Stormy Weather: Trump and Stormy Daniels

Still from Rachel Maddow’s interview with Stormy Daniels on MSNBC.

Stormy Daniels could not have foreseen how what was supposed to be a dinner date with Donald Trump on at a Lake Tahoe resort would change her life, would transform her from an obscure porn star to one of the most famous people in the world. Nor could Donald Trump anticipate that his sexual escapade with Daniels on July 13, 2006 would eighteen years later lead him to courtroom where he would become a felon convicted of 34 counts of fraud. Trump’s problems began that evening because he had never met a woman like Daniels. Daniels on the other hand read Trump like a book—a very short book—that evening. Daniels knew little about Trump and accepted his invitation simply because she knew he had connections which might help her career then in transition from porn to mainstream entertainment.

What follows is the story of the two women’s involvement with Donald Trump, a man they both found to be a compulsive liar and a ruthless man with no regard for anyone who could not advance his own interests and a potential menace to anyone who drew near him with anything less than an attitude of awe at what he saw as his extraordinary mind and unprecedented deeds.

For Stormy Daniels, what happened on July 13, 2006, was more than a brief sexual encounter. It was also a clash of personalities that would alter Daniel’s life forever and put her and her family’s lives in jeopardy.  Mary Trump’s damning portrait of her uncle, on the other hand, drew from her years of watching him manipulate and destroy his kin in the Trump family. Their experiences led each woman to write a book about Trump. Mary Trump’s book Too Much, Never Enough is informed by her PhD in psychology, a subject she pursued that would seem to understand the dysfunctional family around her. The book is a clear-eyed account of her own life and how her uncle worked to destroy her father and his brother Freddie and came to dominate her life and the whole family.(i)

Daniel’s autobiography, Full Disclosure, is even more remarkable. It is an unflinching account of her life from her childhood to that brief encounter in Lake Tahoe and since. Despite her vastly different background and the brief amount of time Daniels spent with Trump, her portrait of Trump is as incisive as that of Mary Trump. It is also more remarkable in that it only took Daniels a few minutes in a hotel room with him to see him for the fraudulent weakling he was.

Full Disclosure

The first thing to be said about Stormy Daniels is that she was a writer before she was a porn star. She has the talent and the tools of a very good writer. Her book shows her to be a close observer of people, witty and ironic. Above all, she is honest about herself and others—fair, even those who exploit her or cross her. When I speak of exploitation, I am not talking about the porn business but rather the people in her childhood and adolescence in Louisiana who abused her and exploited her innocence. As I read her book my admiration for her grew with every page. Against all odds, she became a decent, generous, and courageous person. A person who, despite the terrible things done to her, never regarded herself as a victim. While Trump, born to wealth and privilege, never stops portraying himself as a victim. Daniels’ cold regard for such a person infuses her account of him.

Stormy Daniels was born Stephanie Gregory on March 17, 1979, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Until she was four, she had a comfortable life but not one that would be called middle class in the South. When she was four, her father, Bill, left, and the rest of her youth was spent in poverty.

Her father didn’t want children, and when she was four, he left her and her mom to take a job in Alaska. He sent her little presents like stuffed animals for a while, but after that job ended, he returned briefly to Baton Rouge in the company of his girlfriend Susan and told Daniels and her mother he was leaving for good. Daniels hid in his SUV before he drove away, but when he discovered her, he took her back to her mother. From that point on, she and her mom lived in poverty. Her mom, who had been a good mom to that point, slowly turned into a pitiful person who drank and relied on a series of boyfriends for support. The boyfriends—with one notable exception—took advantage of her mother and her as recompense for the cash they gave her.

Their neighborhood went downhill and their house filled with roaches and rats. The power would get shut off because her mom couldn’t pay the bill. Sometimes Daniels went without food for three or four days. Her dad had, in the meantime, gotten a divorce and married Susan. Susan flew down to take Daniels to see her father in Philadelphia. After that Susan would send clothes and birthday and Christmas presents to Daniels. Shortly, her mom would disappear for several days at a time with men she was dating. Daniels sums up this part of her childhood by writing, “…by the time I was eight, she was used to treating me with less care than you would a dog.”

