"Not so long ago, members of high society were fixated on trying to low-key their way out of the perils of income inequality."

"Minimalism and quiet luxury were in vogue. But in the wake of President Trump’s second election, it’s the luxe life at full volume. He gilded the White House, turning it into a rococo Liberace lair. Swaggy and braggy have replaced stealth wealth. Flaunting it is in. For women, that means sequins, diamonds, tight silhouettes and big hair....  And now there are the Bezos-Sánchez nuptials.... Ms. Sánchez brings to mind another unlikely Vogue subject: Ivana Trump. Ms. Wintour gave her a cover in 1990, shortly before her divorce from Mr. Trump, after worrying, as I reported in a biography of Ms. Wintour, that she was 'too tacky.'... As much as those with more understated taste might turn up their noses at the crassness of the Bezos-Sánchez wedding’s display, tacky is very clearly carrying the day. Maybe hating on tacky oligarchs is itself just elitist...."

Writes Amy Odell, in "The Bezos-Sánchez Wedding and the Triumph of Tacky" (NYT).

"The new Trump movie has his campaign in an uproar...."

 

Apparently, the Cannes audience gasped at the brutality of the rape scene. The victim: Ivana.

Here's the Guardian article, "'This garbage is pure fiction': when subjects hit back at their biopics Trump has spoken out against The Apprentice, but he’s not the first celebrity to attack an unflattering big-screen portrait":

"Donald Trump is presenting himself as the Man on the Cross, tortured for our sins."

"'I consider it a great badge of courage,' he tells crowds. 'I am being indicted for you.'... In January, he put up a video on Truth Social about how he is a messenger from God, 'a shepherd to mankind.'... 'All Americans need a Bible in their home, and I have many,' Trump barked. 'It’s my favorite book.' Maybe the Bible has replaced that Hitler book Trump’s ex-wife said he kept by his bed. But it’s all a scam. Running for president is about enriching himself....  If there is one thing Trump knows how to do, it’s exploit chaos he creates.... Declining faith in religion and rising faith in conspiracies create fertile ground for a faker like Trump...."

Maureen Dowd meowed, in "Donald Trump, Blasphemous Bible Thumper" (NYT).

If they hadn't leaned so hard into persecuting him, he wouldn't have the foundation to make the comparison to Jesus Christ.

And — to repurpose Dowd's phrase — if there is one thing Trump knows how to do, it’s to exploit the chaos his haters create for him. 

ADDED: Whatever you think of Donald Trump, should you use the term "Bible thumper"? Isn't it a looking down on people who follow religions worthy of respect? The OED designates the term "derogatory," and here's a discussion in the subreddit r/Christianity. Someone writes:

"Over the years, she filled it with leopard print, red carpet, crystal chandeliers, ornate gold upholstery, and a Pepto-pink marble bathroom...."

"One library has a portrait of leopards that hangs above a leopard-print couch and a leopard-print ottoman, both of which sit atop a leopard-print rug. The dining room features the kind of gold upholstered chairs one might have found in a hotel ballroom in 1990 and a gold-embossed fireplace.... Garish décor aside (which can be negotiated with the sale in the unlikely event that anyone should want it), the 17 rooms lack one significant — and costly — amenity: a full-size kitchen."

From "The Townhouse Where Ivana Trump Died Has Been Hard to Sell" (NY Magazine).

"Trump claimed in a deposition that he couldn’t remember if he was seeing Marla Maples before his divorce. It would be quite a thing to forget."

That's the subheadline for "Trump’s affair was huge tabloid news. Now it’s apparently news to him" by Aaron Blake (WaPo).

At one point, [E. Jean] Carroll’s attorney asked Trump a basic factual question: “Isn’t it true that you were seeing Ms. Maples before you were divorced from Ivana Trump?” 

Trump responded, amazingly, “I don’t know,” in the sworn deposition. “It was towards the end of the marriage. So I don’t know, really. It could be a lapover, but I don’t really know.”...

It was such bullshit he had to invent a word: "lapover." 

