"He was much less stoked to be assigned by Tina Brown, then editor of The New Yorker, to profile Mr. Trump in 1997."

"Observing him over several months on construction sites, in his Trump Tower office and on a private plane, Mr. Singer concluded that Mr. Trump, in the period before he became a reality TV star, was a man 'who had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.' 'That profile,' [said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker], 'got everything about Trump 20 years before he ran for president: the vanity, the casual cruelty, the outsized selfishness. It was all there.'... [After a NYT piece mentioned it], Mr. Trump wrote a letter to the editor attacking Mr. Singer as 'not born with great writing ability.' Mr. Singer sent a mock thank you to Mr. Trump for the publicity, which apparently bumped his book higher on the Amazon book charts. He also enclosed a check for $37.82, 'a small token of my enormous gratitude,' he wrote. Mr. Trump returned the letter with an all-caps note at the bottom, reading, in part, 'MARK — YOU ARE A TOTAL LOSER.' Mr. Trump also cashed the $37.82 check, Mr. Singer later said. Mr. Singer framed a photocopy of it for his apartment."

From "Mark Singer, Longtime Writer for The New Yorker, Dies at 75/He joined the magazine’s staff at 23. Among the subjects of his profiles were the magician Ricky Jay and a pre-politics Donald Trump" (NYT).

I'm sorry to hear that Mark Singer has died. You can click on my tag "Mark Singer" to see how he's come up here over the years. What a distinction to have Trump's "YOU ARE A TOTAL LOSER" in your NYT obituary. To continue the all-caps — RIP.

UPDATE: Upon publishing, I clicked my tag. I'm sorry to say that Trump is in every post.

Jean-Claude Van Damme was in a movie with Volodymyr Zelensky and Jean-Claude Van Damme stars in Trump's favorite movie "Bloodsport."

Coincidence?

I was looking into the life story of Volodymyr Zelensky, because I was trying to figure out what language he spoke in the notorious telephone call with President Trump. This mattered as I analyzed a WaPo article about the supposedly low number of words per minute compared to a phone call between Trump and the President of Mexico.

And I stumbled into the movie "Rzhevsky Versus Napoleon," in which Zelensky played Napoleon:



Fascinating. Distracting. And there's this in the cast list:

Jean-Claude Van Damme as himself

So Jean-Claude Van Damme was in a movie with Volodymyr Zelensky. Well, what, if any, is Jean-Claude Van Damme's connection to Trump?

First, there's this, from "Trump Solo" by Mark Singer in The New Yorker, back in 1997, when Trump was "solo" because he'd just broken up with Marla Maples:

We hadn’t been airborne long when Trump decided to watch a movie. He’d brought along “Michael,” a recent release, but twenty minutes after popping it into the VCR he got bored and switched to an old favorite, a Jean Claude Van Damme slugfest called “Bloodsport,” which he pronounced “an incredible, fantastic movie.” By assigning to his son the task of fast-forwarding through all the plot exposition—Trump’s goal being “to get this two-hour movie down to forty-five minutes”—he eliminated any lulls between the nose hammering, kidney tenderizing, and shin whacking. When a beefy bad guy who was about to squish a normal-sized good guy received a crippling blow to the scrotum, I laughed. “Admit it, you’re laughing!” Trump shouted. “You want to write that Donald Trump was loving this ridiculous Jean Claude Van Damme movie, but are you willing to put in there that you were loving it, too?”

And then there's this from December 2017 (again, from The New Yorker, where I get my Van Damme news), describing a scene from just before the 2016 election:

And last October, in an interview with TMZ conducted outside a restaurant while he was holding his small dog, Van Damme said, among other things, that the next President of the United States needed to “have a vodka with Mr. Putin” and “try to make peace.” He then downplayed the attention being paid to Donald Trump’s use of the phrase “grab ’em by the pussy,” and said, though he loves his “brother Muslims,” “right now, we need Donald Trump.” In that video, and in other public moments, Van Damme has had the appearance of a man who still takes himself quite seriously....

Now, continuing with the New Yorker, look at "The Risk of Nuclear War with North Korea/On the ground in Pyongyang: Could Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump goad each other into a devastating confrontation?" (September 2017):

When it came time for Kim Jong Il to choose an heir, his four daughters were ineligible, because of their gender. His eldest son, Jong Nam, was more a playboy than a statesman, and, in 2001, he was caught trying to enter Japan on a forged passport, to take his four-year-old son to Tokyo Disneyland. The next-oldest son, Jong Chul, was reserved and gentle. While in Switzerland, he had written a poem called “My Ideal World,” which began, “If I had my ideal world I would not allow weapons and atom bombs anymore. I would destroy all terrorists with the Hollywood star Jean-Claude Van Damme.” According to Fujimoto, Kim Jong Il said that Jong Chul was unfit to rule “because he is like a little girl.”

I don't know what more you need to know. Connect the dots!

"I recognize you, but take your fucking pants off... now!"

When Donald Trump wrote "I've read John Updike, I've read Orhan Pamuk, I've read Philip Roth."

An AP writer has dug up a letter Trump wrote to the NYT in 2005 in response to a review of a collection of New Yorker profiles written by Mark Singer. The review said:

The only instance in which Singer throws and lands a sucker punch is in a 1997 profile of the pre-"Apprentice" Donald Trump, in which his tone becomes a little arch. That Trump is already a caricature of a caricature makes him too easy a target, with neither the foot speed nor the wit to defend himself. A harder thing to do, perhaps impossible, would have been to find the one lonely component of Trump's character that wasn't manufactured as a brand strategy. It is a small quibble, certainly, as most New Yorkers, including me, would readily climb the arch in Washington Square to drop a flowerpot filled with nasturtiums on Trump's astonishing head if given half a chance to do so.

Trump wrote (or had someone write over his signature):

I can remember when Tina Brown was in charge of The New Yorker and a writer named Mark Singer interviewed me for a profile. He was depressed. I was thinking, O.K., expect the worst. Not only was Tina Brown dragging The New Yorker to a new low, this writer was drowning in his own misery, which could only put me in a skeptical mood regarding the outcome of their combined interest in me. Misery begets misery, and they were a perfect example of this credo.