Among the men her mother was seeing, Daniels describes only one man, Wade, who took an interest in her and helped her. He didn’t mind the roaches and rats and brought them groceries.  He would ask her how she was doing in school and what she and her friends did. In fact, he was—somehow—in love with her mom. But as Daniels says with a nice irony, “Wade was a nice guy with a decent job, so she wasn’t interested.” Her mother finally married a man, a Mr. Kelly, who was well off in the context of where she and her mom lived, but he was, as Daniels’ says, “a raging alcoholic.”

When Daniels was nine years old, she was raped. She was at the house of her friend Vanessa when a man who was Vanessa’s mom’s boyfriend showed up. He took Daniels into a bedroom and raped her. It appears from the way Daniels tells it that he had already raped Vanessa. Whatever the case may be, the man continued to rape the two girls for two years before he was caught raping yet another girl. This time, however, the girl’s parents found out about it and called the police. Somehow, the cops got wind of Daniels’ ordeal and came to her house. Her mom would only crack the door to talk to them, fearing that if they saw the roaches and squalor, they would take her daughter away from her. She mentioned the name of the suspect to her daughter, and Daniels denied he had done anything to her—they would take her away, and she would end up in a ward of the state waiting to be adopted.

Of her rape, she writes, “I was nine. I was a child, and then I wasn’t.” She says that she hesitated to write about her rape because she knew “that it will be used against me by people who want to prove that women involved in the adult entertainment industry are all ‘damaged.’” She goes on to point out that in a survey of two thousand women, 81% said they had experienced sexual harassment or assault. She writes, “Did they all become porn stars? By that logic, if you polled a hundred female surgeons—or politicians—would none of the women say they got through being female scot-free? Vanessa and I endured being assaulted by the same man. Why isn’t she doing porn?”

The only person to whom Daniels ever mentioned her two years of assault was a guidance counselor in middle school. He called her in to corroborate Vanessa’s rape—Vanessa, by this time, was suffering from severe anxiety. When Daniel confirmed her friend’s story, she added, “He did it to me too.” The counselor refused to believe her. He told her he suspected that she was jealous of the attention that Vanessa was getting.

She wouldn’t mention it again until nearly forty years later when she drove by her childhood home to show it to some journalists doing a profile of her. She writes of that, “Seeing it brought back a flood of memories, and I broke down. I am still receiving flashes of memory, moments too graphic and sickening to share.”

She then adds,

Being a rape survivor does not define me at all…It’s why I keep highlighting this whole passage, my finger hovering over the Delete key. What stops me is seeing a bracelet on my right hand, a blue rubber one that I give out to people at events. In white type there is a quote from me: ‘Standing up to bullies is my kind of thing.’ I may not want to, and I may fear what will happen when I do, but I have to tell the truth. This is mine.

Two years after Daniel was raped, another friend Myranda told her she was taking riding lessons and this would be a form of therapy for her and a turning point in her life also. For Daniels, it was the beginning of a lifelong attachment to horses. Within a few weeks, Daniel also took riding lessons. She would soon get a job working at a nearby stable, keeping tabs on the horses, and used part of her paycheck to take lessons to the point she was becoming an accomplished rider. Some months later, her mom’s boyfriend, Mr. Kelly, showed up at the stables where she was working. He was drunk and tried to get Daniels to go with him. When she refused, he threw five hundred dollars at her. She used that money to buy a horse named Perfect Jade. Jade was born on the same day as Daniels, March 17, and was two years older than her. The horse had been left to her riding instructor, Miss Cathy, and it was sick, thin, and covered with mange.  For four months, Miss Cathy and Daniels tended Jade. By summer, the horse had come around. Her coat was sleek and she gained enough weight that Daniels could begin to ride her.

The page facing the title page of her book has a photo of Daniels, now ten, sitting atop Jade. For the rest of her life, she would own a horse whenever the tumult of her life and career allowed it. She would train them, groom them and go on to participate in equestrian events.

She now had a boyfriend named Jacob, whose family owned a farm, and Daniels could keep Jade there. Jacob built jumps for Daniels to practice on for competitions. It was also in the barn that Daniels and Jacob had sex for the first time—she was in eighth grade at the time. About a year later, Jacob’s parents, who were strict Christians, found out that Daniels and Jacob were regularly having sex in the hayloft. They told Jacob he could never see her again. Daniels writes of Jacob’s parents, “They let me know I was a piece of white trash.” That fall, Daniels managed to go to a magnet middle school, and as she writes, “This piece of shit got straight As.”