Or... wait... Google says it is a word:

"Inside, the church was less than half full. There were plenty of Hermès bags but few boldfaced names from the gilt-covered slice of Manhattan society the couple had inhabited..."

"... in the 1980s and 1990s.... 'In the tumultuous times of the last few years, with all the attacks we faced,' [Donald Trump Jr.] said, 'she was the first person to call and see if I perhaps wanted, or maybe needed, to move back in with her. That call was simultaneously the sweetest and most emasculating thing ever. And she could do that with the best of them, and usually it was on purpose.' When he was a small child, Mr. Trump said, he went with his family to the Hamptons. While there, he acted at Gosman’s (Montauk’s best-known seafood spot) in a way that 'exceeded the limits' of everyone’s patience. His mother, he said, took him to the bathroom and showed him 'what Eastern European discipline was really all about.' When it was over, he said, she told him, 'And if you cry, we’re going to come back in here and do this again.'... [Eric Trump] told another story about his sister Ivanka destroying a very pricey chandelier while playing in the house with a beach ball. 'Ivanka managed to quickly convince my mother that it was me,' he said. That time, the 'remedy,' as he put it, was a 'wooden spoon,' and what made his mother even more irate as she spanked him was his fervent denial of having played any role in the misbehavior. 'Not only had I broken the chandelier, but now I was also lying to her,' he said. But by the time she realized he was telling the truth, Mr. Trump said, she was 'too tired to deal with Ivanka.'"

From "At Ivana Trump’s Funeral, a Gold-Hued Coffin and the Secret Service" (NYT).

I'll just say it was mean of the Times to say "the church was less than half full" and tag this post with "mothers," "domestic violence," and "gender difference" and move on.

"She was outstanding. Beautiful inside and out. We began all of it, our lives together, with such a great relationship."

Said Donald Trump, about Ivana Trump. He'd called up NY Post columnist Cindy Adams, because he was "just thinking how well you knew Ivana. You knew her very well. You knew her from the first."

Adams asked what he remembered about Ivana, and he said: "That she was different. That she never gave up. Beautiful, yes, but she was also a hard worker. No matter how rough things were or how badly they looked she never fell down. She went from communism to our lives together. She took nothing for granted.”

Never fell down.

Adams asked "if he thought we were about to also lose our country," and he said: "It’s horrible. We’ve never been at such a low point. That trip to Saudi Arabia? We have more oil than they have. This man in Washington is setting us all back. Setting everybody back."

"I was always so upset about that staircase. I hated those stairs. They were so treacherous. We worried about her falling."

"Her townhouse was four stories high and while there was an elevator, she never used it. It’s a beautiful staircase but I wouldn’t want it. It’s so steep and deep. Friends used to say to me, 'Why don’t you stay with Ivana when you’re in New York?' But you couldn’t pay me to hang out there and go up and down those stairs.... I begged her to sell [the house] and move to the Pierre. But she said, 'No, I’m never leaving here.'"

Said Nikki Haskell, a close friend of Ivana Trump's, quoted in "Ivana Trump’s friends worried about her ‘treacherous’ staircase before death" (NY Post).

"Ivana Trump, the first wife of former president Donald Trump, died of 'blunt impact injuries' to her torso..."

"... according to a report from the New York City chief medical examiner Friday. The manner of death was classified as an accident, the report added.... Ivana Trump was found unconscious on a staircase in her East 64th Street home near Central Park.... More than one in four Americans older than 65 fall each year, and falls are the leading cause of injury-related death among that age group, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Deaths from falling occur at a rate of about 64 deaths per 100,000 older adults...."

WaPo reports.

"Ew. That’s really the only way to describe the experience of reading 'All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator,' a deep dive into..."

"... the many allegations that depict Trump’s relationships with women as vulgar, misogynistic, demeaning, sometimes violent and always puerile. The accusations wash over a reader like a tidal wave of sewage until you are thoroughly caked in muck and light-headed from the stink."

So writes Robin Givhan in "A thorough, revolting history of Trump’s behavior toward women" (WaPo). It was interesting to read that right after immersing myself in the meaning of "human scum."

