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This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files”—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current President—on June 13, 2016.

Intelligence and homeland security agencies already get big chunks of the federal budget, but Donald Trump still thinks they need more resources. So in 2000, he proposed that Americans pick up the tab for a bigger national security budget—using lottery tickets.

At the time, Trump was running for the nomination of the Reform Party, the party founded by Ross Perot and later joined by Pat Buchanan and former wrestler Jesse Ventura. In his campaign book, The America We Deserve, Trump complained that the United States wasn’t serious about its spies. “We need to train and employ a lot more of them,” he wrote. “We need to be shelling out a lot more money for what the experts call ‘human intelligence.'”

And where to get that money? The lotto. “I bet if I started a national-defense lottery, with money earmarked for preventing terrorism against U.S. cities, we would take in enough money to hire and train every spy on earth and still have money to spare,” he mused. “Imagine this for a second: The (Trump) National Security Lottery would sell tickets just like in a Powerball Lottery, but dedicate every cent to funding an antiterrorism campaign. Talk about a good reason to buy a lottery ticket.”

Unfortunately, lotteries have a pretty mediocre record of actually raising money for the government agencies they’re supposed to fund. NBC News estimated in 2012 that 72 percent of every Powerball dollar goes somewhere other than a government budget. At that rate, the proceeds from every Powerball ticket ever sold in its 24-year history would, in total, net about $16 billion for new spies—which is what the government already spent on counterterrorism in 2013 alone. (Data that year was leaked, so we can’t see the details of more recent intelligence budgets.) Sad!

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This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files”—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on September 14, 2016.

Throughout most of the 1980s, the American Power Boat Association held its world championship races in the calm waters off Key West, Florida. But in 1988, Donald Trump outbid Key West and moved the 1989 edition of the high-speed spectacle up to Atlantic City to help lure more people to his casinos.

Powerboat racers were not happy. Errol Lanier? told South Florida’s Sun-Sentinel newspaper that there was “no chance” that the water in Atlantic City would be calm. “People who have to race there next October will find it atrocious,” he said. “Many racers said the APBA should have realized that scheduling a race in New Jersey in mid-October was risky at best,” the Miami Herald later noted.

They were right. The Washington Post reported that the first day of the competition “was a minor disaster as more than half of the superboat fleet, including [Miami Vice star Don] Johnson’s new catamaran, failed to finish.” Then bad weather canceled the races for four straight days, leaving the spectators and racers fuming. “The organization of this championship has been very bad,” Italian racer Eduardo Polli told the Post. 

None of this seemed to bother Trump, though. His casinos were doing bumper business thanks to the bored and stranded race fans. “I walked through the [Trump] Castle today and it’s Boomtown, U.S.A.,” he crowed to the Post. “The worse the weather, the better for business.”

When racing finally resumed, the event turned deadly when the Team Skater boat got into a horrific accident. “The 32-foot racing boat was headed southwest about 2 1/2 miles from the starting line when its bow launched into the air, hooked the water and rolled, landing upright,” the Associated Press reported. Driver Kevin Brown was killed instantly, while his crewmate, James Dyke, survived with minor injuries. Trump does not appear to have ever commented on Brown’s death.

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This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files“—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on July 19, 2016.

Architecture experts seemed shocked, when Trump Tower opened in 1983, to find that its six-story, brass-and-marble-encrusted shopping atrium was actually pretty tasteful. Paul Goldberger, the New York Times‘ architecture critic, wrote that “the atrium of Trump Tower may well be the most pleasant interior public space to be completed in New York in some years. It is warm, luxurious and even exhilarating.” He even praised the color of the marble—”a mixture of rose and peach and orange”—that was hand-picked by Ivana on a trip to Italy.

