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October 25 - October 25, 2020
he is not a forgiving person. Once he sours on you, you are done.
It was physical, emotional, not quite spiritual, but a deep longing and need that Trump filled for me. Around Trump I felt excited, alive, like he possessed the urgent and only truth, the chance for my salvation and success in life.
my role as Trump’s personal attorney was essentially managing chaos, as he was always, always, always enveloped by crisis and teetering on the brink of disaster.
The rejection was weirdly a kind of compliment from Trump, in that he was treating me just as he treated his children: badly.
That was always Trump’s way, learned at the feet of Roy Cohn, his first attack-dog attorney: Never apologize, and never admit to error or weakness. Never. Ever. Not even in the time of Coronavirus, as the world would discover. In
The real real truth about why I wanted Trump to be president was because I wanted the power that he would bring to me. I wanted to be able to crush my enemies and rule the world.
He abandoned the truth in favor of falsehoods—which he knew perfectly well were false—in exchange for news-cycle soundbites, and the media has fallen for it over and over and over, to this day and beyond.
If Trump wanted to believe something because it served his purposes, he decided to begin to believe, a leap of the imagination that was effortless to him, even second nature.
But that is what it feels like to lose control of your mind—you actually give up your common sense, sense of decency, sensitivity, even your grip on reality.
“Can you believe that bullshit?” Trump said, with incredulity, referring to the ritual and the evangelicals. “Can you believe people believe that bullshit?”
He constantly referred to himself in the third person, a trait that I saw as a quirk at the time, but in hindsight was the indication of dissociative egomania
Winning was always, always, always Trump’s top priority, no matter the price, less a competitive streak than a compulsion that has led the nation and maybe even the world to the brink of disaster.
A “friend” approaching Trump for assistance in a time of need was making a mistake of epic proportions. Trump doesn’t help people, he preys on them,
We would repeat what he said, as if it were true, and then we’d repeat the message to one another so often that we would actually begin to believe the distortions ourselves. This mind meld is what I see every day as I sit in prison watching the nightly news from the White House.
the lack of ethics applied equally to his three children, despite Ivanka’s carefully tended image—all them are like jackals when it comes to harming innocent businesspeople.
If he ever got caught cheating and Melania threatened to leave him, Trump told me, he wouldn’t be upset or hurt at the loss, and I suspect she knew it. The relationship was just another deal, plain and simple.
No. The biggest influence by far—by a country mile—was the media. Donald Trump’s presidency is a product of the free press. Not free as in freedom of expression, I mean free as unpaid for. Rallies broadcast live, tweets, press conferences, idiotic interviews, 24-7 wall-to-wall coverage, all without spending a penny.
If interest in Trump was waning, even just a little bit, he’d yank the chain of the media with an insult or racist slur or reactionary outrage—and there would be CNN and the Times and Fox News dutifully eating out of his hands. Like so much about Trump, if it weren’t tragic, you’d laugh—or cry.
“I agree,” I toadied, if that’s a word.
In this way, I was like the millions of Americans who now line up for hours in the driving snow in some town in Wisconsin to hear Trump’s hour-long stream-of-consciousness comedy act—because that’s what he is, a stand-up comic, with a grotesque sense of humor.
The campaign was far too chaotic and incompetent to actually conspire with the Russian government.
I knew that the deceptions I was engaging in were designed to hide the true nature of Trump’s character, and some deeply buried part of my psyche had to be able to understand that I was doing truly undemocratic and dangerous and dirty deeds—but all I was focused on was accomplishing my goal: helping Trump to win the Presidency.
Despite all the promises made to the public that he would recuse himself from running his companies, he never gave an inch of control to his kids.
In truth, Trump lacked intimates and true friends, so he had nowhere to turn in his hour of need, a reality I now see playing out on the nightly news as he gets more and more isolated as president.
The voters had decided to blow up the establishment—or drain the swamp, if you prefer—and suddenly Kushner, an aristocratic man-child possessed of supreme arrogance and a completely amoral will to power, like his father-in-law and wife, was going to simultaneously bring peace to the Middle East and somehow navigate a looming global trade war?
Because here is the thing: I care for Donald Trump, even to this day, and I had and still have a lot of affection for him.
