The Orange Elephant in the Room: Donald Trump

Since the 1970s a lot has been written about Donald Trump as a real estate developer, bestselling author, celebrity businessman, survivor of multiple bankruptcies, advertising pitchman (for the likes of Cozone.com, Milton Bradley’s Trump: The Game, McDonald’s, and Pizza Hut), football team owner (in a league that he ultimately helped to tank), reality TV star, a one-term president of the United States, and the instigator of the riot at the US Capitol building in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021. If I could have my own way, I would completely ignore him and never write anything about him in this Substack because I’m totally sick and tired of that man and his attention whoring ways. I would definitely welcome the opportunity to never again see his large obese body with orange spray tanned skin and his yellow straw colored hair. I would love never hearing his bombastic voice ever again.

But he refuses to go away from the limelight, he has a cult of followers who are willing to do anything for him (look at the number of people who ended up in prison for participating in the January 6 riot), and the mainstream media is indulging him on this so here we are.

Normally a president who leaves office tends to keep a very low profile. He might write his memoirs about his time in the White House or give the occasional paid speech in front of a select audience. A former president generally tends to put his political past behind him and not comment much on the current political situation.

But not Donald Trump. He continues to dominate the Republican Party despite being out of office. Trump especially has a very strong hold over elected Republican lawmakers in Congress, which is fully explained in this video.

He spent the last few years filing lawsuit after lawsuit in order to overturn the 2020 elections and get reinstated in the White House, with all of those efforts being unsuccessful. Last year he called for a suspension of the Constitution so he could be reinstated as president.

Now he is running for reelection to the White House in an effort to become the first president to serve two non-consecutive terms since Grover Cleveland. What’s more, he has been getting frequent and deferential media treatment at the expense of the other Republican candidates, which is a total repeat of what happened in 2016. This issue of how the media has treated Donald Trump in his reelection efforts so far is the subject of this recent scathing report in the Columbia Journalism Review that is worth reading.

There's also Trump’s Kremlin connection. The Russians are once again doing everything possible to make sure that Trump gets reelected.

Donald Trump is running despite the fact that he is currently facing a whopping 91 different criminal charges in four different indictments on both the state and federal level. Unless Donald Trump drops out of the presidential race or suddenly drops dead, it looks like he will be spending next year alternating between spending time in a courtroom and spending time on the campaign trail. And that's not to mention this “what-if” scenario: Trump gets elected president at the same time as being sentenced to prison.

Trump didn’t suddenly turn bad. His bad behavior gradually evolved over a lifetime. As the Wikipedia attests, Donald John Trump was born in 1946 as one of five children in the Queens borough of New York City. While Trump has long complained in his political speeches about too many immigrants coming to the US, his mother, who was born Mary Anne MacLeod, immigrated to the US from Scotland. Both of his paternal grandparents immigrated from Germany.

It was his paternal German grandfather, Frederick Trump, who initially made the family fortune when he opened a restaurant and hotel that also served as a brothel with prostitutes during the Yukon Gold Rush. He later opened a real estate business in New York City, where he died during the 1919 Spanish flu pandemic.

Frederick Trump’s widow, Elizabeth Christ Trump, took over the real estate business and her oldest son, Fred Trump, began to help her with running it after he graduated from high school. Over time the family business became very successful. According to this expose that ran in The New York Times, by the time Fred’s son, Donald, turned eight, Donald was already a millionaire. That fact alone has always astounded me whenever I hear about Trump managing to convince a sizeable amount of voters that he’s “the quintessential working class hero” that the late John Lennon once sang about.

As Donald Trump’s niece Mary Trump wrote in her tell-all book about her family, Too Much and Never Enough, Donald Trump’s mother had frequent health problems that stemmed from complications that developed after she gave birth to her youngest child, Robert Trump. Meanwhile Fred Trump wanted his sons to grow up to become “killers” in the business world. That family background had an effect on Donald as he developed a reputation for being the neighborhood bully and a troublemaker in school.

