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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWow, this 1990 Vanity Fair article on Donald and Ivana Trump is an interesting read...
Ran across this while looking for something else, and found it so interesting I read all the way through.
https://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2015/07/donald-ivana-trump-divorce-prenup-marie-brenner
(Note -- there's a July 2015 date in the link, but the 1990 article on the Trumps and their divorce battle was from their archives then.)
Old custom? Hes only had Mrs. Posts house a few months. Really! Im going home, one Palm Beach resident whispered to his date.
Oh, stay, she said. It will be so amusing.
It was spring, four years ago. Donald and Ivana Trump were seated at opposite ends of their long Sheraton table in Mrs. Marjorie Merriweather Posts former dining room. They were posed in imperial style, as if they were a king and queen. They were at the height of their ride, and it was plenty glorious. Trump was seen on the news shows offering his services to negotiate with the Russians. There was talk that he might make a run for president. Ivana had had so much publicity that she now offered interviewers a press kit of flattering clips. Anything seemed possible, the Trumps had grown to such stature in the golden city of New York.
-snip-
Emphasis added. Note that the writer of the article is talking about an evening in 1986, with Trump already considering a presidential run and thinking he could negotiate with Russia better than anyone else.
Trump hasnt changed much physically in the last ten years. Then, as now, he was all cheeks and jaw, with a tendency to look soft in the middle. He retains the blond hair, youthful swagger, and elastic face that give him the quality of the cartoon tough Baby Huey. Trump is a head swiveler, always looking around to see who else is in the room. As a boy, he was equally restless. Donald was the child who would throw the cake at the birthday parties, his brother Robert once told me. If I built the bricks up, Donald would come along and glue them all together, and that would be the end of my bricks.
-snip-
Trump spoke in a hypnotic, unending torrent of words. Often he appeared to free-associate. He referred to himself in the third person: Trump says. . . Trump believes. His phrases skibbled around and doubled back on themselves like fireworks in a summer sky. He reminded me of a carnival barker trying to fill his tent. Im more popular now than I was two months ago. There are two publics as far as Im concerned. The real public and then theres the New York society horseshit. The real public has always liked Donald Trump. The real public feels that Donald Trump is going through Trump-bashing. When I go out now, forget about it. Im mobbed. Its bedlam, Trump told me.
-snip-
Donald is a believer in the big-lie theory, his lawyer had told me. If you say something again and again, people will believe you.
One of my lawyers said that? Trump said when I asked him about it. I think if one of my lawyers said that, Id like to know who it is, because Id fire his ass. Id like to find out who the scumbag is!
-snip-
Donald Trump appears to take aspects of his German background seriously. John Walter works for the Trump Organization, and when he visits Donald in his office, Ivana told a friend, he clicks his heels and says, Heil Hitler, possibly as a family joke.
Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitlers collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed.
-snip-
The phrase Stockholm syndrome is now used by Ivanas lawyer Michael Kennedy to describe her relationship with Donald. She had the mentality of a captive, Kennedy told me.
-snip-
I thought about the ten years since I had first met Donald Trump. It is fashionable now to say that he was a symbol of the crassness of the 1980s, but Trump became more than a vulgarian. Like Michael Milken, Trump appeared to believe that his money gave him a freedom to set the rules. No one stopped him. His exaggerations and baloney were reported, and people laughed. His bankers showered him with money. City officials almost allowed him to set public policy by erecting his wall of concrete on the Hudson River. New York City, like the bankers from the Chase and Manny Hanny, allowed Trump to exist in a universe where all reality had vanished.
-snip-
Leghorn21
(13,543 posts)posting!!
To her credit, Ivana still served the dinners her husband preferred, so on that warm night the guests ate beef with potatoes. Mrs. Posts faux-Tiepolo ceiling remained in the dining room, but an immense silver bowl now rested in the center of the table, filled with plastic fruit.
canetoad
(17,318 posts)From 1990.
The Heart of the Deal: The Love Story of Marla Maples and Donald Trump
After a period of hidingbehind a secret code name, in a Southampton beach house, on the Trump Princess yachtthe press and the paparazzi cant get enough of Marla Maples. In Vanity Fairs November 1990 issue, Maureen Orth talks to the woman who, in the post-Ivana era, is primed to become the next Mrs. Trump.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/1990/11/marla-maples-donald-trump-relationship
Leghorn21
(13,543 posts)BlueMTexpat
(15,392 posts)Smitten with him here.
But she seems to have been the luckiest of the three wives In that she got out and away. Poor Tiffany!
3catwoman3
(24,374 posts)So said the second Mrs. Trump. Yeah, right.
Interesting article.
BigmanPigman
(51,835 posts)to become even worse over time. I didn't think anyone could become more vulgar but he sinks to new depths with every passing second.
TexasProgresive
(12,181 posts)"People don't change, they just become more of who they really are."
3catwoman3
(24,374 posts)Mrs. Obama said, "The presidency does not change who you are. It reveals who you are."
Trump has been revealed to be completely unsuited for the job which he holds. We knew it well ahead of time, and all or worst fears have been confirmed.
I am still stuck in the first denial and disbelief stage of grieving for what could have been.
SergeStorms
(19,217 posts)he was as much of an asshole then as he is now. He's just a more experienced asshole now.
mountain grammy
(26,794 posts)Vanity Fair has some of the best writing..
unblock
(52,893 posts)xxqqqzme
(14,887 posts)was/is has just been verified.
BlueMTexpat
(15,392 posts)All the enablers who should have known better who participated in perpetuating the ego of this degenerate bully who was reading Hitler, believed in the big lie, and who was "negotiating" with the Russians even then.
Any sympathy I ever had for Ivana Trump has certainly evaporated. She literally became his female equivalent.
empedocles
(15,751 posts)All the enablers, . . . [who do know better]. Compounded by various 'likes' . . . what a mess . . . hard to comprehend.
LisaM
(27,933 posts)Too bad a few more members of the press didn't give that a read a few years ago.
RandomAccess
(5,210 posts)Except it's not only his money, it's now his rank -- he's king of the America now.