Of course, there was still plenty of room for Trumpian foibles. Trump was famous for micromanaging minute details of the building’s construction, demanding that various fixtures be replaced if they didn’t meet his standards. And for a group of trees he had ordered from Florida, that meant an untimely death, which the Times chronicled in a 1984 profile:

Mr. Trump does not place patience on his list of virtues. Workmen confirm a story that he paid $75,000 to truck several 40-foot trees from Florida to Trump Tower, where a tunnel was built into the building so the trees would not be damaged by frost. The 3,000-pound trees were then installed in the lower plaza of the atrium. Mr. Trump did not like the look. He ordered the trees removed, and, when workmen balked for 24 hours, Mr. Trump had the trees cut down with a chainsaw.

As Newsweek later reported, it wasn’t a cheap change of heart: “It cost Trump $100,000 more, but he got rid of the trees he didn’t want.”

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This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files”—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on September 15, 2016.

Donald Trump’s purchase of the Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA pageants in 1996 gave him another chance to indulge in one of his favorite pastimes: surrounding himself with beautiful women. And the woman who won the Miss Universe crown that year, Venezuela’s Alicia Machado, found out what happened when you slipped below Trumpian standards.

After Machado won Miss Universe in May 1996, she gained some weight. As she explained to the Washington Post in 1997, that was probably because she’d been starving herself in the run-up to the pageant. “The year leading to it, I didn’t eat at all,” Machado said. “And whatever I ate, I threw up. I weighed 116 pounds when I won. I was skeletal.” She said she gained back 19 pounds, putting her in what the Post reported was “within the healthy range” of American Medical Association weight charts.

Trump didn’t see it that way. After he bought a controlling stake in pageants in the fall of 1996, he demanded Machado lose weight, allegedly called her “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping” in a dig at her roots and, in February 1997, made her exercise in front of the media at Exude Gym in Manhattan to prove that he was cracking the whip. “When you win a beauty pageant, people don’t think you’re going to go from 118 to 160 in less than a year, and you really have an obligation to stay in a perfect physical state,” Trump told reporters, making his own estimate of Machado’s weight.

Trump portrayed the photo op as a sign of his support for Machado. “We want her to stay as Miss Universe and she is working on her problem,” he said, referring to rumors that the organization wanted to take her crown. Machado remembered it differently. “I asked him to please send me to a trainer or a nutritionist or something because I needed some orientation, and he sends me to a gym in New York,”? she said in the 1997 Post interview.

Apparently she didn’t meet Trump’s standards. The mogul wrote in The Art of the Comeback, his 1997 book, that he attended the Miss Universe pageant that year and saw Machado “sitting there plumply…The best part of the evening was the knowledge that next year, she would no longer be Miss Universe.” Nor is the feud over. Machado attacked Trump earlier this year for his comments about Mexicans, and told Billboard last July that she’s planning to return the favor with a book about “all the details, abuses of power, arrogance, and racism on Donald Trump’s part that she suffered in the flesh.” No release date has been announced.

Trump: So shower heads, you take a shower, the water doesn’t come out. You wanna wash your hands, the water doesn’t come out… Dishwashers you didn’t have any water… In most places of the country, water is not a problem. They don’t know what do with it. It’s called rain pic.twitter.com/rx96mCFsae

— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) July 16, 2020

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This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files”—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current President—on October 13, 2016.

Just as Donald Trump was preparing in 1990 to open the Trump Taj Mahal, a gargantuan Atlantic City casino that was supposed to become the crown jewel of his gambling empire, one man poured cold water all over the project.

That man was Marvin Roffman, a respected casino analyst at brokerage firm Janney Montgomery Scott. Two weeks before the casino was set to open in April 1990, Roffman told the Wall Street Journal that it would never succeed. Trump had financed the Taj’s construction with $675 million in high-interest junk bonds, and Roffman said the casino would have to do record-breaking business to keep up with the debt. Specifically, it would have to earn at least $1.3 million a day, something no casino had ever pulled off.

“When this property opens, he will have had so much free publicity he will break every record in the books in April, June, and July,” he told the Journal. “But once the cold winds blow from October to February, it won’t make it. The market just isn’t there.”