After middle school, Daniels got into Baton Rouge High School, which was not the school in her rundown neighborhood. Baton Rouge High was known for its arts programs. There, she took AP English and creative writing courses—for some years, she had been writing stories about herself and her friends. She also became the editor of the school newspaper. She says of her life at this point, “Writing was all I wanted to do besides ride Jade.”

The polish of her autobiography reflects her dedication to writing that began three decades before the publication of Full Disclosure.

By her last year in high school, there was a final argument between her mom and Mr. Kelly, and they ended up throwing things at each other. Daniels tried to get the police involved, but the police wouldn’t come because such domestic arguments were commonplace in the neighborhood. One morning in late January, Daniels was in her bedroom watching Conan O’Brien’s show when she heard her mother screaming. Daniels ran out of her room in time to see her mother run down the hall to the living room, where she jumped on a chair, ripped off her nightgown, and then, losing her balance, fell into the Christmas tree, which was still up. Daniels moved out the following day. She was sixteen.

In the midst of all this chaos, she was still getting As, editing the school newspaper, and competing in equestrian events. She and her current boyfriend Andy, who was twenty three years older than her, moved into an apartment near LSU. Their only furniture was a mattress on the floor and some shelves for Andy’s CDs. It was also at this time that Daniel’s career in entertainment began at a bar housed in a double-wide.

Daniels met a young woman named Amy, who drove a new Camaro. Daniels asked her what she did and she said she was a dancer who worked at a strip club called Cinnamons. Cinnamons’ was a ‘titty bar’ as Daniels terms it—the dancers did not strip completely. Amy told Daniels, now seventeen, to drop in sometime. Two weeks later, Daniels, though she was seventeen, managed to get into Cinnamons with her boyfriend, Andy. Amy and her fellow dancers came over to chat with Daniels and her boyfriend since they were unusual customers for the place. One of the dancers told Daniels that she was so pretty she should do a ‘guest set.’

They took Daniels to the dressing room, gave her a costume and put some makeup on her.

Any told her to dance to two songs, the first one up-tempo, the second “slower and more sensuous,” as she began to bare her breasts. The DJ asked her what her stage name would be. Daniels said ‘Stormy.’ She had been going by that name for years instead of the name ‘Stephanie’ her mother gave her.  It reflected her love for the rock band Mötley Crüe, whose bass player Nikki Sixx had named his daughter Storm. Daniels felt comfortable dancing since she had performed at ballet recitals. When Daniels went back to the dressing room, Cinnamon offered her a job. Daniels explained she still had to attend classes at her high school and Cinnamon said she could work on Friday and Saturday nights. Daniels had earned eighty-five dollars in tips in nine minutes. She said yes. No one at Cinnamon’s knew her age, and at her school, only her best friend Elizabeth knew of her job there.

Daniel graduated from high school the next year with straight As despite all her other activities. She planned to go to college and study journalism with an eye on pursuing a career in it and no doubt would have succeeded in that had she done so. But she decided to put off applying to schools for a year so as to lay away some money dancing at Cinnamon’s and teaching at the equestrian center.

While working at Cinnamon’s, she became sick from an allergic reaction. Her illness led to a complete rupture with her mother that would last for many years. Andy called her mother hoping she might help with the medical bills. Her mom replied, “She abandoned me and I fucking hope she dies.”

She left Cinnamon’s and began working at an up-scale club in Baton Rouge, the Gold Club. The money was, of course, better at the Gold Club, but Daniels had another reason to take the job that speaks to her uncompromising honesty. She had begun to feel uncomfortable with her job at Cinnamon’s because part of it was to get three customers each night to buy doubles for themselves and her. Since Daniels doesn’t drink, she had to pretend to drink vodka when she was drinking Sprite, and she felt she was swindling her customers.

