The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Trump Women: Part of the Deal by Nina Burleigh Interview

Episode Date: October 5, 2020

The Trump Women: Part of the Deal by Nina Burleigh Interview Ninaburleigh.com New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist, Nina Burleigh, explores “the stark details of the forces that shaped [Donald] Trump’s thinking about women” (The New York Times) in this comprehensive, provocative, and critical account of the six women who have been closest to Trump. Previously published as Golden Handcuffs. Has any president in the history of the United States had a more fraught association with women than Donald Trump? He flagrantly cheated on all three of his wives, brushed off multiple accusations of sexual assault, publicly ogled his eldest daughter, bought the silence of a porn star and a Playmate, and proclaimed his now-infamous seduction technique: “grab ’em by the pussy.” The Trump Women is a provocative and “comprehensive exposé” (Kirkus Reviews) of Trump’s relationship with the women who have been closest to him—his German-immigrant grandmother, Elizabeth, the uncredited founder of the Trump Organization; his Scottish-immigrant mother, Mary, who acquired a taste for wealth as a maid in the Andrew Carnegie mansion; his wives—Ivana, Marla, and Melania (the first and third of whom are immigrants); and his eldest daughter, Ivanka, groomed to take over the Trump brand from a young age. Also examined are Trump’s two older sisters, one of whom is a prominent federal judge; his often-overlooked younger daughter, Tiffany; his female employees; and those he calls “liars”—the women who have accused him of sexual misconduct. Nina Burleigh is a New York Times best-selling author of six lively, acclaimed works of creative nonfiction. Her latest book, on Trump and women, was published in October 2018. She has written hundreds of works of journalism, essays and book reviews, on a wide array of topics including culture, politics, gender issues, science, and the environment. Her books share a theme of examining the tension between belief and science, religion and rationality in post-Enlightenment life, including 1830s American politics, among post-revolutionary French scientists in Egypt, Cold War era CIA conspiracy theories, fake Biblical archaeology in Jerusalem today, and the role of faith versus science in an Italian courtroom. Two books explore the relationship between art, nature, history, and science. In Mirage, she told the story of the scientists and artists behind the first great study of modern Islam and ancient Egypt, Description de l'Egypte, a landmark work of art and publishing produced by the scientists who went to Egypt with Napoleon in 1800. Her book Unholy Business is a Maltese Falcon style crime caper about a gang of forgers accused of applying new technology to alter and sell archaeological relics. A fellow of the Explorers Club, she has covered stories on six continents. She has published works about the Arctic and the Antarctic, the Amazon, where she wrote an essay about women, nature, and the human culture along the Amazon River in Peru and ayahuasca culture in Iquitos, posh Lagos, racism and rhino poaching in South Africa. She has written cover stories for Newsweek on Trump and Women, Trump as a tool of the New York billionaires, Trump and Evangelicals, Trump and the Law, Facebook and political big data mining, the #metoo movement, the melting of Antarctica, sea level rise in Florida, asteroid defense schemes and other current events. She has judged the J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards for nonfiction, and won several awards for her journalism and books. She was writer in residence at the Siena Art Institute in 2013 attached to the Above/Below Ground project with Mark Dion and Amy Yoes, including a symposium on the Art and Science of The Expedition. She was a Dora Maar Fellow in the arts in Menerbes, France, in 2014, where she worked on a novel. Mirage was selected by The New York Times as an editors' choice and won the Society of Women Educators' Award.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, we're coming here with another great podcast.

We certainly appreciate you tuning in. Be sure to see the video version of this conversation. You can go to youtube.com, 4chesschrisvoss. Hit that bell notification button for all the different things that are on there. You can see all the wonderful interviews we have with these brilliant authors we always have on. You can also follow me on goodreads.com, 4chesschrisvoss. We're setting up a new book club over there so that people can see our reviews and we can talk about all the good stuff.

Our newest syndicator is Amazon Music. You can check that out as well. And there's one thing I'm forgetting, but I'm sure that my audience will remember it. The chrisfossshow.com or thecvpn.com. You can subscribe to all nine podcasts. Go over there and check it out. Today, we, of course, have a most brilliant author on. She's written one of the newest books that just barely came out on September 22nd. She's written

several books, in fact. Nina Burley is a New York Times bestselling author of six lively acclaimed works of creative nonfiction. Her latest book on Trump and women was published in October 2018. She has published and written hundreds of works of journalism, essays, and book reviews on a wide range of topics, including culture, politics, gender issues, science, and the environment. Welcome to the show, Nina. How are you? Good, thanks, and happy to be here. Happy to have you as well. Give us your plugs so that we can find you on the interwebs. Well, www.ninaberley.com is my website.