Trump, to say the least, was not happy. According to Washington Post reporters Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher, Roffman went to meet Robert Trump, Donald’s brother and a Taj executive, not knowing the Journal had published his comments just hours before. “Roffman found Robert Trump and extended his hand for a shake,” Kranish and Fisher wrote in their book, Trump Revealed. “Robert exploded. He said Roffman had stabbed the bondholders in the back. ‘Get the fuck off the property,’ Robert screamed. ‘Good-bye.'”

“I mean, every word out of his mouth was a four-letter word,” Roffman recalled.

Donald went much further in his rage. He called both Roffman and his boss and sent Janney Montgomery Scott a letter saying he would “institute a major lawsuit” unless Roffman retracted his comments. Roffman at first signed an apology, but he recanted the next day. Roffman was promptly fired, although the firm claimed to the New York Times it had nothing to do with Trump.

Roffman was out of a job, but he was immediately proven right about the Taj—and it didn’t even take until the fall. Within its first three months, the Associated Press reported, the Taj lost $14 million. Trump defaulted on the casino’s debt in November 1990, just six months after it opened, and gave up 50 percent of its ownership to his creditors during bankruptcy proceedings the next year. And Roffman had one final laugh: He won a $750,000 wrongful-dismissal lawsuit in 1991.

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This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files“—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on August 1, 2016.

First there was Trump: The Game. Almost two decades later, the billionaire slapped his name on a different sort of product, and Donald Trump The Fragrance was born. For fans who wanted to smell of eau de Trump, the magnate released his first cologne in 2004. For the mere price of $60, Trump’s fragrance would “make you feel like a success,” the billionaire said at an event covered by the Chicago Sun-Times. According to another report, in the Chicago Tribune, Trump claimed it could even bring success in love. “If a man puts it on, he can have any woman he wants,” Trump said at a launch event at the now-defunct Chicago department store Marshall Field’s. “Or man he wants.”

The scent, created in partnership with Estee Lauder, smelled “floral and fruity and green,” according to the Tribune, and its central note was concocted from an “exotic plant” kept secret by Estee Lauder.

The reviews? Maybe not what the billionaire expected. The Tribune quoted reviewers who gave surprising descriptions of its essence. One woman said it was reminiscent of “Jamba Juice,” while a man said it smelled of “upscale strip clubs.” Another lady called the bottle “appropriately phallus-like.”

But to Trump, the cologne would appeal to any customer. “The Fragrance is for everyone,” he told the Sun-Times.

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This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files“—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on November 1, 2016.

In 2000, a spa salesman in Medford, Oregon, decided to change his name to Donald Trump Jr., in honor of his hero, Donald Trump.

Trump loves flattery, but he hates it when other people try to take his name. After the Oregon man, Chad Michael Milligan, filed a name-change petition in court, Trump dispatched a “slick city lawyer,” as the New York Post put it, to stop him.

Milligan told a local paper that he had based his whole life on Trump. The Post compared Trump and his admirer, noting that there weren’t many similarities between the two men, other than the fact that they both had two ex-wives and shared the same favorite book, Trump’s The Art of the Deal. But Trump’s lawyer claimed that Milligan was trying to use the Trump name to cozy up to creditors by tricking them into thinking he was related to the New York billionaire.

Milligan, it turns out, was a shady character. He was a convicted petty thief. He had 34 lawsuits pending against him, making him one of the most sued men in Medford. The Post reported that the suits covered “everything from unpaid child support to delinquent bills to complaints about the service at his hot-tub business.” He owed $4,700 in taxes to the state of Oregon. Those who had crossed paths with Milligan told the Post that he was “a sleazy character” with a “superiority complex” and “as crooked as the Snake River.”

Like Trump, Milligan didn’t back down when confronted with a legal fight over the name change. “We’ll see how many millions Trump wants to spend on this,” he said.