After he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968 Donald Trump joined the family real estate business. It would be the only place that he ever worked for until he was elected president in 2016. In 1970 his father Fred promoted him as president. This propelled him on the road to becoming a bestselling author of the book The Art of the Deal in 1987 (which was mostly written by his ghostwriter Tony Schwartz) which, in turn, made him into some kind of a celebrity billionaire businessman who frequently appeared on talk shows and gave interviews in celebrity publications like People magazine.

Even his multiple bankruptcies didn’t dispel the notion that Donald Trump was an ultra successful billionaire. Those who worked closer to Trump have their own stories and they aren’t flattering. I recently came across this TikTok video from a man who worked at one of the Trump-owned casinos and he spoke in detail about how that was a disaster.

Trump had problems with things like not paying his contractors and hourly employees for the work that they’ve done for his properties and being accused of rape and sexual assault. As a celebrity businessman Donald Trump had an easy time of keeping the less savory aspects of his persona on the downlow because the celebrity and business press he spoke to were interested in maintaining access to him since any interviews with him guaranteed sales and ratings.

It was also during his years as a celebrity businessman that Donald Trump and the Kremlin began to flirt with each other. Former KGB agent Yuri Shvets said that Donald Trump was cultivated as an asset by the Soviet Union at the time. The Soviet government arranged for Donald Trump, his first wife Ivana, and Ivana’s assistant Lisa Calandra to visit Moscow and Leningrad in 1987 under the guise of Trump potentially engaging in a building project in Moscow. While there was never a Trump Tower Moscow or a similar project that was built, the Soviets felt that he would make the ideal asset with his narcissism and being prone to flattery. It was the Soviets and (later) the Russians who kept on suggesting to Trump that he would make the ideal president if he would ever go into politics.

The Soviets and (later) the Russians got their money’s worth when they financed Trump’s first visit to the USSR. For years Trump properties served as money-laundering operations for the Soviets and Russians.

Trump properties have also served as locations for a peculiar Russian practice known as birth tourism. It goes like this: A Russian woman who is in the very late stages of her pregnancy would travel to a Trump property in the US where she would stay until she gives birth at a nearby hospital. Her child would be a US citizen at birth and would also be a Russian citizen. You can watch a PBS video about that practice right here.

This is a type of practice that only wealthy Russians can indulge in. I find it very telling that there are Russians who are among the oligarchy who go through the extraordinary effort to make sure that their children have dual citizenship instead of just giving birth in a Russian hospital. Could it be that, deep down inside, these rich Russians aren’t confident in the future of their own country so they are trying to create a backup plan for themselves and their children in case something really goes wrong in Russia? 🤔

The fact that two of Trump’s three wives were born in Eastern European communist countries also interested the Soviets and, later, the Russians. His first wife was born Ivana Zelníčková in 1949 in what was then-known as Gottwaldov, Czechoslovakia but today it’s known as Zlín, Czech Republic. She developed an early interest in skiing, which led to her joining the junior national ski team where she received an opportunity to travel outside of Czechoslovakia. Here’s a fun fact: In 1970 she made a guest appearance on this Czechoslovak children’s TV show called Pan Tau (Mr. Tau). Someone uploaded scenes from that episode where the future first Mrs. Trump made an on-screen appearance. (She’s easy to spot. She’s the one with the long platinum blonde hair.)

She liked what she saw in the West during her travels with the ski team and she wanted to move there. Like other communist countries of that time, Czechoslovakia severely restricted international travel among its citizens. She didn’t want to defect outright because she would no longer be allowed to visit her parents in her native country. So she got a platonic friend and Austrian ski instructor named Alfred Winklmayr to marry her in 1971. That marriage enabled her to get an Austrian passport in 1972 so she could live outside of Czechoslovakia without defecting and she could visit her parents. That marriage ended in divorce in 1973. She subsequently moved to Montreal, Canada where she worked as a ski instructor and she also did modeling jobs, which included doing promotional work for the 1976 Olympics that were held in that city.