At Nina Berley, N-I-N-A-B-U-R-L-E-I-G-H is my Twitter handle. And I have a Facebook page for my books under my name. So look it up, and you'll get updates on the work that's underway. There you go. And be sure to order her book. You can get it on Amazon, a lot of different sellers, the Trump women part of the deal. Uh, so what motivated you want to write this book, Nina? Well, Chris, I was, um, in the Hilton on election night, 2016 at 3 a.m. Having made my way through the chanting throngs on 6th Avenue, people shouting, lock the bitch up as cameras from Turkey and France

and Europe and Asia were honing in on their faces. And I put the press pass in inside the coat because it felt a bit menacing. And I got in. I went up to the party room. And the music, now it was a very crowded room. Earlier in the night, of course, people thought he was losing. And the music strikes up. I can't remember. I think it was, we are the champions.

And Donald comes onto the stage and you had to walk down some steps to get onto the stage. And I was standing, I had stationed myself very close to see him. And so I was under at the eye level with kind of their feet and he comes in and then he's followed by five. I call them gazelles, women who almost look like sisters. They look like they're the same age. They all have the perfectly ironed hair, this ice skater dresses. And, um, except for the Oscar de la rent la renta uh jumpsuit or whatever that melania had because she thought she was going to go to mar-a-lago instead of being in uh accepting first ladyship

that night and um i looked at them for the first time really thought about like who are they and i watched them come down the steps in these four inch heels and I thought because I was eye level to them and I thought you know most women wearing those shoes have to look down at the stairs and they didn't and that was the first sort of inkling that I had that they're they have an internal rigor that you that they they kind of hide because they have to be they're around this oaf they're his they're his brand accessories they have to look like these ultra feminine, plastic, fantastic Vegas showgirls. But there's something about them that, you know, they have practiced that. And so, and at that moment, I thought also of my 13 year old daughter at home, we thought Hillary Clinton was superwoman. And I thought about how the face of American womanhood

and our role model for our daughters within a space of two hours had gone from, you know, granny with bad hair days in a pantsuit to these plastic, fantastic Vegas showgirls surrounding this oaf. And I thought, who are they and what makes them tick? Because I really hadn't thought about them before. And that was the impetus for originally just sort of a Newsweek cover story.

And then the whole book, Simon & Schuster asked for more and I delivered it. That's an amazing perspective on that experience. I watched that video several times. I think I was blasted out of my mind with vodka times. I think I was blasted out of my mind with vodka at the time because I was like, you know, I was in shock, utter shock. I think everyone was. And just watching it and watching for cues. A lot of times I think I kept repeating it was because I was trying to figure out what happens now with this dude and looking for cues. But that's an extraordinary. and there was a line you used that I really liked, brand accessories, was that what you said?

Yeah. So when I talk about them, what I learned from the research is that at some point in his life, probably after the first wife, first wife was Ivana, after he was divorcing her or splitting up with her and hooking up with Marla Maples, who wanted to be an actress,

who was very much younger than he was, he somehow understood that his way of having a relationship with a woman was about branding and about commodifying. And so for Marla Maples and a lot of these other women that he's interacted with, like Stormy Daniels, because he offers them like a TV show or for Melania, I'll get your, you know, I'll make you a supermodel. I'll get you a good deal. It's all about branding them as Trump women. And then in return, what they do is they embellish the Trump brand. They are accessories to the Trump brand. It's not

unusual for American or any kind of sort of Western advertising to use the feminine to sell things, right? I mean, you open any magazine and there's a beautiful woman standing next to a Lexus, right? There is that in the veins of our capitalistic society. That's part of the advertising and the marketing business. But he made an avocation of it. He became a pageant impresario. He, he liked to move herds of young women around. He'd like to be able to go into their dressing rooms, ownership,

ownership of women. Also, that's also part of the New York modelizer scene where the, you know, he was not alone in that. I mean, Epstein is the far end of the extreme pervert end of that. But there were lots of men in New York in the 90s and still now in Wall Street who, you know, it's a competitive, it's a sport. And he was, he was practicing that, but to get your own pageant and to get your own model agency so that you can just call up 10 of them to come over and say, you know, walk on my table without your underwear on at, at this restaurant or something. I mean, that's what they were doing, right?