Are we in a new age of squeamishness? Or are we just pretending to be disgusted?

Givhan writes:

Somewhere between the descriptions of casual groping and the lengthy investigation of Trump’s possible involvement in a threesome with an underage girl, you long to scrub your memory bank with bleach, to douse yourself with disinfectant.

Do you? Personally, I am revolted by the idea of putting dangerous chemicals on my body. I'm never so disgusted with others that my impulse is to attempt to clean myself in some crazily exaggerated fashion.

Givhan goes on to say the book isn't shocking, because we've heard the main things before: "the affair with Karen McDougal, the sex with Stormy Daniels, the sexual intimidation of Ivana Trump, the gutter talk with Howard Stern, the ogling of half-dressed Miss Universe contestants, and the personal insults hurled at women ranging from Megyn Kelly and Rosie O’Donnell to former beauty queen Alicia Machado."

Gutter talk with Howard Stern. This is America in 2019? Disturbed by conversations with Howard Stern? I hope this is pretend offense. I've read Howard Stern's collection of interviews, which has lots of Trump, and it's lively and funny, and everything that's said is said for a reason. I wouldn't call it "gutter talk."

Givhan informs us that "All the President’s Women" has "a 70-page appendix filled with truncated tales of lascivious behavior — bonus nuggets of lechery." A fashion photographer calls Trump a "predator" because "He was always chasing models." The book says that in the presence of models, Trump "liked to paw their shoulders, cup their bottoms, grab at their breasts and plant sloppy kisses on them when they least expected it."

Paw, cup, grab, plant — How would your gestures of physical affection be described by your worst enemy? Every playful, tender move you make would be disgusting.

Givhan faults the book for collecting the stories but never analyzing why Trump is the way the stories, as told by the authors, make him look. What made him "a lecher"? Something about his childhood, his mother? Some "cultural forces"? "Was he created by some collision of generational, social and demographic storms? Is he a volatile result of a tectonic shift in gender roles?"

And what about us? What makes anybody want to read a compilation of all the scurrilous sexual material about Trump? What kind of result of a "collision of generational, social and demographic storms" are you?

"Dignity and stuff like that" — Ivana Trump gives a great interview.

At Page Six. I'm seeing a lot of highlighting of one thing she said:



But all she said was — when asked — “I’ll tell you something, I don’t think it’s necessary... He has a good life and he has everything. Donald is going to be 74, 73 for the next [election] and maybe he should just go and play golf and enjoy his fortune." That's such an inconsequential thing to say. It's only highlighted, I think, because a lot of people obsess about what will make Donald Trump go away.

But I note that Ivana's reason why he might not run would have just as well applied to his 2016 decision to run, and it's an idea that Donald Trump himself has expressed many time: He doesn't need it, he could live a very pleasant life without all this. But he did run in 2016, so why wouldn't he run in 2020? You could say, he's already proved he can be elected President. Yeah, but he hasn't yet proved he can be re-elected. And if you take him at his word — a concept that will annoy the hell out of his haters — he didn't do it to magnify himself but because he really thought he knew what the country needs and believed that only he can provide it.

Ivana also talked about her son Don Jr's impending divorce. She sees her boy as the winner and the mother of her grandchildren as the loser:

What does Ivana Trump think about "the fact that President Trump often uses Twitter to name call?"

What if she heard her children "call someone a 'loser'"?



"I think they sometimes call the people losers. If they are losers, they are losers, okay? And I don't mind it."

"Melania is there and I don't want to cause any kind of jealousy or anything like that because I'm the first Trump wife. I'm the first lady, ok?"

Ivana Trump said.

Funniest thing I've read since they've found "Santa Claus's tomb."

NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof asks "Is Donald Trump a Racist?," looks for concrete evidence, and finds it.

Many people are just incanting Trump is a racist and expecting you to already know and be on the same page, but I'm not that kind of go-along-to-get-along person. (Ironically, the go-along-to-get-along person is, in a different context, amenable to racism and to following a demagogue and so forth, so I'm happy with my standing apart from the Trump-is-a-racist crowd.)

