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September 7 - September 12, 2020
he never took seriously the need to respect women.
“I can always get another wife,” Trump told me.
he constantly projected his worst traits onto others,
All that day, Gauger and his team of techies fed the fake IP “votes” into the poll, and all day, Trump continued his manufactured ranking rise. The poll closed at three that day, I knew, so I was constantly refreshing my search engine to monitor the results. Gauger had promised a top ten finish, predicting confidently the final result exactly at number nine. As three o’clock neared, my intercom rang and I
The feeling was euphoric—until the following day, when the bottom fell out of the scam. During the day, Trump discovered that CNBC claimed to have reserved the right to remove anyone they wanted from the list and that they had unilaterally removed his name from the list. The network didn’t say why—they didn’t have to, as written in very small print on the launch page of the poll.
No one spoke the truth to Trump, and I’m sure that is the case now that he’s turned the White House into the mirror image of his office in the Trump Tower, with yes men like me doing his bidding and never, ever, ever confronting him with reality.
mansion in Westchester that he had purchased for $7M was given a value of $291M, to cite but one example
Samantha didn’t like the Trumps and their incessant competitiveness and egomania, but she had become close friends with Tiffany before I even began working for Trump and at the University of Pennsylvania, where they both studied, though she’d been amazed and appalled at how Tiffany’s father treated the only daughter he’d had with Marla Maples. I also really felt for Tiffany and the way she was treated.
His daughter Tiffany was referred to as the “red-haired stepchild” by the other Trump kids, just one of a million ways she was treated differently than her siblings.
was in Trump’s office with Ivanka one day as he mused over the idea of supporting Tiffany pursuing a career in fashion. “I don’t think Tiffany has the look,” Trump said to Ivanka and me. “She just doesn’t have what you have, honey.”
no publication mattered more to Trump than the Times, no matter what he said to the contrary. He cared more about what the Times said than the opinion of his wife or children.
“What about self-funding the campaign,” Trump said to me one afternoon. I knew there was no way he was going to spend his own money on politics. He was far too cheap, to begin with, and he was far less liquid than was understood by outsiders,
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. The free press gave America Trump. Right, left, moderate, tabloid, broadsheet, television, radio, Internet, Facebook—that is who elected Trump and might well elect him again.
He was chaos all the time. By five a.m. every day, he’d created the news cycle with his stubby fingers sending out bile-flecked tweets attacking anyone or everyone. In this way, as in so many others, he was the absolute opposite of Obama. Instead of No Drama, it was Drama All the Time.
the media didn’t see that they were being played for suckers.
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.
when the Drudge Report announced that it was going to conduct an online poll. I called my old pal John Gauger from Liberty University and got him to buy bots to cheat on the poll, just as we’d done with the CNBC poll the year before. This time we managed to land Trump in fifth place, with 24,000 votes, a spot that I thought of as the Goldilocks solution: not too high, not too low, just right.
No one ever tells Trump the truth about his behavior and beliefs, or the consequences of his conduct and ignorance and arrogance, in business or in his personal life and now in politics. Trump truly is the boy in the bubble, impervious to the thoughts and feelings or others, entirely and utterly focused on his own desires and ambitions.
early signs of the power dementia that would come to consume Trump during the campaign and then further as president. It was like he couldn’t stop himself from going lower and lower, seeking to outrage more and more, the thrill of the spotlight bleaching out his few redeeming virtues.
in desperation, the three older kids came to my office on the 26th floor to ask me to talk to the Boss and convince him to drop out of the campaign before it totally destroyed the family’s reputation, name, and brand.
he never prepares for anything, ever. Reading reports, taking briefings, seeking context and background for professional encounters—Trump does none of that, trusting that he can fake his way through life.
Boss could become president because he was so adept at being deceptive and disingenuous.
As I’ve been saying since the beginning, Trump was a mobster, plain and simple, and I had just participated in political and personal blackmail.
What appeared to be collusion was really a confluence of shared interests in harming Hillary Clinton in any way possible, up to and including interfering in the American election—a subject that caused Trump precisely zero unease.
Trump told me that America intervenes in other country’s elections all the time, even overthrowing regimes in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, so what was wrong with the Russians trying to influence the American election? That was Trump’s rationale, so long as the cheating was done in his favor.
Trump would say when informed of the killing of a journalist: “What the fuck do I care? He shouldn’t have written what he did. He should have shut the fuck up.”
Trump saw politics as an opportunity to make money, and he had no hesitation in bending American foreign policy to his personal financial benefit.
As with evangelicals, the essence of the operation was to invert reality, to take an impious and vulgar man and make him appear god-fearing, and in turn magically transform Trump’s white nationalist impulses into the illusion of an open-minded and inclusive leader—putting lipstick on a racist, chauvinist pig would be another way to put it. The task wasn’t made easier by Trump’s incessant, impulsive, self-destructive habit of picking fights with folks like the parents of a Gold Star family whose deceased son happened to have been Muslim, enraging his mourning parents. It was a low that I
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Trump’s opponents have long obsessed about Russian interference in the 2016 election, while overlooking the incredible disinformation campaign run by Americans like Pecker, by far the more insidious and dangerous development of the last cycle—and the most threatening for 2020.
The journalists at the Enquirer delighted in taking the worst rumors or bullshit conspiracy theories circulating online and turning them into ridiculous headlines sitting at the cash register of almost every grocery store in the country and seen by 100 million Americans—a formidable form of attack advertising for us.
it had amazed me that the national press investigated every accusation made against Hillary Clinton, as if she were the most devious and corrupt politician in history, while Trump’s long history of bankruptcies and infidelities and dubious business practices received relatively little scrutiny.
The fact that I’d never consumed alcohol in my life endeared me to Trump in an unspoken way;
