{"id":119662,"date":"2018-01-05T08:18:36","date_gmt":"2018-01-05T16:18:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=119662"},"modified":"2018-01-05T16:00:31","modified_gmt":"2018-01-06T00:00:31","slug":"fire-and-fury-inside-the-trump-white-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=119662","title":{"rendered":"Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House"},"content":{"rendered":"

Highlights from the new book<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* Lewandowski and Hope Hicks, the PR aide put on the campaign by Ivanka Trump, had an affair that ended in a public fight on the street…<\/p>\n

* Shortly after Lewandowski, with whom Hicks had an on-and-off romantic relationship, was fired in June 2016 for clashing with Trump family members, Hicks sat in Trump Tower with Trump and his sons, worrying about Lewandowski\u2019s treatment in the press and wondering aloud how she might help him. Trump, who otherwise seemed to treat Hicks in a protective and even paternal way, looked up and said, \u201cWhy? You\u2019ve already done enough for him. You\u2019re the best piece of tail he\u2019ll ever have,\u201d sending Hicks running from the room.<\/p>\n

* The silver lining of the ignominy Melania Trump had to endure after the Billy Bush tape was that now there was no way her husband could become president. Donald Trump\u2019s marriage was perplexing to almost everybody around him\u2014or it was, anyway, for those without private jets and many homes. He and Melania spent relatively little time together. They could go days at a time without contact, even when they were both in Trump Tower. Often she did not know where he was, or take much notice of that fact. Her husband moved between between residences as he would move between rooms. Along with knowing little about his whereabouts, she knew little about his business, and took at best modest interest in it. An absentee father for his first four children, Trump was even more absent for his fifth, Barron, his son with Melania. Now on his third marriage, he told friends he thought he had finally perfected the art: live and let live\u2014\u201cDo your own thing.\u201d He was a notorious womanizer, and during the campaign became possibly the world\u2019s most famous masher. While nobody would ever say Trump was sensitive when it came to women, he had many views about how to get along with them, including a theory he discussed with friends about how the more years between an older man and a younger woman, the less the younger woman took an older man\u2019s cheating personally. Still, the notion that this was a marriage in name only was far from true. He spoke of Melania frequently when she wasn\u2019t there. He admired her looks\u2014often, awkwardly for her, in the presence of others. She was, he told people proudly and without irony, a \u201ctrophy wife.\u201d And while he may not have quite shared his life with her, he gladly shared the spoils of it. \u201cA happy wife is a happy life,\u201d he said, echoing a popular rich-man truism. He also sought Melania\u2019s approval. (He sought the approval of all the women around him, who were wise to give it.) In 2014, when he first seriously began to consider running for president, Melania was one of the few who thought it was possible he could win. <\/p>\n

It was a punchline for his daughter, Ivanka, who had carefully distanced herself from the campaign. With a never-too-hidden distaste for her stepmother, Ivanka would say to friends: All you have to know about Melania is that she thinks if he runs he\u2019ll certainly win. <\/p>\n

* Throughout his life, Trump had few close friends of any kind, but when he began his campaign for president he had almost no friends in politics. The only two actual politicians with whom Trump was close were Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie, and both men were in their own way peculiar and isolated. And to say that he knew nothing\u2014nothing at all\u2014about the basic intellectual foundations of the job was a comic understatement. Early in the campaign, in a Producers-worthy scene, Sam Nunberg was sent to explain the Constitution to the candidate: \u201cI got as far as the Fourth Amendment before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.\u201d <\/p>\n

* For quite obvious reasons, no president before Trump and few politicians ever have come out of the real estate business: a lightly regulated market, based on substantial debt with exposure to frequent market fluctuations, it often depends on government favor, and is a preferred exchange currency for problem cash\u2014money laundering. Trump\u2019s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Jared\u2019s father Charlie, Trump\u2019s sons Don Jr. and Eric, and his daughter Ivanka, as well as Trump himself, all supported their business enterprises to a greater or lesser extent working in the dubious limbo of international free cash flow and gray money. Charlie Kushner, to whose real estate business interests Trump\u2019s son-in-law and most important aide was wholly tied, had already spent time in a federal prison for tax evasion, witness tampering, and making illegal campaign donations. Modern politicians and their staffs perform their most consequential piece of opposition research on themselves. If the Trump team had vetted their candidate, they would have reasonably concluded that heightened ethical scrutiny could easily put them in jeopardy. But Trump pointedly performed no such effort.<\/p>\n

* Trump liked to say that one of the things that made life worth living was getting your friends\u2019 wives into bed. <\/p>\n

* Ten days before Donald Trump\u2019s inauguration as the forty-fifth president, a group of young Trump staffers\u2014the men in regulation Trump suits and ties, the women in the Trump-favored look of high boots, short skirts, and shoulder-length hair\u2014were watching President Barack Obama give his farewell speech as it streamed on a laptop in the transition offices.<\/p>\n

[Who is Trump boffing these days?]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Highlights from the new book: * Lewandowski and Hope Hicks, the PR aide put on the campaign by Ivanka Trump, had an affair that ended in a public fight on the street… * Shortly after Lewandowski, with whom Hicks had … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21791,29752],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-119662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-america","category-donald-trump"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t