But Nicholas Kristof, in a short column, undertakes to assemble the evidence, looking at nearly half a century of Trump's very extensive activities in this world. Kristof concludes that Trump is, indeed, a racist, but what matters is the evidence. By presenting evidence, Kristof puts us in a position to judge for ourselves. He also exposes himself to our judgment if his assessment of the evidence is biased. How much evidence do you need before you see — as Kristof does — "a narrative arc, a consistent pattern" that can't be called anything "else... but racism"?

For that great length of time, there should be an awful lot to amount to a consistent pattern, so let's look at Kristof's evidence:

1. In 1973, when Trump was 27 and working with his father, the Nixon administration Justice Department sued the Trump organization for housing discrimination. The government used testers, and, as Kristof puts it: "Repeatedly, the black person was told that nothing was available, while the white tester was shown apartments for immediate rental." The lawsuit was settled, and: "Three years later, the government sued the Trumps again, for continuing to discriminate." Kristof doesn't say how that lawsuit was resolved, and he concedes that Trump "inherited" whatever the policy was. Kristof does not talk about whether there is evidence of discrimination after the mid-1970s, after Trump is out from under his father's dominance. And Kristof — I think quite unfairly — gives absolutely no attention to the absence of evidence.  If Donald Trump began in a business where excluding black people was the norm, and he ended that discrimination, avoiding even accusations, that should count as an achievement, and the failure to notice this is evidence of bias in Kristof.

2. Trump took out an ad in 1989, saying that the 5 teenagers who were convicted of raping and beating the "Central Park jogger" deserved the death penalty we should bring back the death penalty. You can read the ad here. It resonates with today's politics. ("What has happened to our City... What has happened to law and order...?") There's nothing racial in the text — other than a mention of the "families — White, Black, Hispanic and Asian" — who are suffering from the "muggers and murderers" who plague the city. But, Kristof tells us, the 5 who were convicted in the Central Park jogger case were "black and Latino." Kristof accuses Trump of "whipping up the crowds" in "a modern version of a lynching," but the young men were brought to trial and prosecuted, and the problem of law and order in New York was very real. Somebody raped that woman and left her naked, tortured, and in a coma. In those decades, New York was a scary place, and a person going into Central Park at night was considered a fool. I was a woman living in the city in those days. It was a very different place, where you were supposed to be smart and know that you were always in danger. Donald Trump spoke out about that. In later years, the men who were convicted — and who confessed — obtained their release because they did not match the DNA from the victim. This was a complex and important incident in which Trump played a role. Was that role racist? Decide for yourself. Is it part of a "consistent pattern" of racism? It's unlike everything else on this list. And by the way, does Trump get credit for vigilance about violence against women?

3. One former Trump casino worker, back in the 1980s, was quoted in The New Yorker saying: "When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor. … They put us all in the back." So, there's hearsay from one person about what was a practice purportedly involving many other persons. Has anyone ever produced the evidence that this was a real practice or tried to figure out who demanded the practice? Where are all the lawsuits about he mistreatment of black employees in the many establishments Trump's organization ran? You just have one man saying something back in the 80s! That's the absence of a pattern. 

4. There is a book written in 1991 that has a quote from Trump complaining about one black accountant and calling him lazy and then making a racial wisecrack: "And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control." Trump denies saying that, but even if it's true, where's the pattern? He made one regrettable racial joke a quarter century ago! If you're proving a pattern, shouldn't you have at least 25 racist jokes? I'd say there's an amazing lack of material like this. Has Hillary ever, in her 7 decades of life, remarked, after criticizing an individual, that maybe he couldn't help it, because he belongs to a group that people think of as having a particular characteristic? Are we going to label "racist" anyone who's ever said one thing like that, even decades ago? We could all sign the "Everybody's a little bit racist" confession, but then what? Why are we losing our minds over Trump being racist?

5. Trump made a show of demanding to see Obama's birth certificate. Obama was running for President and needed to meet the constitutional requirement that he's a natural born citizen. Is that racist? Because Obama is black? Because the possible other country of birth is in Africa?