And it's a kind of a legalized trafficking. And he is the avatar of that. Yeah. And you're right. He used to use it for branding. He would call up, you know, the trades and page six and be like, Donald Trump, you know, he did that fake PR thing. And Donald Trump was seen last night with, yeah, he was seen last night with beautiful women.

The imagery that you evoke, though, of them coming down the stairs reminds me of a lot of like, you know, coming from Vegas, our mayor, Oscar Goodman, who used to be a mob lawyer, defending him, defending mob people. He maybe should have defended Trump too. But he used to go around as mayor for eight years with the trove of these, what do they call them, the girls from Vegas that dress up with the feathers. Yeah. And he would appear with that sort of entourage.

There's precedent for that. I mean, you know, burlesconi i lived in italy for a while when i was doing this book on amanda knox burlesconi was then running italy and uh he had made a name for himself by putting showgirls in between showgirls they called them, veal, these scantily clad babes. He was putting them on his media set was his television network. And he was putting these women out as part, it was part of his brand to send out, you know, in the middle of a news show, they would like send out, you know, a babe in a bikini.

And it's, Trump is Berlusconi with nuclear weapons, basically. It's like the same, it's the same, it's branding, it's commodifying females. It's this lust for young, virgin flesh, if you can get your hands on it. And it's the competition of being able to pick up the phone and say, you know, come over guys, I'm going to have 30 hot babes here and they're only going to be three of us, you know, and that's what, that's what he, that was his avocation, you know, he's, it was entertaining for him. It was a, you know, scoring points on the, on the, you know, big man in Manhattan kind of scale. And, you know, so that's what he's doing. But what is also interested me was like, well,

what were these women getting out of it? What is Ivanka? You know, what is Marla? What is Melania? Ivana? Why would you hook yourself up? They're beautiful women. Why would you hook up with this oaf? Now let's go back. I mean, when Ivana, when Czech beautiful, listen, blonde Czech mate, Ivana shows up in New York in the 70s. She actually was beautiful. And he was good-looking then. He wasn't, you know, he kind of had an oleaginous kind of Swedish architect thing going on. You know, he looked, he didn't look like he does now. So you can kind of see why he would, you see kind of the charm that's syrupy. But what was it that they were getting out of it? And we can talk about that as you look.

The title, The Trump Women, and there's been a lot of Trump women, especially people who have accused him of sexual assault. What does this book entail and encompass in a certain Trump, the Trump women? It's not about the Trump women, the victims. It's not about the 30 or some who have been calling him up, although that's part of the end chapter. I looked into his grandmother, his mom, the three wives and Ivanka.

And then there's a chapter about sort of the women that he's employed, Kelly Ann and Barbara Rez and people like that. So it's really looking at how his views on women were shaped. Who were the women closest to him, and what did they do to him to make him what he is, or how did he turn out the way he is? I mean, he is fundamentally misogynistic at very, very, very foundational levels. We can talk about that.

So I start with his grandmother, who came over here on a steamer. She was 10 years younger than Frederick Trump, his grandfather, both of them from Germany. Fred Trump had come over here and made a small nut money as a saloon and brothel keeper in the Yukon during the gold rush. And he had this money and he went back to Germany and he brought the girl next door from his tiny village back to New York City, married her and brought her back here. And she had three children and he promptly died of the Spanish flu when the oldest one was only 12 years old.

And she was homesick. She spoke German, really more German than English at a time, this is right around World War I, when there was a ton of anti-German sentiment in New York and across the country. So she's left with this family and this small note of money that he's left. And so she started the Trump, she literally incorporated the Trump organization. Now, fast forward for a second to now. I mean, what political enterprise in this country would not celebrate the fact that your candidate's company was started by a female? In this era now that's like a selling point they just bury it it's not it's not something that they ever bring up so okay so that's grandma

and then and we can talk about her if you want to later old world values um probably very prudish very maybe nazi connected people i don't know they're of the, certainly her brother's children fought for Hitler in, they were buried in, I went over there and did research. There's definitely Nazis in the family tree. And then, and then his mother, Marianne came over from the, an Island in the outer Hebrides that's closer to Iceland than to London. It's, she was the 10th child of a fisherman, basically grew up in muck boots, probably had one dress, got to eighth grade in education,

and followed her older sisters to New York in the 20s to work as a domestic. In those days, the great families, this is the Gilded Age 20s, you know, Rory 20s, the great families of New York like to have servants from the British Isles. And there was this whole community of them, Brits, Irish, Scots. She comes over, hooks up with her older sisters, they get her this job at her first address in New York City is as a domestic in the mansion of the Carnegie family, Carnegie's widow, Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate, one of the richest men in America at the time. So that's mom. Now, when Donald talked about his mother, he says she came over on vacation. She was on a holiday.