The worst event fell on her nineteenth birthday—which was also Jade’s twenty-first birthday.  That day, Daniels had to have Jade put down at a veterinary school. She took her for one last ride. Jade had begun to show some problems that the veterinarians couldn’t diagnose. A few weeks later, some veterinarians did a full workup on Jade and told her that her horse had been living with only one of her heart valves functioning. Daniels writes, “Jade came into my life when I needed her, and she left when I needed her to leave.  I had an apartment and plans for school. I couldn’t afford her anymore…I had to move on and she let me. I’ve had many horses since Jade, but she was the best.”

Daniels’s plan to go on to college gave way to the money she was making on her tours. Later, with her years of experience with horses and her straight-A grades, she would be offered a full scholarship to Texas A&M, but again, the college lost out to the money she made touring.

On her tours, she took the bouncer at the Gold Club as a bodyguard. Soon, they were a couple, too. She worked in clubs that featured metal bands on other nights, leading to her meeting one of the top metal bands at that time, Pantera. They liked her, and she ended up riding on their bus and following them on their two-week tour. For five years, strip clubs around the Midwest and South were where she worked—and rock bands were often her companions. She also began to do nude pictorials in magazines. As Daniels writes, she had, after those five years, more or less topped out in the strip club circuit and magazine pictorials.

In the spring of 2002, a friend, Devon Michaels, who had been dancing on the same circuit, called her.  She told Daniels she was going to LA to get into porn. She asked Daniels to come along—for moral support, so to speak. Michaels told her she would buy her ticket. For Michaels everything happened fast. The same day that they arrived, Michaels was booked to do a lesbian flick for one of the major porn companies, Wicked Pictures.  Daniels went along with Michaels to watch. Of her first time on a porn shoot, Daniels has some interesting things to say about porn:

“That day I learned what I still tell people: ‘You don’t want to go to set. It’s going to ruin porn for you forever.’ It’s not that it’s somehow degrading or gross—it’s that there’s nothing spontaneous about it whatsoever. Everyone is there to do a job…These four girls were going at it like they were inventing girl-on-girl rough sex.”

When the director called, “Cut, ” the actresses maintained their positions and discussed the weather while the cameraman loaded a new videotape. Daniels ended her account brief with the tart remark, “It takes a village.”

Daniel’s subsequent career with Wicked Pictures followed a path much like any professional career. There were mentors and rivals, setbacks and advancements. After four years Daniels was doing more writing, directing and producing than she was acting, and she was beginning to make contacts with people in mainstream entertainment. At that point, four years later, Daniels met Trump at Tahoe.

Daniels was at Lake Tahoe in July 2006 with another actress to promote Wicked Pictures at an event at the American Celebrity Golf Championship. There they would sponsor a hole, offer the golfers water and snacks, and let them take photos of themselves to generate some PR for Wicked Pictures outside the usual circles of the porn industry.

Trump met Daniels that afternoon and invited her to have dinner with him that night. Daniels was hesitant to do it. She was supposed to have dinner with friends and she had met many celebrities by this time and that alone made no impression on her. But she was talked into it by Moz, the publicist for Wicked, who emphasized the importance of making connections in business. So when Trump’s bodyguard called her, she agreed.

Daniels describes the first moment of their meeting in his suite in the hotel that night this way:

…Trump came swooping in, wearing black silk pajamas and slippers.

‘Hi there,’ he said.

Look at this motherfucker, I thought.

‘Excuse me, I have the wrong room,’ I said, adding a southern edge of polite malice to my voice. ‘Sorry, Mr. Hefner. I’m looking for Mr. Trump.

His jaw went slack, and his eyes bugged.

‘What are you doing?’ I yelled. ‘Go put some fucking clothes on.’

That confrontation should have warned Trump that in Daniels, he was dealing with a woman who was unlike any woman he had ever met. No one had spoken to him that way except his father, Fred. Trump dutifully went back into his room and emerged in a business suit. A one-sided conversation followed, which Daniels describes as “one pretentious brag after another.” At one point, he asked her if she wanted to see a magazine with a picture of him on the cover. Daniels responded:

“‘Really?’ I snapped, looking up at him. “Does this work for you normally?” He looked perplexed…. “Or are you so insecure that you have to brag about yourself…or are you just a fucking asshole? Which is it?” He was so stunned he just stood there. I lowered my voice to growl, “Someone should take that magazine and spank you with it.”

“You wouldn’t,” he said in a quiet voice.