6. There's Trump's statement that people entering the country illegally from Mexico are "in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists." Kristof concedes that "Latinos can be of any race," so "technically" it's "not so much racism as bigotry."

7. There's the call for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country. Again, as Kristof concedes, that's not "technically" racism.

8. Trump didn't distance himself quickly and decisively enough from from the Ku Klux Klan in a television interview.

9. Trump retweeted some things: "a graphic suggesting that 81 percent of white murder victims are killed by blacks (the actual figure is about 15 percent)," "messages from white supremacists or Nazi sympathizers."

That's it. That's all the evidence Kristof put together — from an event-filled half century career — and which he reads as "a narrative arc, a consistent pattern." Judge for yourself.

"Interesting that Trump actually lost in Manhattan to Kasich. He should've saved yesterday's Ab Fab impression until after the NY primary."

My son Chris said, after Trump accidentally referred to 9/11 as 7/11:

"It's very close to my heart because I was down there and I watched our police and our firemen down on 7/11, down at the World Trade Center, right after it came down, and I saw the greatest people I've ever seen in action...."

Chris pointed me to the "Absolutely Fabulous" clip in which Eddie calls 9/11 7/11:



And doesn't Patsy look like Ivana Trump? From a 1992 AbFab episode:

Eddie: I'm opening a shop, Pats.
Patsy: Ooh, what are you going to sell?
Eddie: Oh, just gorgeous things, you know.
Patsy: Ooh, lovely.
Eddie: Gorgeous, tasteful, little stylish little gorgeous things.
Patsy: Expensive...
Eddie: Obviously, yes. They'll be present-y Anoushka Hempel-y sorts of things everywhere.
Patsy: Chocolates?
Eddie: Garden implements, that sort of thing.
[flicking through a magazine]
Eddie: I can't find anyone I want to look like... Oh! Oh, she's not bad. Who's that?
Patsy: That's Ivana Trump.
Eddie: She's good, isn't she?
Bubble: Do you think so? She looks like a classic bimbo to me. All that terrible blonde hair piled on top of her head. False tan. She's far too thin. Always pouting. Absolutely no character. The skirt's too short. I mean, it's pathetic these older women struggling to look twenty five... Sorry.
Patsy: I think she's tremendous.

"Can Trump’s Clinton-Sex-Scandal Revival Hurt Hillary?"

Asks Margaret Hartmann (in New York Magazine).

While several of his rivals have tried and failed to turn Bill Clinton's decades-old sex scandals into a 2016 campaign issue, Trump is actually making it happen. After his complaint about Hillary calling him "ISIS's best recruiter" morphed into a debate about sexism just before Christmas, Trump changed the conversation again, tweeting on Monday "If Hillary thinks she can unleash her husband, with his terrible record of women abuse, while playing the women's card on me, she's wrong!" Tuesday on the Today show, he added, "there certainly were a lot of abuse of women, you look at whether it's Monica Lewinsky or Paula Jones, or any of them, and that certainly will be fair game."

Hartmann quotes Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus who said that "in the larger scheme of things, Bill Clinton’s conduct toward women is far worse than any of the offensive things that Trump has said." And Marcus contended that what Bill did should be held against Hillary, because: "She is (smartly) using her husband as a campaign surrogate, and simultaneously (correctly) calling Trump sexist."

And Hartmann points us to a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that calls Bill Clinton "a genuine sexual harasser in the classic definition of exploiting his power as a workplace superior, and the Clinton entourage worked hard to smear and discredit his many women accusers."

Over on Facebook this morning, my son John had linked to a CNN piece: "Trump: It's OK to talk about my personal life, too."

Trump didn't go into specifics.... But his personal life at times has been tabloid fodder, most famously in the early 1990s when his marriage to his first wife, Ivana Trump, fell apart after he had an extramarital affair with model and actress Marla Maples. Trump eventually married Maples in 1993, and the two divorced six years later. Trump married his current wife, Melania, in 2005.