No, she was polishing banisters in the Carnegie Mansion for one of the richest people in New York in the country. And again, when Donald Trump went to meet the queen at Buckingham Palace in the summer of, I think it was 19, the children went with him. Ivanka, Donald, Eric, Tiffany, I can't remember. And those kids got to meet the queen. Again, any other political enterprise in this country would have had a press release out celebrating the grandchildren of a maid are meeting the queen of England today. That is the definition, the manifestation of the American dream.

They don't even acknowledge this fact. They've never acknowledged it. The Times picked it up, put it in an A1 story. I found it, one of my discoveries for the book, in the New York census, in the 1929 New York census. They've never acknowledged it. So they're an odd clan, right? Because then he marries, because in his ears, he's got that, all of those accents, all those women speaking with accents. His first wife comes from Czechoslovakia. Okay. Ivana, we don't spend a lot of time thinking or talking about her. She's kind of a joke. She went on to a life of QVC, shopping channel, getting drunk, falling down.

She's got too much plastic surgery and she's his age. And of course, that means he cannot be photographed next to her ever because that's part of the brand. He wouldn't want to be photographed as she's the Dorian Gray, picture of Dorian Gray. But she's actually rather interesting because she got out of Czechoslovakia at a time in the late 60s when it wasn't easy to get out. It was the Soviet bloc. So she had some special access that allowed her to come here. She was collectivist educated, meaning, you know, hardcore communist education. She was Russian speaking. She spoke Czech, of course, but she was Russian speaking enough that she was going to

translate for Raisa Gorbachev, Gorbachev's wife. And she, the main thing is, Chris, she habituated him to the Slavic world. He would have never gone to Russia in 86, which was the kind of beginning of his interaction with Russia and people who believe that he's this puppet of the Russians. That's where it starts. That's when he becomes, but he had been in and out of Czechoslovakia for years before that because of her. So people overlook this, but she's like the perfect Czech mate. She's a honeypot. And the Czechs that I met in Prague

who studied that era said, very unusual that this woman was able to get out when she did. There's more to the story. let's just put it that way i think you bring up a really interesting topic that no one talks about i mean maybe that's why he's attracted to putin oh um but no but seriously i mean the the czech connection the russian connection uh and stuff like that um yeah i. I've never heard anybody talk about it, but that is brilliant. Thanks. I find it interesting. And I think there's, you know,

it's just because she's kind of a, you know, older and ditzy and people don't really spend much time thinking about her. But, you know, if you're going to talk about Trump and Russia, you have to go back to the beginning of that. This guy was provincial. He lives in cheeseburgers. He didn't want to leave, you know, if you're going to talk about Trump and Russia, you have to go back to the beginning of that. This guy was a provincial, he lives in cheeseburgers. He didn't want to leave. You know,

he wouldn't have left New York, right? He doesn't like to eat, sleeps in his Bedminster golf courses, golf clubhouse or the mansion there. He doesn't want to go anywhere. Yep. Yep.

What was interesting. I don't know if you validated this but this was in uh with the original mother uh i believe uh elizabeth and mary uh well elizabeth was a grandmother and then mary mary was the mother of of uh fred correct mary elizabeth is the mother of Fred, the grandfather, but Mary Ann is his mother. And Mary Ann is the Scott and her children are Fred Jr. Or the third, I guess. Donald, not in that order. Elizabeth, the sister.

