be a magazine guest at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Carter said he placed the developer next to a well-known model, who soon asked to move to another position. “He’s the most vulgar human being I’ve ever met,” she recalled him saying. “He asked me to judge whether other women’s legs and breasts are better or inferior to his wife’s.”
The seats have been rearranged, Carter said in an interview. “She was angry.”
Another woman, journalist E. Jean Carroll, said that at this time – in 1995 or 1996 – she met Trump, an acquaintance, in a high-end store in Manhattan. After he asked for help to buy a gift for a woman, he said, the two went into a dressing room, where he raped her.
Carroll presented his allegations in a new york magazine article in 2019. Trump denied the accusations in this way: “I say it with great respect: No. 1, he’s not my type. No. 2, it never happened. It never happened, okay? “
E. Jean Carroll accused Trump of rape.Credit:AP
Carroll has since filed two lawsuits against Trump, for defamation and for battery and defamation. One of those cases is set to go to trial this month.
Trump did not reserve his big comments for private conversations, as evidenced by his numerous appearances on the Howard Stern radio show. Joking with his provocative host from 2005 to 2010, for example, the future president rated women on their looks—Tiger Woods’ then-wife Elin Nordegren was “a solid 9″—suggesting that he had once a trio with women who have combined. the weight was 170 kilos, and he remembered a particular advantage of owning the Miss Universe pageant: going backstage for a so-called inspection while the contestants were getting dressed.
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“They’re standing there without clothes,” he said, as CNN reported in 2016. “”Is everyone okay? “And you see these incredible women, and so I get away from things like that.”
Trump’s documented penchant for misogynistic behavior was no secret to voters as a presidential candidate in 2016.
A month before the November elections, The Washington Post posted a video of Trump in 2005then 59, talking about women with television personality billy bush as they prepared for an episode of the Access to Hollywood program The transcript of their conversation reads like an unfunny script from a reject Animal house follow up.
Some of Trump’s recorded comments, laced with crude references to the female anatomy, are more famous than most of his speeches as president. “Just enough,” he advised at one point. “I don’t even have to wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
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After initially downplaying his comments as “locker-room jokes,” Trump apologized to his family and the American people. In a few weeks, he won the presidency; within months, he began to privately question the tape’s authenticity.
But Trump’s past as a self-styled player continued to bubble to the surface of the MAGA red sea.
In early 2018, The Wall Street Journal breaks the story of the $130,000 that Trump’s personal attorney Cohen personally paid Daniels to buy her silence about her alleged one-night stand with Trump after a charity golf event 12 years earlier.
Cohen was later convicted of tax fraud and campaign finance violations after admitting that he had provided hush money to Daniels and helped arrange a similar payment to another woman, a Playboy model named Karen McDougal. He did so, he said, at the direction of Trump, who denies this.
Trump also denied having sex with Daniels and took to calling her “Horseface.” She responded by referring to the “shortcomings” of the 45th president.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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