Ivanka and Vodka, on the Rocks

Why had she stayed mute for so many days about the torment her father was inflicting on thousands of immigrant children? What will happen to her if Michael Cohen flips?

.. doomed never to return to her privileged perch as a Manhattan society darling?

.. “It’s really easy for someone whose sole job in the White House is women and children to issue a statement — even Melania did it,”

.. “It just shows how fake Ivanka is,” Fox continued. “She’s crafted this whole image of herself that’s not actually her. And the real her is cooler, slightly more interesting, funnier. She curses like a sailor. She partied a lot when she was younger. She flashed a hot dog vendor when she was in eighth grade. She chain-smoked. Which is so opposite of the image she put out there.

.. “What you’re seeing now is the unmasking. She can’t control the narrative anymore because she’s so inauthentic. It has really come back to bite her.”

.. as the echoes of sobbing children snatched from parents fleeing violence collided with images of a whining, pampered child-president bragging about his crowd size and his bank account, all while he callously used helpless kids as hostages to get his wall.

.. Her $39 Zara jacket read, “I Really Don’t Care. Do U?” And yet again, it wasn’t clear whom she was trolling — most likely, as her husband tweeted,

.. Which means the first lady is like her husband in one unfortunate respect: In times of national turmoil, she makes it about herself.

.. “She was infatuated with the Kennedys,” Fox said.

.. She tried to present her brand as luminous, caring and classy — a champion of women and children with a carefully curated image over the years on Instagram, in a blog and in books.

Amid the dark hailstorm of her father, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, she sold herself as the sunny morning — the one who would temper her father’s retrogressive and sometimes wretched moves.

.. Introducing him at the 2016 Republican convention, Ivanka assured the crowd that he had “empathy and generosity,” as well as “kindness and compassion.”

.. it seemed like fan fiction.

.. a former top Trump administration official recently told me, “Donald Trump is the meanest man I’ve ever met.”

.. After her panic when he left her mother for Marla Maples — Ivanka worried she wouldn’t be able to keep the Trump name, and called him constantly — she spent her life fashioning herself, “Vertigo”-style, into his ideal.

.. no matter how hard Ivanka tried, Donald Trump thought she could be even more ideal. When she was a model, Fox writes, her father “suggested to friends that breast implants might help her along.

..  Maryanne Trump, Donald’s sister, urging him to talk Donald out of letting her get plastic surgery that young.

.. When his friend confronted him about it, he denied that she was getting implants. At the end of the call, he asked, ‘Why not, though?’”

.. Ivanka succeeded in being a Mini-Me. By 16, she trademarked her name with the intention of using it for everything from bras to brow liner to scrub masks. “There is a distinct genetic quality to Ivanka’s preternatural ability to self-promote,”

.. Ivanka ran into split-screen trouble with her gauzy and glam mommy-of-the-year Instagram posts during the refugee ban, the migrant crisis and the Palestinians dying at the Israeli border during her visit to the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem.

.. Her father is the all-consuming maw, what Fox calls “an infinite pit of need — a time-sucking vampire who fed off those around him to sustain his own vanity.”

.. Ivanka backed up the president’s fake narrative that it was Congress’s fault. When Daddy finally ended the pitiless policy that he imposed, she congratulated him on Twitter for white knighting it

.. The Trump family, of course, was seeing the problem as optics, not as a barbaric flouting of American values.

.. Donald and Ivanka are consumed with protecting their own brands. America’s? Not so much.

Donald Trump, a Playboy Model, and a System for Concealing Infidelity

One woman’s account of clandestine meetings, financial transactions, and legal pacts designed to hide an extramarital affair.

.. At the time of the party, Trump had been married to the Slovenian model Melania Knauss for less than two years; their son, Barron, was a few months old. Trump seemed uninhibited by his new family obligations. McDougal later wrote that Trump “immediately took a liking to me, kept talking to me – telling me how beautiful I was, etc. It was so obvious that a Playmate Promotions exec said, ‘Wow, he was all over you – I think you could be his next wife.’ ”

.. Purchasing a story in order to bury it is a practice that many in the tabloid industry call “catch and kill.” This is a favorite tactic of the C.E.O. and chairman of A.M.I., David Pecker, who describes the President as “a personal friend.”

.. Six former A.M.I. employees told me that Pecker routinely makes catch-and-kill arrangements like the one reached with McDougal. “We had stories and we bought them knowing full well they were never going to run,”

.. George said that Pecker protected Trump. “Pecker really considered him a friend,” George told me. “We never printed a word about Trump without his approval.”

.. Pecker also used the unpublished stories as “leverage” over some celebrities in order to pressure them to pose for his magazines or feed him stories. Several former employees said that these celebrities included Arnold Schwarzenegger, as reported by the Los Angeles Times, and Tiger Woods.

.. McDougal wrote that Trump impressed her. “I was so nervous! I was into his intelligence + charm. Such a polite man,” she wrote.

..  All three women say that they were escorted to a bungalow at the hotel by a Trump bodyguard, whom two of the women have identified as Keith Schiller.

