Portside

All the President's Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator
Barry Levine and Monique El-Faizy
Hachette Books
ISBN: 9780316492669

Barry Levine and Monique El-Faizy parachute into the netherworld of weaponized libido that is the life of the 45th president. Salaciousness abounds. Their book is lurid, informative and aptly subtitled “Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator”.

All the President’s Women is breezy but heavy. Unlike Stormy Daniels’ 2018 bestseller Full Disclosure, none of it is entertaining. Not surprisingly, the White House declined multiple opportunities to rebut the book’s contentions.

It takes us from Trump’s days growing up in Queens to his arrival in the Oval Office and chronicles everything in between, mommy and daughter issues included. Much has been heard before, some is aired for the first time, little is pleasant, plenty is disturbing.

The book rests upon firsthand interviews, transcripts and prior reports. It also contains a detailed appendix that lays out its sources. Said differently, if you can actually believe Barack Obama is a crypto-Muslim born in Kenya to a cocaine-addled Martian, then opting in to at least 50% of All the President’s Women should be a no-brainer.

Despite all Trump’s protestations and legal maneuvers, the lawsuit commenced in New York by Zervos, a one-time Apprentice contestant who was allegedly manhandled and defamed, proceeds apace. Since the case began in early 2017, the defendant has never submitted a sworn statement denying the substance of the complaint.

In March 2019, a New York appeals court gave its greenlight for Zervos’s action to continue. Earlier this month the trial court set a 6 December discovery cut-off, with the possibility of Trump being deposed.

Practically speaking, don’t bet on it. Like Bill Clinton before him, Trump will probably continue to assert that a sitting president cannot be sued, an argument rejected by the supreme court when Clinton squared off against Paula Jones. It is also possible Trump will claim that being deposed while being impeached is more than one man should be forced to bear. There, he may have a point.

More ominously for Trump, on Thursday Zervos filed a motion with the court that outlined a series of sexual assaults in late 2007 allegedly perpetrated by Trump. For good measure, the results of a polygraph are included. According to Zervos, in one instance Trump “began kissing” her “very aggressively”, then pawed at her. Zervos also attached portions of Trump’s calendar. Barron Trump, the president’s son with Melania, was less than two years old at the time.

On top of that, there is Cohen’s guilty plea that essentially paints the president AKA “Individual-1” as an unindicted co-conspirator in a campaign finance scheme to keep Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model (“Woman-1”), and Daniels, a porn star (“Woman-2”), out of the headlines. The plan worked well enough. The two women were neither seen nor heard until the presidential race was over.

Among the book’s more questionable vignettes is a story of a younger Trump, nearly 40 years ago, frequenting a sex club maintained by the mob and pursuing a threesome with a porn star and a young girl. The authors have failed to find the two women or a possible black-and-white tape.

Beyond that, the building in question has since been demolished and the mob kingpin behind the club was purportedly whacked in 1986. The sole eyewitness is named John Tino, and his rap sheet includes convictions for larceny, fraud and forgery.

Yet Trump’s forays into construction and casinos, his nexus to organized crime and his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein together confer a patina of plausibility on a tale that would otherwise be close to nonexistent. The authors stand by Tino.

The book also raises the possibility Trump may have left in his wake more than a few terminated pregnancies. David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer prize winner and a Trump biographer, is quoted as saying that several “name-brand” women had pregnancies and abortions courtesy of Trump. Johnston adds: “I don’t have the medical records to prove it, but they’ve told girlfriends about it.” No names are listed.

All the President’s Women also examines evangelical support for Trump and Trump’s religious life. One source is quoted as saying evangelical backing stems from Trump’s judicial selections. Another attributes it to the loss of “Protestant privilege in America”.

On that score, Pew Research recently announced: “In US, Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace”. Just over two in five Americans are Protestants and evangelical Protestantism is now the dominant branch. At the same time, the religiously unaffiliated comprise more than a quarter of the country.

Potentially more telling is that Paula White, a preacher of the prosperity gospel, has emerged as Trump’s personal pastor. White’s take on immigration and Scripture: Jesus “did live in Egypt for three and a half years. But it was not illegal. If He had broken the law then He would have been sinful and He would not have been our Messiah.” Good to know.

White is a resident of Trump Park Avenue, a condominium in Manhattan’s Lenox Hill neighborhood. In 2018, Omarosa Manigault Newman, formerly of The Apprentice and the White House, asked if White’s position as Trump’s spiritual adviser “had ever been missionary”? Levine and El-Faizy don’t go there. Instead, they look to White as a character witness.

It is unlikely All the President’s Women will change many, if any, minds about Trump. He was never viewed by anyone as a boy scout. Each half of the US sees what it wants. If Trump is brought down, it won’t be by his zipper.