A slew of lawsuits, tax avoidance, complaints about his business, a big ego, and an appetite for legal battles: Perhaps Milligan and Trump had a few things in common after all.

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This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files”—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current President—on July 25, 2016.

Among Donald Trump’s proudest accolades is his place in the WWE’s Hall of Fame. Trump has appeared at WWE wrestling shows and events numerous times throughout the years, but the peak of his career in the ring was undoubtedly his “Battle of the Billionaires” with WWE owner Vince McMahon at 2007’s Wrestlemania XXIII. “To this day it has the highest ratings, the highest Pay-Per-View in the history of wrestling of any kind,” Trump bragged in his Hall of Fame induction speech in 2013.

The battle was actually fought by wrestlers representing the two men, but Trump still managed to clothesline McMahon and pummel him while the two were on the ground. After Trump’s victory, he climbed into the ring to shave McMahon’s head and pile shaving cream on top of it.

“Donald Trump is in a world he is not familiar with,” the announcer said as the carnage unfolded. “This is not real estate.” McMahon is not the only one who wished Trump had stopped there.

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This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files”—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on August 18, 2016.

Donald Trump’s yacht, the 282-foot-long Trump Princess, was probably the Trumpiest of all the tycoon’s toys. It was one of the largest yachts in the world when he bought it from the Sultan of Brunei in the late 1980s, featuring plenty of marble and gold decor and over-the-top amenities including a helipad, a disco, and a movie theater. Trump even had to dredge the Atlantic City channel so it could accommodate his ship.

But the yacht still wasn’t big enough.

Just a year after he bought the Trump Princess, Trump announced he was looking for an upgrade. He told Newsday in June that he planned to build a new yacht—”something in excess of 400 feet long, closer to 500 feet”—so that it could fit all the casino high-rollers who liked to come aboard.

A Dutch company reportedly had the inside track with plans for a 420-footer that Dutch journalist Peter Degraaf of De Volkskrant told Newsday was “maybe the greatest ship ever built in the world, and it’s exactly what Mr. Trump wants—the greatest and most luxurious yacht.” Trump figured he might simply name it the Trump Princess II rather than paying homage to his then-wife Ivana as a reporter suggested. “I like to keep things low-key,” he explained.

But the new and improved Princess was never built, and Trump soon had no yacht at all. After his net worth crashed under a gargantuan debt load in 1990, Trump was put on a strict monthly allowance by his creditors. He was allowed to keep the yacht, but by 1991 he was forced to sell the Trump Princess—or had it repossessed, according to some reports.

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This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files”—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on July 14, 2016.

In 1990, Donald Trump’s empire and image were imploding. Running short on cash and having already missed a bond payment to the backers of his Trump Castle casino in Atlantic City, Trump was on the precipice of bankruptcy. If he defaulted on the loan, banks would swoop in, seize his prized properties, and sell them off to get their money back.

But those banks offered Trump a lifeline. They agreed to loan him more money so he could keep making payments on his various debts—under a few conditions. “The banks will name two executives to run the Trump empire, bar him from moving money among his companies without the banks’ permission, and limit him to a $450,000 allowance for ‘personal and household spending,'” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

The Associated Press and other news outlets called the allowance “stringent.” But Wayne Barrett, the longtime Village Voice reporter, showed how ridiculous the sum actually was in his book, Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth. “The absurdity of his personal allotment—more than the salary of the chairman of the principal bank backing the deal, Citibank, and tallying $14,516 a day—baffled even real billionaires. ‘I have no idea how to spend $450,000 a month,’ said an anonymous one to the [New York Times].'”

Apparently Trump did. According to New York’s Newsday, Trump spent around $54,000 a year on suits, ate out at New York’s best restaurants around 200 times a year, and had to keep up the staff and grounds at his three homes. He also owed a big stipend and child support to his wife Ivana—the couple were then separated—who breezily told reporters, “I think he’ll be fine.”