In 1976 she traveled with a group of models to New York City where she met Donald Trump. That meeting apparently sparked something between them because they were married the following year. She began working alongside her husband at the Trump Organization, where she led the interior design of Trump Tower in New York City by putting in a pink marble wall with a waterfall in the lobby. The couple had three children, all of whom would later work for their father in the Trump Organization–Donald Jr. (born 1977), Ivanka (born 1981), and Eric (born 1984).

Years later The Guardian did this expose where it was revealed that Ivana’s father, Miloš Zelníček, was an informer for Czechoslovakia’s Státní bezpečnost intelligence service (StB). The StB was interested in learning more about Trump since he married a Czechoslovakian. Miloš Zelníček would relay information to the StB about his daughter’s visits from the US and his son-in-law’s career.

Their marriage ended when Donald Trump had an affair with a model named Marla Maples. Trump married Maples in 1993 just two months after she gave birth to the couple’s daughter Tiffany. Marla Maples was the only one of Trump’s three wives who was born and raised in the US. The couple separated in 1997 and divorced in 1999.

His third wife was born Melanija Knavs in 1970 in what was then Yugoslavia but is now part of Slovenia. Her father was a member of the League of Communists of Slovenia, a branch of the official ruling League of Communists of Yugoslavia. It was through her mother’s job as a pattern maker at a children’s clothing manufacturer in Sevnica that she received her first modeling jobs where she, her sister, and other children of the employees participated in fashion shows that displayed the latest in children’s fashion.

At sixteen she posed for a local Sevnica photographer. She was named a runner-up in Jana magazine’s “Look of the Year” contest, which led to her signing with a modeling agency in Milan. She changed the spelling of her name to Melania Knauss. After doing modeling jobs for fashion houses in Milan and Paris she moved to New York in 1996 to further her modeling career.

In 1998 she met Donald Trump at a party. It was during the time that Trump was in the process of divorcing his second wife, Marla. The couple got married in 2005. In 2006 she gave birth to their son Barron and she became a US citizen that same year.

Here’s a fun fact: Melania Trump was the first foreign-born First Lady since Louisa Adams (the wife of John Quincy Adams) and the first one who came from a non-English speaking country.

The mainstream media tends to forget this but 2016 wasn’t the first time that Donald Trump had attempted to run for president. In 1987, just weeks after his first Moscow trip, he explored the idea of running in the Republican primary. He even made a few appearances in New Hampshire but he ultimately abandoned his campaign. In 1988 he approached George H.W. Bush’s campaign manager Lee Atwater asking to be put into consideration for being Bush’s running mate. Bush found the request to be “strange and unbelievable” and he picked Dan Quayle instead.

In 2000 he ran for president under the Reform Party. That campaign ultimately went nowhere but, to be fair, the Reform Party was on its last legs as a viable political party due to too much infighting among the party members on the future direction of that party.

At the time of his Reform Party stint, Trump was still dealing with the fallout from his first bankruptcy (which happened at the same time as his affair with Marla Maples and the collapse of his first marriage to Ivana). Over the years Trump would get bank loans from US banks until they stopped lending to him because he has a tendency not to pay them back. Then he turned to foreign banks like Deutsche Bank, whose loans turned out to be convoluted messes. In recent years Trump has gotten financing from Russian banks. His sons Donald Jr. and Eric have both claimed that Russia was an important source of money for the various Trump businesses. It was also that closeness between Trump and Russia that led to the infamous Steele dossier, which was initially revealed by Buzzfeed's now-defunct news division.

Trump’s fame suddenly reached new heights in 2004 when he became the host of the NBC reality TV show The Apprentice. It became a huge hit for several years and it led to The Celebrity Apprentice. Here’s a fun fact about Mark Burnett, the creator and producer of The Apprentice: In 2015 he attempted to make a reality TV show featuring Vladimir Putin but his efforts ultimately went nowhere.

