EXCLUSIVE:

The White House says that it “has made it clear to Turkey that this operation is a bad idea.”

But a senior adviser to Erdogan, @Gulnuray, tells me: “President Trump and President Erdogan have reached an understanding over precisely what this operation is.”

https://twitter.com/camanpour/status/1181986059023998981

In an exclusive excerpt from All the President’s Women, Karen Johnson, one of 43 women with new allegations against the president, tells her story.

If you thought the Access Hollywood tape was the opening salvo in the story of Donald Trump's transgressions against women, think again. In All the President's Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator, journalists Barry Levine and Monique El-Faizy draw on over 100 interviews, many of them exclusive, to craft a detailed history of Trump's relationships with women, stretching back to his childhood and education as well as his rise through real estate, entertainment, and politics. What emerges from the authors' reporting is a portrait of a predator who hides behind wealth and institutional power to frequently harass and abuse women.

While the president has publicly faced allegations from two dozen women, this book reveals another 43 allegations of alleged inappropriate behavior, including 26 instances of unwanted sexual contact. In this exclusive excerpt from All the President's Women, Levine and El-Faizy investigate an alleged wave of unwanted touching that preceded his proposal to Melania Knauss, including a disturbing instance of groping at Mar-a-Lago. —Adrienne Westenfeld

In 1998, Sam Mendes packed the old Henry Miller Theater at Forty-Third Street and Broadway with round black cabaret chairs and tables dotted with red tasseled table lamps and installed banquettes and a bar, thus transforming it into the Kit Kat Club for the second Broadway revival ofCabaret, a musical about the rise of Nazis in 1930s Germany. “It’s rough, it’s dirty, it’s in your face,” Mendes said of the new Weimar-styled nightclub-cum-cabaret-cum-theater. Perhaps fittingly, it was there that Donald Trump, who would eventually have his own political rise, met an inscrutable twenty-eight-year-old brunette with steel-blue eyes who would be the star of the second revival of his role as married man.

The third Broadway staging of Cabaret was a huge hit and opened the door to Mendes’s career as a film director—and it seems Trump has had success his third time around as well. In Melania Knauss, he found his best match, a woman who seemed to combine first wife Ivana’s Eastern European love of a strongman with second wife Marla Maples’s homey attitude.

Donald Trump is a creature of habit, and the story of how he met the Slovenian model Knauss rings familiar. In 1998, when he had been separated from Maples for about a year, he went to the Kit Kat Club for a party for a Victoria’s Secret model with Norwegian heiress Celina Midelfart, who was in her mid-twenties and living in Trump Tower while studying at New York University, as his date. According to Trump’s account, he was meant to be introduced to another model that night, but Melania caught his eye. “I went crazy,” he told Larry King during an interview the CNN host conducted with newlyweds Donald and Melania in 2005. “There was this great supermodel sitting next to Melania. I was supposed to meet this supermodel. They said, ‘Look, there’s so and so.’ I said, “Forget about her. Who is the one on the left?’ And it was Melania.” Melania was twenty-eight at the time and had been invited to the party by her friend and agent, Paolo Zampolli. When Midelfart absented herself to use the restroom, Trump seized the opportunity to hit on Melania.

After chatting her up, Trump asked Melania for her number, but she refused to give it to him, asking for his instead. She was impressed when he gave her all his numbers—the office, Mar-a-Lago, all of it, she later told Harper’s Bazaar. Their courtship began with a few dinners together in New York. It didn’t take more than a month before she was boarding his private jet to fly to Mar-a-Lago.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a29391247/donald-trump-assault-allegations-karen-johnson-all-the-presidents-women-book/

As Turkey bombs the Kurds after US troops withdrawal, remember—

The Annual Conference on U.S.-Turkey Relations took place at—

the Trump Hotel DC.

@realDonaldTrump profited from people paying to mingle with Turkish politicians.

Via @1100Penn

https://twitter.com/Z_Everson/status/1181936090346934272

Turkish–U.S. officials gathered at Trump Hotel D.C.

The 37th Annual Conference on U.S.-Turkey Relations took place April 14–16 at the Trump Hotel D.C. The American-Turkish Council, a business organization, hosted the event.

While the 2017 conference also was held at the U.S. president’s Pennsylvania Avenue hotel, last year the event was canceled because U.S. officials didn’t want to attend given the tensions between the Turkish and U.S. governments.

There was less reluctance this year. According to the event’s program and social-media sightings, U.S. participants at an event in the president’s hotel held by a group advocating for improved relations with a foreign country included

chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford

deputy Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette

the Secretary of State’s special representative for Syria engagement and special envoy to the global coalition to defeat ISIS, James Jeffrey

former Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke (flashback: security detail for Zinke and his wife’s 2017 vacation in Turkey cost U.S. taxpayers $25,000)

(While Commerce Sec. Wilbur Ross and senior advisor to the president Jared Kushner spoke during the conference, it appears their remarks were made at a different venue.)

...

Meanwhile, at least three ministers in Turkey’s government and a senior advisor to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan headlined an event that President Trump’s hotel ostensibly profited from. In addition to being a featured speaker at the Trump Hotel D.C., Turkey’s finance minister, Berat Albayrak met with President Trump at the White House last week.


https://1100pennsylvania.substack.com/p/turkishus-officials-gather-at-trump

In an interview with Axios on Tuesday night, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) condemned President Trump in his harshest language yet for deciding to withdraw U.S. troops from northern Syria, suggesting Trump is violating his oath of office by allowing Turkey to move in and attack the Kurds.

Driving the news: Graham said Trump is making the biggest mistake of his presidency, against the advice of his national security team, and putting his presidency in peril. "I think he's putting the nation at risk, and I think he's putting his presidency at risk," Graham said. "And I hope he will adjust his policies like he did before. That would actually be a sign of real leadership."

Details: Graham told me in a phone interview:

"This is worse than when Obama left Iraq, because you've got so much information as to what happens. This would be a game changer to our national security. This would pave the way to the re-emergence of ISIS."

"If I hear the president say one more time, 'I made a campaign promise to get out of Syria,' I'm going to throw up."

"He took an oath of office to protect the nation against all enemies, foreign and domestic. There's no bigger enemy to our nation than ISIS. And there's no way we can protect the country from radical Islam without partners like the Kurds."

"His duty as commander-in-chief, I believe, compels him to act honorably by the Kurds, and it is impossible for Turkey to go into Syria and not create a devastating ripple effect, no matter what the president says to [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan."

"Nobody besides Trump believes the president's claim that the U.S. is not abandoning the Kurds."

https://www.axios.com/lindsey-graham-donald-trump-syria-withdrawal-e103594e-2417-4355-a5af-46a0f197e838.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic