Exploring the Secret History of Trump's Women (interview with author, Nina Burleigh)

[demmiblue]

Outside Donald Trump’s castle, the country becomes more tolerant of women in public roles. But Trump and his “Queens,” as Nina Burleigh calls them in her new book, Golden Handcuffs: The Secret History of Trump’s Women, are a link to a different era. His wives — and even to an extent the other women in his family — have made a deal to accept what Burleigh calls “long-term enslavement” in exchange for wealth and fame.

We know tabloid tidbits about Trump’s women, but Newsweek reporter Burleigh puts the pieces together in some surprising ways. The most nativist president in recent history has some of his most intimate relationships with women consumed by their immigrant roots, from his grandmother, to his mother, to his current wife. Trump in many ways treats women as inconsequential props, yet he deeply fears them, almost as if they were witches who, with their mysterious bodily functions, could steal away his mojo. It’s all so old–fashioned, yet part of his appeal undoubtedly comes from nostalgia for what his style of marriage represents. Herewith, what the six most important women in Trump’s life — his mother, grandmother, oldest daughter, and three wives — tell us about him and maybe ourselves.

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That’s a good transition to his childhood. Trump often talks about his father, Fred, but you write about his mother and grandmother as the most influential forces.
Yes. His grandmother was this stern, probably cold woman who came from a tiny village in Germany. Then suddenly her husband dies, leaving her with three young children and a small nest egg. To survive, she transformed it into the Trump Organization in the 1920s.

So she’s the original Trump!
But she’s been written out of history. They tell it now as if Fred started the whole organization at age 16.

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Can you talk about the great Freudian moment of his young life?
When he was 2, his mother went to the hospital to give birth to his little brother, Robert, and didn’t come home for many months because she contracted peritonitis and had to go through numerous surgeries. And so he was alone, bereft of a primary caretaker. And his father is not warm and fuzzy. He’d tell the older kids, “Your mother may die today, but you need to go to school.” At 2 is when you’re making primary connections, learning about love and being loved — and his mother was gone.

Coupled with that, I think, he had a learning disability, a reading problem, and probably ADHD, undiagnosed. Except in those days the rambunctious boys were regarded as the healthy ones; the readers were the sissies and neurotics. So Donald wasn’t regarded as having a problem. His aggressiveness was praised.

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But isn’t there something patronizing about what you’re saying? Someone like Melania may just have a different understanding of how power works. And, in fact, she’s gotten a lot of power and fame for herself.
But at what cost? I mean, the humiliation of being married to somebody who sleeps with porn stars right after you have a child. Or who’s accused by 19 women of gross acts. And of having to accept the pity of millions of people. Is that worth what you call power, just to have the ability to pick up the phone and have a stylist come to dress you?

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/nina-burleigh-golden-handcuffs-the-secret-history-of-trumps-women.html?utm_source=tw&utm_medium=s1&utm_campaign=di