Thanks
to Ivana Trump’s new memoir, we now know that Donald Trump once did
have a dog. Well, actually it was Ivana’s. A poodle named Chappy. And
Donald didn’t like him.
Nevertheless, this appears to be the closest our current president ever came to having a pet, so attention must be paid.
This
is possibly the biggest insight in “Raising Trump,” by Donald’s first
ex-wife. (We are not going to go into her contention that people who
have been married more than 10 years seldom have sex more than “a few
times a month.”)
I’m
sort of presuming that you’re not going to read it, despite the fact
that it includes several recipes. So let me summarize. The book is
supposed to be about good parenting. But the most important thing you
learn is that we can never say another mean thing about Donald Jr.
again. Really, it sounds like the worst childhood ever. His story begins
with Dad resisting the idea of naming the baby after him, in case his
first born turned out to be “a loser.”
As
a toddler, Don Jr. broke his leg due to a negligent babysitter. Then
one day when Ivana was out of town, he and Eric called hysterically to
report they had found their nanny unconscious in the basement. (She
died.)
Wait,
there’s more: During their infamous divorce, Dad sent a bodyguard from
his office to get Junior, announcing: “You’re not getting him back. I’m
going to bring him up myself.”
Ivana
says she responded: “O.K., keep him. I have two other kids to raise.”
Silence and 10 minutes later the bodyguard returned her son.
It
was, Trump’s ex-wife concluded, “a tactic to upset me.” However for
some reason, at around this time Don Jr. stopped speaking to his father
and wound up getting shipped to boarding school.
After
several more years of being the namesake of a man who was then famous
for starring in the most sensational tabloid stories of the era, Don Jr.
graduated from college, moved to Colorado and got a job bartending.
Ivana said she made her disapproval clear by “cutting him off” until he
gave up, returned to New York and joined the Trump Organization.
Do
you see what I mean? It’s a miracle the man is walking and taking
nourishment. I will never attack him again. Well, except for the
elephant hunting.
A
lot of “Raising Trump” is Ivana bragging that the children were never
spoiled — unlike those Kardashians. There’s a lot about her glamorous
wardrobe and triumphs as a C.E.O. in the family businesses. (“My version
of helicopter parenting was to bring the kids to work with me in the
Trump chopper.”)
And you just keep plowing on because you figure sooner or later she’s going to get to The Affair.
Finally, it’s 1989 in Aspen. A young woman comes up to Ivana and says: “I’m Marla and I love your husband. Do you?”
What
followed was perhaps the biggest sex scandal in American history. O.K.,
I’m totally exaggerating. (Remember that whopper in the 19th century
with Grover Cleveland’s illegitimate child?) But the Donald-Marla-Ivana
story was unusual in that at the time, nobody involved in it was all
that important. Trump was a celebrity real estate developer, but there
were plenty of equally rich and glamorous figures in New York, many of
them having adultery issues of their own.
The
difference was that Trump pushed the story, calling his allies in the
media with new tidbits or lines of defense. It was as if Grover
Cleveland had press agents trying to make sure his side of the
love-child scandal was in a headline every day.
You
will not hear anything about that angle in Ivana’s book. In fact, once
the affair comes center stage, you hardly hear anything about Donald at
all. He seems to be a sort of passive bystander. (“After the showgirl
got pregnant and had a daughter, Donald married her.”)
The
villain of the book is “Marla freaking Maples” the “showgirl” who broke
up her marriage and produced The New York Post’s all-time famous
front-page headline: “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had.” If Marla had kidnapped
Donald, thrown him in a trunk and driven him off to a shotgun wedding,
she could not have been more evil.
Ivana’s
eagerness to gloss over the sins of an ex who now happens to be
president of the most powerful nation on the planet is hardly the worst
issue of sexism the country has to discuss this week. But it’s still a
useful reminder that Trump has gotten away with absolutely appalling
behavior throughout his life, right down to his yelping “locker room
talk” whenever people bring up that recording of him bragging about
grabbing women’s private parts.
Toward
the end of the book Trump is “kind enough to waive the $20,000 fee”
when Ivana held her third marriage at Mar-a-Lago. The later husbands
were pretty terrible, too. One of them had a large, thuggish son who
spent one family gathering throttling — oh no! — Donald Jr.
The happiest person in the family was probably Chappy.