Yet the banks apparently still had a heart: they generously allowed The Donald not to count the costs of his jet, helicopter, and 272-foot luxury yacht against his allowance.

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This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files“—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on August 23, 2016.

Donald Trump’s move into the Atlantic City casino business in the early 1980s meant he had to open up his books to New Jersey’s Casino Control Commission, which investigated potential new casino operators for red flags like legal issues or mob ties. The process could take up to 18 months, but Trump didn’t have the patience to sit through it.

In The Art of the Deal, Trump’s 1987 bestseller, Trump described how he met with New Jersey officials in February 1981 and demanded his investigation last only six months (another account by reporter Wayne Barrett claims he asked for a three-month completion). If it didn’t, Trump warned that he would drop his casino plans. That threat was apparently enough for John Degnan, the state’s attorney general, to cave. “If you cooperate fully, we’ll give you an answer one way or the other in six months,” he said, according to Trump’s book—and pushed the casino commission’s director to agree.

The state lived up to its six-month timeframe, but Trump didn’t exactly hold up his end of the bargain. The Casino Commission’s forms required Trump and other would-be casino owners to list any times they were the subject of government investigations “for any reason.” But, as investigative journalist David Cay Johnston writes in his new book, The Making of Donald Trump, Trump failed to list four separate government probes into his business dealings. And while three of those investigations hadn’t resulted in charges, the fourth was the Department of Justice’s huge 1973 lawsuit that accused Trump’s management company of blocking black families from renting apartments in Trump-owned buildings. That case made headlines in New York—especially when Trump countersued the government for $100 million—and ended with the company agreeing to a range of anti-discrimination measures.

Johnston points out that Trump lied about the case in another section of the application as well. “Casino owner applicants were asked about being accused of any civil misconduct, which would include racial discrimination in housing,” Johnston writes. “Trump checked the ‘no’ box.”

Those omissions should have prevented Trump from getting approval for his casino. The cover of the application, Johnston writes, carried an all-caps warning that “FAILURE TO ANSWER ANY QUESTION COMPLETELY AND TRUTHFULLY WILL RESULT IN DENIAL OF YOUR LICENSE APPLICATION.” Instead, Trump apparently later “volunteered” the missing information during an interview with the New Jersey Department of Gaming Enforcement, according to Wayne Barrett. Trump passed his abbreviated investigation despite the evidence of deception. According to Johnston, “it was an early sign of what two Casino Control commissioners would later say was a pattern of [Department of Gaming Enforcement] favoritism to Trump.”

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The fight to unseat Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is still an uphill battle—but it is also, at least, an incredibly well-funded one.

Jaime Harrison, Graham’s Democratic challenger, announced Tuesday morning that he had raised $13.9 million dollars between April 1 and June 30. It is the most money any Senate candidate in South Carolina, of either party, has raised in a single quarter—breaking a record Harrison set himself just last quarter with his $7.3 million haul. Harrison has been helped along by the distaste Democrats nationwide have for Graham, whose one-time appearance of moderation has been fully eclipsed by blind allegiance to President Trump since the president took office. (Graham’s second-quarter numbers have not yet been reported.)

Harrison, a longtime operative but a first-time candidate, had aspired to run a shoe-leather campaign to introduce himself to voters and excite the state’s huge number of Black voters who have often stayed home for general elections in the GOP stronghold. “You have such large pockets of African American voters, and the big thing is you have to persuade them that an election is important enough for them to come out and vote,” Harrison told me last fall.

The pandemic has, of course, changed those plans, and the money has helped Harrison change gears. The campaign has conducted a massive media blitz across local television and Black radio stations in recent months. Last week, the campaign began airing an ad that attempts to tie Graham’s loyalty to Trump to the exploding coronavirus death rate. Harrison has also been a top advertiser on Facebook since early June.