And I can't remember all their names now. But Robert, who just died. And another sister, Elizabeth and Mary Ann. So that's five kids. She had five kids. Donald is the fourth. And what happened was Donald, we haven't talked about dad yet. Let's just say for a second that dad, Fred, if you read the Mary Trump book, Mary, his niece's book, you get the full picture of how dark that household was. This guy was like, again, you know, generational issues. You know, he's, the dad was alcoholic, died of the Spanish flu. He was, he had to be the man of the house from 12 years old on. He is hardcore and he has no,

no compassion, no sympathy. Trump, Donald Trump has inherited all of that from him. No emotional, nothing nurturing about him. When Donald was two, his mother was giving birth to the last child, Robert, who just died. And she had this child and then she had complications and she got peritonitis and it was the 1950s. They didn't have all the, and she almost died and she was in the hospital for nine months. And my shrink friends tell me at the age of two, if your nurturing person is removed from your life, that is very, very damaging to the, to the development of a lot of human, you know, things that you have to have to be a functioning human on an emotional level. So, you know, he was left with not, not with her, probably Elizabeth, the German grandmother stepped in a lot, but she was stern, cold, distant, not a warm, fuzzy

woman. And then he had his dad who basically just judged his children by how tough they were. And also is a hardcore misogynist who said to his daughter, the judge, Marianne, when she came home and said, I'm pregnant, I'm going to have a baby. He said, your mother had five children and we never used that word in the household. I mean, these men are, these are men who are revoked by female biology. Donald Trump is on record to Liz Smith, the late gossip columnist in New York saying,

I can't have sex with a woman who's had children. So that's why you get, gee, when did he run off with Stormy Daniels? When did he run off with the playboy Bunny that he tried to hush up? Right after Melania, his supermodel, gave birth. Yeah. He has a lot of issues. It's like this shamanic, rabbinical kind of loathing of female biology that is the foundation, really, of misogyny. I mean, it's like the definition of it

is this having this kind of disgust about female, the body and having babies and all of that stuff. And I'll admit I've had babies and it's not pretty. So I get that. But he's running, you know, that's what he's running from that. And he wants these plastic, fantastic Vegas showgirls around him, you know, or virgins, right?

You talked about... It's so archaic, Chris. Yeah, it's a real caveman-ish sort of thing. A little bit of toxic masculinity, I'm understanding. Yeah, okay, yeah. Comedy. But, yeah, I've actually started to see a lot of the Trump thing as toxic masculinity in some of their supporters and stuff.

You were talking about how she, one of the original women, took and created the Trump Corporation brand. She's the one who actually saw in Fred the ability to do stuff and sell stuff and move stuff. And she's the one who really encouraged him, supported him, to my understanding, to really what built the empire that they live on today. Yes. Yeah. She's the mother behind Fred who made the empire. I mean, Fred worked like an aunt. I mean, the details of what, you know, he was still in high school and he was building these houses. He gave up a lot. You know, the brother went to MIT or something and got like a physics PhD. And he finally, he was the older brother and he stepped in and he became the builder. And, and he worked and worked and worked and worked and created, and he had no interest in like frippery and the Versailles, you know, the Versailles triplex that Donald ended up building. Even, even the glass,

the glassine tower that he created, Fred, Fred was appalled. Fred wanted, you know, it was meat and potatoes architecture. It was brick. Do it the cheap way. Do it solid, but let's not spend any extra money. You know, this is for middle. He built apartments for middle-class New Yorkers. And his son inherits from his mother this longing for the royal, right? She comes from her little island. I went and visited it. There's one castle on it. And she was always the little fishing fisherman's child looking in at the castle window.

And then she ends up working in the closest thing that America has to a palace, the Carnegie mansion. She passes that down to, to Donald. But his father was the one who made the real money. Right. And then Donald just, you know, it's, it's Shakespearean level tragedy. He just completely messes up. And Fred just keeps infusing money in and infusing money in. He didn't just have a little nut of a couple hundred grand. We know that now.

But he's still doing it. And because of that relationship with Fred and the way that that family operated, he has, and Mary Trump, the niece, has said this, he has a weakness for super powerful men and needing them to like him. So that explains why he's got these relationships with Putin or even with any of these dictators that he loves so much, because that's what a man is, you know, to him. He knows he's a fraud financially and business-wise, and that haunts him. And so he's doing that. And I think he probably overcompensates from the woman's side as well

to create this image that's a total fraud. I mean, it's a stack of cards, really. Mm-hmm. Yeah. One thing you talked about in the book is how Donald's childhood learning disability overwhelmed his mother. I was surprised to see that. I've always thought he was stupid, but this is my opinion, but, but tell us a little bit more about that.