.. Over the course of the affair, Trump flew McDougal to public events across the country but hid the fact that he paid for her travel. “No paper trails for him,” she wrote. “In fact, every time I flew to meet him, I booked/paid for flight + hotel + he reimbursed me.”

.. In July, 2006, McDougal joined Trump at the American Century Celebrity Golf Championship, at the Edgewood Resort, on Lake Tahoe. At a party there, she and Trump sat in a booth with the New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees, and Trump told her that Brees had recognized her, remarking, “Baby, you’re popular.”

.. During the Lake Tahoe tournament, McDougal and Trump had sex, she wrote. He also allegedly began a sexual relationship with Clifford at the event.

.. Another adult-film actress, whose screen name is Alana Evans, claimed that Trump invited her to join them in his hotel room that weekend. A third adult-film performer, known as Jessica Drake, alleged that Trump asked her to his hotel room

.. During Trump’s relationship with McDougal, she wrote, he introduced her to members of his family and took her to his private residences. At a January, 2007, launch party in Los Angeles for Trump’s now-defunct liquor brand, Trump Vodka, McDougal, who was photographed entering the event, recalled sitting at a table with Kim Kardashian, Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., and Trump, Jr.,’s wife, Vanessa, who was pregnant. 

.. At one point, Trump held a party for “The Apprentice” at the Playboy Mansion, and McDougal worked as a costumed Playboy bunny. “We took pics together, alone + with his family,” McDougal wrote. She recalled that Trump said he had asked his son Eric “who he thought was the most beautiful girl here + Eric pointed me. Mr. T said ‘He has great taste’ + we laughed!”

.. In Trump Tower, McDougal wrote, Trump pointed out Melania’s separate bedroom. He “said she liked her space,” McDougal wrote, “to read or be alone.”

.. McDougal’s account, like those of Clifford and other women who have described Trump’s advances, conveys a man preoccupied with his image. McDougal recalled that Trump would often send her articles about him or his daughter, as well as signed books and sun visors from his golf courses.

.. Trump also promised to buy McDougal an apartment in New York as a Christmas present. Clifford, likewise, said that Trump promised to buy her a condo in Tampa. For Trump, showing off real estate and other branded products was sometimes a prelude to sexual advances.

.. The decision was reinforced by a series of comments Trump made that McDougal found disrespectful, according to several of her friends. When she raised her concern about her mother’s disapproval to Trump, he replied, “What, that old hag?” (McDougal, hurt, pointed out that Trump and her mother were close in age.)

.. friend mentioned a relationship she had had with an African-American man. According to multiple sources, Trump remarked that the friend liked “the big black dick” and began commenting on her attractiveness and breast size. The interactions angered the friend and deeply offended McDougal.

..Crawford said, referring to Trump. “I said, ‘You know, if you had a physical relationship with him, that could be worth something about now.’ And I looked at her and she had that guilty look on her face.”

 

The Scaramucci Show: New Communications Director Unloads Nasty Attack on White House Colleagues to Opposition Party

Move over President Donald Trump. You are yesterday’s news. It seems like this is now The Anthony Scaramucci Show. And Trump better get used to it.

in a rambling rant that was so outrageous and discordant that reporters wondered whether Scaramucci drunk-dialed Lizza, was drunk with power, or, revealing he was unqualified for his communications director job, did not know how to smoothly go on and off the record — like Trump skillfully did recently with three New York Times reporters — so that such inflammatory comments do not reflect badly on his boss.

.. It is also interesting that Scaramucci had nothing bad to say about globalists Jared Kushner, Gary Cohn, and Dina Powell during his rant.

.. His comments about Bannon also sound like someone falsely hating in another person what he secretly may hate about himself.

.. Since accepting the communications director job, Scaramucci has promoted his book from the White House podium. Despite having told students not to brag about Harvard, Scaramucci has name-checked his alma mater nearly every chance he gets, acting like someone who needs to reference “Harvard” to try to prove to others that he is not in over his head and actually belongs. Scaramucci, the ultimate self-promoter and brand-builder, also ran the “SALT” conference, which is a wanna-be Davos-style conference that brings together globalists and members of the permanent political class from the D.C. swamp to hobnob and self-perpetuate.

.. Legacy media reporters have also mocked Scaramucci for vowing to crack down on leakers given that he was reportedly known as the “go-to” leaker for those seeking info from Mitt Romney’s and Jeb Bush’s campaigns.

..  Stephanie Ruhle, one of the savviest anchors around when it comes to Wall Street and someone who obviously knows even more about the financial industry than she publicly reveals, said on Thursday evening that Scaramucci’s comments may make it more difficult for him to sell off his hedge fund firm to Chinese investors, which is a deal he must seal and get approval for in order for Scaramucci to officially work in the White House.

If Scaramucci is tarnishing his brand at the moment when it needs to be the most spotless and pristine, then imagine the disregard he will have for Trump’s brand, which Trump has built up over his lifetime. If Trump thinks that Scaramucci’s outbursts will damage Trump’s brand for the long haul, he may see Scaramucci as a gamble that is not worth taking.