In 2011 Trump toyed around with running for president again, this time as a Republican, while still serving as a reality TV show host. He gave speeches where he seemed to agree with the birther conspiracy theory surrounding Barack Obama, the first African American president, which says that President Obama was born outside of the United States in Kenya, which makes him ineligible to be president under the US Constitution. (The reality is that Barack Obama was born in the state of Hawaii, which makes him a US citizen. While it’s true that his father was born in Kenya, Barack Obama was born in the USA.) It was only when NBC looked into replacing Trump as the host of the upcoming season of The Celebrity Apprentice that Trump decided against seeking the Republican nomination that year.

In 2015 Trump made his infamous announcement at Trump Tower in New York that he was seeking the Republican nomination as president. In that speech he also railed against immigration by speaking about how Mexico never sends its best people to the US but it sends its rapists and drug dealers. That remark led to NBC firing Trump from the show. Arnold Schwarzenegger replaced Trump as the host of The Celebrity Apprentice but it only lasted one season.

Trump got plenty of help from Russia that year through the use of troll farms like the Internet Research Agency. While Trump denied that Russia helped him win that year, a Senate Intel report confirms that this was true. The CIA came to a similar conclusion. In 2021 The Guardian cited leaked Kremlin documents that said that Vladimir Putin personally authorized a secret spy agency operation to support a “mentally unstable” Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election during a closed session of Russia’s national security council. In 2016 Samantha Bee travelled to Moscow to interview two Russians who were paid to make posts on social media in an effort to get Trump elected.

Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016 really paid off for the Kremlin. CNN has a list of 37 times that Trump was soft on Russia during his term in office. In 2019 Donald Trump became the third US president to get impeached and it was for his attempt to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to find dirt on Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, in exchange for getting aid from the US that had already been promised to Ukraine. On a personal level I was dumbfounded at the time about this because the US had no historical quarrels with Ukraine. It was also the first time I had ever heard of Volodymyr Zelenskyy. As an American I was unaware of Zelenskyy’s previous career as an actor and comedian and the news report of the time didn’t mention the fact that prior to becoming the Ukrainian president he played a Ukrainian president on the sitcom Servant of the People. Trump managed to beat those charges so he remained in office for another year.

Trump’s unsuccessful blackmail attempt have had an effect in Ukraine as well. This year three Ukrainian men who aided Trump’s efforts to find dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter have been charged with treason in Ukraine. The details about their antics have even involved former New York Mayor and onetime Trump lawyer (before he got disbarred) Rudy Giuliani.

As president Trump behaved in a way that is a far cry from all of his predecessors. If you need to refresh your memory, The New York Times have put out this video that shows four years of the Trump presidency in six minutes.

Trump’s effort to remain in office despite losing the 2020 election had not only led to the riot at the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021 but he became the first president in history to be impeached twice. Had he been convicted, he would’ve been prohibited from ever holding public office again. But most of the Republicans in the Congress were incredibly spineless and refused to convict.

Next year will determine the fate of American democracy. Despite his attempt to overthrow the government on January 6, 2021, his supporters still stand by him, which shows his continued ability to dupe and con people. His first wife Ivana claimed that Trump kept a book of Adolf Hitler's speeches by his bedside. There is definitely something to Ivana’s claim because he recently made a speech where he stated what he will do if he gets elected and it’s alarming. There is a video that compares Trump to other fascist leaders.

One of Trump’s many criminal charges deals with the fact that he stole classified documents, hid them at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, showed them to various people, and refused to return them when asked. There is the possibility that Trump may have passed secrets about Israeli security to Vladimir Putin and they eventually reached Hamas so the terrorist group was able to use them to launch those devastating terror attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023.

The bottom line is that Donald Trump is a danger not only to the United States but to the world as well. Even though history has shown that in the US election losers of previous elections tend to lose the rematch as well, we Americans shouldn’t take this for granted. We need to act as if Trump can overcome all odds and win again and do whatever is necessary to prevent this.

My blog is free to subscribe but if you want to make a comment, you’ll need to take out a paid subscription, which only costs $8 per month. I know it costs as much as a subscription to Twitter/X Blue but at least I have no connections with anyone even remotely connected to Vladimir Putin’s government. ;-)