John commented: "I love the subtly sardonic phrase 'his current wife.'" That prompted me to type this out very fast over there at Facebook, and now I want to reprint it here. I said:

Trump is in a good position here: 1. The bad stuff was already exposed like hell in the tabloid press back when it happened. 2. That was over 20 years ago. 3. He's been with his current wife for more than a decade. 3. His kids turned out great (including the one with Maples). They are beautiful, smart, respectful, and productive. 4. There are so many people who know him and have had a motivation to speak ill of him this year and there's been silence. 5. He's not resting his case on personal rectitude. 6. He hasn't flaunted his religion and being quiet about religion is one way -- a good way -- to seem sincere and respectful toward religion. He's not asking to be seen as a religious paragon and to be voted for on that ground. 7. He isn't saying much at all in the social conservative realm, but he needs to fend off his competitors who are doing that big time. I think subtle prods to regard them as insincere are fine and I agree with the insinuations. 8. Hillary is vulnerable and he's signaling to her that efforts to paint him as sexist will be met with criticism about what she did toward women in defense of her husband. She deserves that criticism.

"I want nothing social that you aspire to. If that is what makes you happy, get another husband!"

Something Donald Trump allegedly screamed at Ivana long before this Vanity Fair article was published, which was 1990.

I was reading that because someone on Facebook (my son) had flagged a strange section that reference — of all people — Hitler:

Ivana Trump said "Yes, but the problem is, what is he going to do with his third wife?"

The "yes" was a response to someone telling Ivana that she would have made a great First Lady. The "third wife" is Melania Trump. According to Ivana, "She can’t talk, she can’t give a speech, she doesn’t go to events, she doesn’t (seem to) want to be involved." Ivana nevertheless thinks Donald will be "a great President": "He’ll surround himself with the right people. He was always meant to be a politician."

Ivana said that she "suggested to Donald that he should run for President in the ’80s... Then he got involved with Marla Maples and America hated him."  Maples was the second wife, the one who made him need to wait 30 years to do that run for President and to need to have to do it with a wife who can't even talk and doesn't want to be involved instead of the wife who would have been a first wife and would have made a great First Lady.

And that's the way the first wife tells it.


(Photo source.)

"After a painful scalp reduction surgery to remove a bald spot..."

When Donald raped Ivana, as told by The Daily Beast, relying on a book by a reporter named Harry Hurt III. The book, from 1993, relied on a deposition of Ivana in her divorce case against Trump.

At the time, Trump said: "It’s obviously false... It’s incorrect and done by a guy without much talent… He is a guy that is an unattractive guy who is a vindictive and jealous person." Now, there's this defense from Michael Cohen, special counsel at The Trump Organization:

“You’re talking about the frontrunner for the GOP, presidential candidate, as well as a private individual who never raped anybody. And, of course, understand that by the very definition, you can’t rape your spouse. It is true... You cannot rape your spouse. And there’s very clear case law.”

That's a head-slappingly stupid thing to say. There was a time, long ago, when marriage was understood as inconsistent with the idea that one partner could rape the other. But New York, the place of the incident, had abandoned that notion by 1989, when whatever happened happened.

ADDED: Cohen walks it back:

Politics and fashion.

There's a nice article by Cathy Horyn in today's NYT about women who pick a style and stay with it (like the socialite who decided in the late 1950s to wear blue tinted glass day and night and is still wearing them and Ivana Trump with her giant beehive). Here's the political part:

To look at Laura Bush, with her neat, unvarying hairstyle and penchant for tailored clothes, is to wonder if she subscribes to Lady Astor's line: "What a boring thing it is to try to look pretty." But unlike her predecessor in the White House, who bobbed from style to style, Mrs. Bush found a look that suited her (now mostly from Oscar de la Renta) and stuck to it. She has managed to silence the conversation about her clothes, which is the boring thing.

The brilliance of being boring! Isn't what Laura Bush does (as opposed to what Ivana and that socialite do) the old dress-for-success approach that ruled in the 80s (alongside a lot of goofy, outrageous fashions)? And isn't it what men, en masse, have been doing for over a century? Pick out a plain uniform and be done with it.