I held out my hand, palm up. “Hand it over,” I said. When he didn’t give the magazine to me, I snatched the magazine from him and rolled it up. “Turn around and fucking drop ’em.”

Trump lowed his pants and Daniels swatted him twice, then threw the magazine on a nearby table.

The scene is weird and improbable but so telling about Trump’s character. A pitiful, weak man is abasing himself before a porn star in a most humiliating way. It shreds the image his MAGA followers have of him as a strong and dominant personality. After Trump pulled his pants up Trump told Daniels—it should be no surprise now—that he liked her! Then, more weirdness. He said, “You remind me of my daughter.”

Trump’s incestuous feelings towards his daughter are confirmed by a passage in a book published last year by his second chief of staff, the former general John Kelly. Kelly is mentioned in the book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, in which twenty-seven psychologists and psychiatrists said that the man was unfit to be president:

“Aides said he talked about Ivanka Trump’s breasts, her backside, and what it might be like to have sex with her, remarks that prompted Kelly to remind the president that Ivanka was his daughter.”

After his spanking, Trump asked Daniels if she had ever seen his TV show The Apprentice.

Daniels said no, telling him she was not a “TV person”—suspecting he was resuming his usual mode of conversation, boasting about himself. He told her it was a big hit. Then he told her she should be on the show. She would be “huge,” he said. She told him the network would never agree and he asked why. One wonders if he was really so stupid since Daniels had to spell it out for him. “Because I am a porn star and it’s NBC.” Daniels writes, “It gave me an idea of how I could fuck with The Donald.” She then said, “Even you aren’t that powerful.”

A meandering conversation followed, much of it Daniels explaining adult film business functioned—it was really the one thing Daniels did that interested him. Then, she excused herself to use the bathroom. There, she surveyed the gold nail clippers and tweezers and the large number of toiletries he required, especially those needed to maintain his trademark hairdo. When she left the bathroom, she found Trump sitting on the edge of the bed in his t-shirt, briefs, and socks.

She writes, “I had the sense of a vacuum taking all the air out of the room.” She says she was mad at herself for getting herself into this situation and recalled her mentor Moz saying to her often, “Put yourself in bad situations, bad things happen.” Finally, she decided the easiest and fastest way to get out was to let him fuck her. She stripped and let him get on top of her. There was no foreplay. Trump kissed her once and Daniel writes, “He’s even a terrible kisser.” While he fucked her, Daniels simply lay inert, thinking about how she could have avoided it. It was over in two or three minutes. She got dressed and Trump called her “honeybunch”—which she found revolting—and told her he wanted to see her again so they could talk about getting her on The Apprentice. Then she left. No dinner. But no complaints from Daniels about that.

The whole episode can only reinforce the opinions of those psychologists and psychiatrists who have publicly spoken of Trump’s profound psychological problems. Behind the thin veil of bravado and bluster is a cringing, psychological cripple. A person one might pity—except he is, after all, Donald Trump, who has subjected everyone who has said anything slightly critical of him to an angry, abusive reply. Consider his recent post on Truth Social about Taylor Swift after she endorsed Kamala Harrison: “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!”

The next day, Trump’s bodyguard, Keith, called her and said Trump would like to meet with her in the bar in the hotel where she was staying. Trump was sitting next to the quarterback of the Super Bowl champions earlier that year, Ben Roethlisberger. Daniels was there for about an hour, during which she and Roethlisberger had a desultory conversation when Trump announced he had to make some phone calls. Before he left, he said to Daniels, “We need to talk about The Apprentice.” Then he added, “Do you mind if I have Ben walk you to your room?”  When she and Roethlisberger reached her room, he asked if he could come in. Daniels told him she was tired and opened the door just wide enough for her to slip in.

Nevertheless, Roethlisberger kept pressure on the door that prevented her from closing it while he pleaded with her, “Come on.” Finally, she abandoned any pretense of politeness, shoved the door shut, and latched it. Daniels writes, “I was terrified. I am rarely terrified.”

 That Roethlisberger and Trump would be buddies is not surprising. A year later, Roethlisberger was charged with sexual assault that took place during the Tahoe golf tournament. The following year he faced the same charge in Georgia. Nothing in Daniels’ account of her years in the porn business is as seedy as the two days at the celebrity golf tournament.