The race has not been polled since the end of May, when a poll from Civiqs, a left-leaning firm, found Graham and Harrison in a dead heat with 42 percent of support each. Earlier that month, national election forecasters tilted their race ratings ever so slightly in Harrison’s favor, moving the odds of Graham’s reelection from “Safe” to “Likely.”

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This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files“—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on August 30, 2016.

“I think I have the best temperament or certainly one of the best temperaments of anybody that’s ever run for the office of president. Ever,” said Donald Trump in July. “Because I have a winning temperament. I know how to win.”

But in Trump’s second book, Surviving at the Top (released as Trump’s empire was crumbling under massive debt in 1990), he described his temperament in ways that wouldn’t seem to bode well for a leader of the free world. “I get bored too easily,” he wrote. “My attention span is short and probably my least favorite thing to do is to maintain the status quo. Instead of being content when everything is going fine, I start getting impatient and irritable.”

He also explained how he enjoyed the thrill of the chase more than anything else. “For me, you see, the important thing is the getting…not the having,” he explained.

It was a rare moment of introspection from the billionaire, but he clearly wasn’t the only one who noticed his blow-it-up streak. Trump also described a conversation he had with his friend Alan Greenberg, then the head of Bear Stearns, when Trump was pondering selling his over-the-top yacht to finance the construction of an even bigger one. “For you, getting these isn’t half the fun, it’s almost all the fun,” Greenberg replied, according to Trump. “You set out to achieve something, you get what you are after, and then you immediately start singing that old Peggy Lee song ‘Is That All There Is?'”

In Donald’s mind, Greenberg had nailed him. “Alan was right about that,” he wrote. “If you have a striving personality, the challenge matters most, not the reward.”

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This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files“—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on July 28, 2016.

Democrats weren’t always bashing Donald Trump. In fact, in 1987, they were seemingly desperate to get his star power on their side.

Even though Trump was a registered Republican, House Speaker Jim Wright (D-Texas) and other high-ranking Democrats asked Trump to host their annual Democratic congressional fundraising dinner the next year. Rank-and-file Democratic lawmakers cheered the effort on. Future presidential nominee John Kerry chimed in to invite Trump on behalf of the Senate Democrats.

“He’s young, dynamic, successful,” gushed Rep. Beryl Anthony Jr., the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, to the New York Times. He cited Trump’s wish to help negotiate nuclear arms reduction treaties as evidence Trump was in the wrong party. “The message Trump has been preaching is a Democratic message,” Anthony said.

Trump, however, was lukewarm. “I’m honored to be asked by the Speaker, whom I hold in high esteem,” he told the Times. He said he’d consider the invitation, but probably not Anthony’s suggestion that he become a Democrat. Two days later, the Washington Post reported that Trump was indeed ready to fundraise—for Rudy Giuliani, then a potential Republican candidate for the Senate. He eventually turned the Democrats down.

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This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files”—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on October 5, 2016.

With Donald Trump’s nonexistent exercise regime getting some attention from Dr. Oz, it seems like a good time to point out one of the GOP nominee’s more unusual healthcare beliefs. The Washington Post‘s Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher wrote in their new book, Trump Revealed, that Trump thought exercise permanently sapped him of energy.

After college, after Trump mostly gave up his personal athletic interests, he came to view time spent playing sports as time wasted. Trump believed the human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted. So he didn’t work out. When he learned that John O’Donnell, one of his top casino executives, was training for an Ironman triathlon, he admonished him, “You are going to die young because of this.”

Trump is still an avid golfer, though—and allegedly an equally avid cheater on the links. “When it comes to cheating, he’s an 11 on a scale of one to 10,” sports columnist Rick Reilly told the Post last year.

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This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files”—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on June 23, 2016.

Donald Trump’s shadowy ties to the mob have been no secret in this election cycle. And in 1982, a member of Philadelphia’s mafia was the only thing standing between him and more land for his Trump Plaza casino hotel.