Yeah. Well, we know now from, you know, Michael Cohen and also Mary Trump, we know that he can barely get through college. He had to pay somebody to take an SAT test. He has threatened, he sent Michael Cohen to threaten Wharton, the University of Pennsylvania, not to share his educational records. My sources in the family said when he published the first book, The Art of the Deal, the family joke was, well, Donald must have read one book now because he didn't read. And all of the evidence about his childhood and the behavioral problems that he had and the fact that he couldn't read. Point to something that all parents are on

the lookout for now in their sons, which is not an uncommon problem, ADD or ADHD. He was aggressive. He couldn't sit still. He couldn't read. And in those days, in the 50s, unlike now, they didn't have Ritalin. They didn't have teachers on the lookout for it. And on those days, in the 50s, unlike now, they didn't have Ritalin. They didn't have teachers on the lookout for it. On the contrary, the boys who liked to read, the bookish boys, were like possible communist or queer. And the ruffians, the dentists, the menaces, were healthy, red-blooded American boys. So there was no treatment for that. And his mother was completely overwhelmed.

She's frail now. The rest of her life was frail after that period. And something happened at the, you know, he was a teenage, early teens, turned 13. He gets caught with a bunch of shivs or something. He'd been going into the city and like aping west side story gangsta boy and the dad sends him off to a military school where he doesn't really need to learn to read he just learns to put that uniform on and and you know put up with being punched by you know the upper

classmen until he can punch the other you know i mean it's this whole, you know, the violence of this kind of shabby New York State Military School and never learns to read. And, you know, if you talk to Noel Kassler, I don't know if you've had him on your show, but he's worked on The Apprentice. He was a celebrity wrangler for years. And he's on the record saying, you know, and to me, I mean, I interviewed him later. It's very difficult to back this up because all of Mark Burnett's former employees are terrified to talk. But he's out there. He says they would hold up a card. In his early TV days, they'd hold up a card with things that he had to say.

And if there was a word that was longer than two syllables, he'd flip out in a rage, go to the bathroom and come back with like white stuff in his nose. And he was snorting Adderall. And at some point, and I think I know what point it was, I think it's this Dr. Feelgood that Dr. Bornstein, which you can Google and see that he was his doctor. At some point, I think Dr. Bornstein must have you can Google and see that he was his doctor. At some point, I think Dr. Bornstein must have said to him, oh, you like diet pills? Well, and you're having a problem reading? This is probably, you know, why don't you take some of this?

I'm just totally guessing. I don't know. We know from the photograph of him in the Cinco de Mayo, when he's talking about his Cinco de Mayo salad that he posted in 2016. In the back, you can see piles of Sudafed boxes in a drawer. Oh, you can? Look it up. I'm friends with Noel Castro on Facebook.

He was supposed to do an appearance. We had him scheduled, and his internet went down, and we need to get him rescheduled. But, yeah, in fact, I think there were a couple of people that kind of slightly validated it. Roseanne Barr's ex-husband. Yeah, Tom Arnold has. Tom Arnold kind of like said, yeah, yeah, yeah, he did it. And then the red-haired comedian lady.

I don't know. I'm horrible with names. I'm great with faces. The red-haired comedian lady who actually got in trouble for holding up the, the decapitated. I don't know why I remember it's Kathy Griffin. Kathy Griffin. Really funny. She had been on the show. Uh, but yeah, he's talked about it. In fact, uh, one of his tweets, he showed one of the reasons Trump wears makeup is his part of his nose kind

of doing this backwards, uh, shows a scar for surgery for a septic septum. Deviated septum. Yeah. I don't, I've never heard that, but that wouldn't surprise me. Wouldn't surprise me at all. I mean, he's clearly on, you remember the Clinton thing. I mean, he was just snorting the whole time, the Clinton debate.

And, and then afterwards he like goes, she's probably on drugs during that time. And you're like, well, Mr. Projection again. He did it with Biden the other day. He said they're probably going to shoot him with something before he inject him with something before he goes on. You're thinking, yeah, there's probably a Dr. Feelgood in the White House has given him a little feelgood shot. Some amphetamines. It's what it is. It's amphetamines.

