She called me in tears the morning that the indigenous people at Standing Rock were setting their teepees on fire, and that is when I began to realize he wasn't just going to be an incompetent person who accomplished nothing, but that he might be seriously dangerous. My mother doesn't overreact to things, or cry a lot. She said that was a harbinger of things to come.

Prior to that, I worked as an assistant to an older, wiser person who had met with Trump about a loan he wanted for a doomed and incredibly tasteless "real estate" project in Los Angeles, and to that person, Trump was nothing more than a joke, so I took my cues from him initially.