That year, Trump bought a nightclub owned by a notorious Philadelphia mafioso, Salvatore A. Testa, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Trump told the paper in 1983 that he wanted to use the space for parking facilities for his casino hotel.

The club, called Le Bistro, had previously been purchased by Testa and a partner named Frank Narducci Jr., both of whom faced bitter fates for their involvement with the mafia. Testa would wind up shot to death in 1984 just weeks after a fight with mob boss Nicky Scarfo, according to the Inquirer. Narducci, who the Inquirer said had transferred his stake in the club to Testa in 1982, was sentenced to life in prison in 1989 for his role in a mob murder.

Le Bistro, which had been languishing vacant for years since the owners were denied a liquor license, was purchased from the mobster for $1.1 million. Conveniently for Trump, the transaction went through a third party so his name would not be revealed. That third party? A secretary of Trump’s lawyer on the purchase, Patrick T. “Paddy” McGahn Jr. McGahn told the Inquirer that if Testa had known who was buying his nightclub, “the price they asked could conceivably have been $2 million to $3 million.” After the sale, the property was transferred to Trump, McGahn said.

The club was “the second most expensive purchase he made on the block” in Atlantic City, New Jersey, according to journalist Wayne Barrett’s book Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention. Although Trump had redirected the sale through his lawyer’s secretary to conceal his identity, Barrett reported, he still bragged in an affidavit about his “unique contribution” in putting together the land for the parking structure. 

The Trump Plaza closed in 2014, costing more than 1,000 people their jobs. 

Lexington Herald-Leader/ZUMA

After a long primary season redefined by a pandemic and police brutality, Amy McGrath defeated her progressive challenger, Charles Booker, in the US Senate Democratic primary in Kentucky. McGrath will take on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in November.

McGrath entered the race in July as the clear frontrunner, running at the behest of Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who’d been recruiting the former Marine fighter pilot since her failed attempt to unseat a Republican House member in 2018. With an early endorsement from the campaign arm of the Senate Democrats and frequent advertisements on MSNBC—an easy play for the pocketbooks of liberals nationwide eager to dethrone McConnell—McGrath had amassed $41 million by June 1, even as she slow-walked her support for impeaching President Trump. She even outraised the ever deep-pocketed McConnell in several quarters.

Charles Booker raised nothing of the sort: He entered June having raised just $788,000 during the entire campaign. The young, Black, first-term state representative from Louisville announced his candidacy with little fanfare during a press conference on Capitol Hill last fall. He ran on a progressive platform that included support for Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and universal basic income. When the primary’s originally scheduled date, May 19, rolled around, Booker seemed to stand little chance.

That was all before 26-year-old Breonna Taylor was shot to death by a police officer in her Louisville home—and before David McAtee, a local Black restauranteur was killed by police at a protest against her killing. Booker attended the protests that broke out in his hometown and often addressed the crowds. As he spoke of the cousins he lost to gun violence and his longstanding commitment to police reform, he emerged as a credible voice whose message met the moment. The attention drew a big last-minute cash haul and scores of high-profile endorsements days before the primary, including nods from Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The primary results had been delayed due to the widespread use of absentee voting in the face of the pandemic— particularly in the cities of Louisville and Lexington, the state’s bluer enclaves. While McGrath had an early lead over Booker after last Tuesday’s in-person voting, Booker closed the gap as election officials tabulated mail-in ballots. 

As other progressive candidates of color defeated longstanding incumbents and Democratic establishment favorites in New York’s congressional primaries last week, liberals hoped Booker could also ride the wave of national outrage to a major upset victory. Even though he didn’t, the coalition he built to nearly topple a enormously resourced opponent offers a roadmap for how progressives could make headway in deep-red states: Not by relying on moderate Democrats, but on liberal populism delivered by candidates of color who can credibly speak to systemic injustice.

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This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files”—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on June 6, 2016.