For the next six months, Trump called Daniels about three times a month, always holding out the possibility of her somehow being on The Apprentice. At some point, he pitched to her the idea that she would do the ‘challenges’ beforehand. That is, Daniels writes, “He was going to have me cheat.” After 2008, Daniels had no further contact with Trump and tried to forget her encounter with Trump at Lake Tahoe. However, the Access Hollywood video in 2016 would make it impossible for her to keep silent about it.

Too much and never enough

Mary Trump’s book of that title complements Stormy Daniels’s book. Mary Trump, Donald Trump’s niece, provides more or less the backstory to the episode at Lake Tahoe and anticipates the grim consequences it would have for Daniels. It is a Trump family history—hence, the subtitle of her book How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. Her account of Donald Trump’s childhood relationship makes it clear that his father, Fred Trump, ruined his favorite son, Donald, thereby creating the unstable misfit who has dominated the political scene of America since 2016.

Fred Trump built a real estate empire during the Great Depression and World War II, most of it initially based on lucrative government contracts for low-income housing in the Queens building. He also had a network of powerful politicians. Fred was a ruthless businessman whose ethos was kiss up and kick down. Lying was a necessary part of doing business. He passed down all of these traits to his son, along with much of his millions.

Too Much and Never Enough makes it clear that when it came to his family, Fred Trump was a father only in a biological sense. The only child he initially took an interest in was his oldest son, Freddie, Mary Trump’s father.  Fred Trump’s sole interest in him was that he was to be the heir who would one day take over and expand his empire. Donald was initially a mere distraction. His daughters Maryanne and Elizabeth were not even distractions. Their father was an old-school sexist who took no interest whatsoever in females as they were unfit to run any business. He never played with his children and took no interest in their friends unless they somehow threatened to distract his sons—first Freddie and then Donald—from preparing themselves to take over his business empire one day. Likewise, Fred Trump had no friends. He only cultivated relationships with people who could assist him in his relentless pursuit of wealth and power.

With such a father, Freddie was doomed. When Freddie said he wanted a pet, Fred said, “That’s stupid.” A still worse sign of Freddie’s failings as he grew older was his diverse circle of friends. For his father, friends were worse than pets since they were incomparably worse distractions than pets. As a result, Freddie sank lower and lower in the eyes of his father, who focused on his son, Donald. Donald gladly seized the opportunity to replace his older brother Freddie. Freddie was now a loser—the worst thing to be for Fred and for Donald too.

When Freddie was old enough to comprehend how much he fell short of his father’s expectations and apologized, it only worsened matters. For his father, apologies were still another sign of weakness because they were tantamount to an admission of making a mistake. When Freddie was old enough to go to work for his dad, he failed miserably and took to heavy drinking.

All through his childhood, Donald Trump played second fiddle to Freddie. But he watched and studied his brother’s mistakes. Where Freddie had a wide circle of friends, Donald had no friends. Like his father, he took no interest in anyone unless they might serve some purpose for him. Unlike his father, however, Trump was lazy. He got his sister Maryanne to do his homework for him. The schools he attended complained to his father about his schoolwork and truancy. So, his father sent him to a military school, hoping he would learn self-discipline. But that didn’t work. Since Maryanne couldn’t take the SAT for him when he wanted to go to the Wharton School of Business at Penn, he paid a fellow student at the military school to take the test for him.

After Trump got his degree at Wharton, his father made no more efforts to discipline him. Instead, he set up a trust fund for him and his siblings that paid them annuities. What’s more, he gave $500,000 to launch his own business enterprises. Trump became a sort of parasite on his father’s wealth, and slowly, the parasite took over its host.

Mary Trump’s book makes clear the significant difference between the father and son is the contrast between Fred Trump’s business successes and his son Donald’s business failures. When, in the 1980s, Donald Trump began to invest and build in Manhattan, his father’s connections were of little help except by providing collateral to secure loans for his son. The Manhattan property values were continually increasing, so they were safe investments. However, Trump began to invest in another market, and the results showed that he lacked business acumen.

