(C) Common Dreams
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7 Takeaways from Vanity Fair’s 1990 Profile of Donald Trump [1]

['Condé Nast', 'Vanity Fair']

Date: 2015-08-05 17:40:45.319000+00:00

Donald Trump has lived the entirety of his adult life in the public eye, leaving behind a trail of bombastic headlines that include accusations of sexual assault, racist rental policies, and more than a mogul’s fair share of other scandals.

Twenty-five years ago, this magazine’s Marie Brenner spent some time with Trump for an investigation into the dissolution of his marriage to Ivana Trump. In retrospect, the story has all the trappings of a perfect Trump piece: discord between reality and Trump’s claims about it, accusations of disloyalty, and triumphant highs amid a string of batted-away lows. Here are seven takeaways that still matter.

1. Trump’s views on women are repugnant. Here’s how Donald explained the tabloid fascination with Ivana: “When a man leaves a woman, especially when it was perceived that he has left for a piece of ass—a good one!—there are 50 percent of the population who will love the woman who was left.”

And here’s a story about one incident that left Ivana distraught:

Trump even called a press conference to announce Ivana’s new position as the president of the Plaza hotel: “My wife, Ivana, is a brilliant manager. I will pay her one dollar a year and all the dresses she can buy!” Ivana called her friends in tears. “How can Donald humiliate me this way?”

2. He excels at the art of slinging “the old Trump bullshit.”

He was known to be making shocking deals now that he never could have made two months before. “Trump won’t do a deal unless there’s something extra—a kind of moral larceny—in it,” one of his rivals once said of him. . . . “Give them the old Trump bullshit,” he told the architect Der Scutt before a presentation of the Trump Tower design at a press conference in 1980. “Tell them it is going to be a million square feet, sixty-eight stories.” “I don’t lie, Donald,” the architect replied. Eventually Trump bought out the Equitable Life Assurance company’s share of the commercial space in Trump Tower. “He paid Equitable $60 million after an arm’s-length negotiation,” a top real-estate developer told me. “The equity for the entire commercial space was $120 million. Suddenly, Donald was saying that it was worth $500 million!” When The Art of the Deal was published, he told The Wall Street Journal that the first printing would be 200,000. It was 50,000 fewer than that. When Charles Feldman of CNN questioned Trump in March about the collapse of his business empire, Trump stormed off the set. Later, he told Feldman’s boss, Ted Turner, “Your reporter threatened my secretary and made her cry.”

3. He is convinced that “the real public” loves him, even if you find him repulsive.

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[1] Url: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/08/donald-trump-marie-brenner-ivana-divorce

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