On June 16, 1990, the day after Donald Trump missed a $43 million payment on bonds he used to finance Trump Castle, the mogul visited his Atlantic City casino for a blowout celebrating his 44th birthday. The party capped off a day that had started with a pro-Trump rally held by casino employees—”Let’s stand behind our Donald, because he’s the father of our babies,” one worker urged the crowd. The rally featured a “professional motivator” to whip up the audience, and one worker presented the tycoon with a gift: an eight-foot-tall “rug portrait” of Trump.

The party at the Castle’s Crystal Ballroom was an over-the-top bash with bands, confetti, and a cheering crowd. Robin Leach, the host of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, walked out of a fake Trump Shuttle to act as a hype man before other celebrities showed up in person and onstage. As then-Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett described in his book, Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth:

Dolly Parton and Elton John appeared on giant screens to wish Donald a happy birthday, with Parton asking to work the Taj instead of her regular Castle gig and promising to charge only $100,000 a show. Joe Piscopo did his Sinatra imitation on the birthday song, followed by a string of Jap gags—oblivious to the presence of several Japanese high rollers in the front rows—even cracking that Atlantic City would be owned by the Japanese if it wasn’t for Donald. A George Bush imitator declared Donald should be President…A chorus line in skintight outfits gyrated around chairs singing longingly about Donald’s dollars. Then Andrew Dice Clay appeared on another giant screen to thank Donald for the Taj hookers, saying they had stamps on their asses to show they’d had their shots.

Sadly, Barrett couldn’t attend the event. He was arrested on his third attempt to get into the ballroom and cover the party. But his research assistant managed to enter the ballroom and cover the festivities.

Mother Jones illustration; Shutterstock

This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files”—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current President—on September 8, 2016.

National media buzzed in November 1990 when it was revealed that Donald Trump would be starring in the music video for a cover of the 1971 Jean Knight single “Mr. Big Stuff” by Precious Metal, an all-female glam metal band. The label’s press release noted that it was a “featured role” that would net Trump a $25,000 donation by the band to the charity of his choice. Trump’s appearance, it crowed, was a “giant act of generosity,” and it quoted Precious Metal’s lead vocalist, Leslie Knauer, calling Trump “a real gentleman to work with.”

“When we were done, he said, ‘This is great! Let’s take this [song] to number one!'” Knauer told Entertainment Week. The enthusiasm may have been linked to the reported bonuses, purportedly also for charity, that Trump would get if the record went gold or platinum. “I think he wanted to keep the money for himself,” Knauer guessed.

Still, all was well for a few months. Then things got Trumpy.

Once the video was done, Trump decided he’d been lowballed. His claim, according to the band, was that he’d been told his appearance was a cameo. But since he appeared throughout the video, Trump allegedly wanted the band to fork over $250,000 instead. Knauer, speaking to Billboard earlier this year, said the mix-up was a lie. “Trump had the script, he played all the parts, shot them,” she said. “So later to say, ‘I thought I was only going to be in one part’—then why did you shoot all those parts? We were just a struggling band, wondering why he would do that to us. He full-on just lied.”

He also creeped out the band’s lead guitarist, Janet Robin. “I had a moment with him where he put his hands around me, his arms around me,” Robin told the Huffington Post, “not around my shoulder but around, you know, my stomach area or whatever you want to call it. I thought that was a little strange.”

“Oh my god, Janet, you have a tight body,” she recalled Trump saying. Knauer remembered the same thing. “He was kinda hot for Janet,” she told Billboard, “saying, ‘Oh my god, Janet, you have a tight body.’ Janet is gay and was like, ‘Yuck, whatever, gross.'”

Precious Metal couldn’t fork over a quarter of a million bucks, so it found a Trump look-alike and reshot the video in a way that didn’t show his face. But Trump’s nonappearance meant the video, and the band, went nowhere. “It didn’t end our band, but it didn’t help,” Knauer told Billboard. “It hurt our label’s support for us.” The band never recorded another album.