Trump’s construction or purchase of hotel casinos in Atlantic City was a reckless adventure his father would have never undertaken. The first was his construction of a hotel-casino, which opened in 1984 and would be called the Trump Plaza. The next year, he bought the unopened Atlantic City Hilton Hotel, which he renamed Trump’s Castle. In 1998, he bought another similar hotel-casino property, the Trump Taj Mahal—neighboring venues. Soon, the Castle and the Plaza were bleeding money and draining the briefly profitable Taj Mahal until it was also losing money. His father, Fred, had to send limousines full of cash to shore up the rickety finances of the casinos. By 1992, Trump had filed for bankruptcy on all three properties. Trump’s other purchases during his spending spree in those years—the Eastern Airlines Shuttle, mega-yacht, the Trump Princess, and the company Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts- all went the way to bankruptcy. The result was that by 1990, Trump was about 3 billion dollars in debt—quite an achievement for a financial wizard. The root cause of these blunders was Trump’s megalomania. This led him to even con himself that simply stamping his name on businesses would create markets and customers and profits. Despite these financial fiascos the image of Trump as a financial wizard has persisted—caveat emptor.

His only real financial success was in a much smaller market. His family. After his father and his mother died, Donald effectively cut out any share for Mary of what her grandparents had left to her father, Freddie. Then, he had effective control over the estate to the exclusion of his three siblings and their children.

The title of Mary Trump’s book Too Much, Never Enough points to fatal flaw in her uncle’s character given his profession. He is a conman, but a conman must know not only his victims, but he must also know himself. If not he will sooner or later be caught in his own web.

Access Hollywood

The Access Hollywood video surfaced on October 16, 2016. In the video, Donald Trump, then the Republican presidential candidate, had the now notorious conversation with Billy Bush, the host of the program Access Hollywood, in which Trump said of women, “…when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab ‘em by the pussy.”

For Stormy Daniels, the Access Hollywood video would, by and by, put her in the same courtroom as Donald Trump. The indictment could not have been made without her testimony. She withstood hours of cross-examination by Trump’s lawyers. Given the honesty of her autobiography, it is no surprise that the jurors believed her. Death threats were made against her and her daughter, and Daniels had to wear a bulletproof vest beneath her clothes to and from the courtroom. In the wake of her testimony, Daniels still turned down interview offers. During the trial about the hush money payment, Daniels’ former lawyer, Keith Davidson, who facilitated the hush money payment, testified that Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine, offered Daniels $1 million to break the 2018 hush money agreement. He also said that Flynt offered to pay Daniels for any legal fees that came with the breach of contract. He said that though Daniels was eager to get out of the agreement, she ultimately rejected Flynt’s offer.

Epilogue

Since I began writing this piece in June, Joe Biden has been replaced by Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate, turning the presidential race upside-down. As Trump was befuddled by Stormy Daniels, he is now befuddled by Kamala Harris. As if Kamala Harris is not enough trouble for Trump, another thing may now be stalking him.

His father, Fred, spent the last decade of his life so severely demented that he talked on a phone that was disconnected and signed blank pieces of paper brought to him by his secretary. Donald Trump’s rambles at his campaign rallies about sharks and electrocution may well be early signs of dementia.

Before his debate with Kamala Harris, his campaign staff was worried about his mental capacity to string together sentences with some semblance of meaning. Once the issue of immigration was raised in their debate, his response to every question put to him ended up with him talking about immigration—no matter whether the question concerned the economy, abortion, tariffs, or Ukraine. When he told by the moderators of the debate that the Republican governor of Ohio and Republican mayor of Springfield dismissed the stories about the Haitian immigrants were baseless, Trump simply said, “They’re eating the cats.”

The day may come when his children hide him from the public while he puts on three ties and signs blank pieces of paper.

Notes.

(i) I should here that I also intended to use Trump’s book The Art of the Deal for this piece. But I was only able to read a page and a half of the first chapter. It consists of brief descriptions of all the phone calls Trump makes and receives in one week. The calls are all with powerful, wealthy people or with celebrities.  I flipped through the rest of its forty-three pages, which read like a forty-three-page laundry list. The rest of the book consists mostly of what he bought and what he owns. That so many people would buy that book so that it spent thirteen weeks atop the New York Times best sellers list says much about what is wrong with this country—though I have to wonder how many of the people who bought the book actually read all 367 pages of its mind-numbing and preposterous braggadocio.