He needs that. Yeah. I always thought it was weird that a guy like him with his much money didn't have a vice because he's like, I don't have any vices. And you're like, yeah, whatever. Part three of your book gets into the Marla Maples era, I guess we can call it. Anything interesting coming out of that era? I'm sure. Well, I mean, you know like i i kind of talked about it in the beginning um i think that is the era where he learned that he likes to mold women into the trump branded ideal so in the pig million right the my fair lady pig million sense where he had this young woman who desperately wants to be a movie star or a model or an actress and he can give her

that and he's sort of but only if she is completely compliant with this look that he wants her to have and this you know participating in this come on you know his accessory and the commodified trump woman look and what happened was marla wasn't on board with that. Marla's a nature girl, right? Marla's the, you know, today, I mean, she has her own, you know, spirit hodgepodge podcast, new age, you know, I call it the like Dixieland gumbo of new age spiritualism. I love your analogies.

But she was at that time already getting into that and she wanted to wear mom jeans and tennis shoes and carry the baby around and in the, you know, and not dress up. And he, she wasn't playing along. And, and that was not, that was never going to work. And she was trying to mold him into the, you know, awakened Donald, awakened to, anyway. So that's the failure of that. That's the root of that, the failure. I mean, I think, yeah, that's all I'm going to say about her.

She's, you know, he didn't, he sent her packing with, you know, kind of a cheap prenup. Their kid, Tiffany, Marla moved to California with Tiffany when Tiffany was three or four, I think. And I think Tiffany, somebody told me he saw Tiffany a maximum of like four times in her life before he moved back to the East Coast to go to college. So typical absentee dad. You know, that would be hard for one thing. If your dad leaves, you don't see him ever again. That's one thing. But if you're seeing him on TV, you're seeing him do all this stuff and you're like, why does he at least call me? Um, the, if I recall correctly, uh, correct me if I'm wrong, he divorced marla and marla was like his first real contract

prenup like basically paid for bride locked up with a super contract i believe he left her because he was like within a few months of hitting the 10-year mark or whatever there was going to be some new payout mark if she passed it yes i think he did i think he did time it to that. Ivana, though, he also had prenups, but Ivana kept having him rewrite the prenup. And, you know, again, she faced the divorcing him at a time when he was in massive debt. You know, Ivana leaves and his whole career is cratered. She was kind of holding it together.

And she did have a prenup. She got a bit more money. She was able to buy herself a yacht and I think a townhouse in Manhattan, some houses in Saint-Tropez. She was okay, but it wasn't a huge amount of money. She had tried to live like a mini Donald and she had a kind of a shabby life after a while. She wasn't as rich as any house.

So that was, but she had a prenup but but yeah melania i mean sorry marla got scent packing with with a very minimal i i don't know remember what it was but i mean a million dollars it's very small yeah yeah i mean he was he was already well on his way to the next one yeah in fact i, in fact, I'm in Vegas. I was in Vegas during the crash and he, they just gotten done building the Trump hotel there and they wouldn't let him build very big. And they, and they blocked his casino license as well.

Uh, and Ivana came into town and she locked down a property in the corner and she claimed that she was going to build the tallest skyscraper in Las Vegas, which is, I remember that story. Yeah. Yeah. I used to have to drive by it all the tallest skyscraper in Las Vegas, which was. I remember that story. Yeah. Yeah. I used to have to drive by it all the time.

She did. It was a, it was big sign and everything. And, and, uh, and I think he was a little bent because he was, she was going to. Yes. And that's why he said she wanted to be, she learned from him. I mean, picture this. She's a, she's born on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. And those people in the 60s and 50s,

they were looking across the Iron Curtain craving chocolate and wine and blue jeans and cool stuff. And then she suddenly has, she's now his cohort. And she took to capitalism like a fish to water, man. And she went for it, and she wanted to be a mini Donald. And she learned how to be that from him, and that's what made her so ridiculous, but also ultimately cratered their marriage because he couldn't deal with it. Yeah, competition is bad, and you've got to keep her in the back seat with his

sexual um with the sexist nature and then part four you get into melania this is kind of interesting you've got some topics here that are uh the sexually the sexualization of modeling the sexualization of melania tell us more well you know melania comes of age in, comes of age just as the wall falls. And she's an Eastern, again, on the Eastern European side, on the Soviet bloc side of the divide, not quite Czechoslovakia. Yugoslavia was kind of in the middle, but still, you know,

they didn't have access to the luxuries of the West. So she, you know, when she was a kid, like to have a Coke was a big day. They would have a sip and share it between them all, or having blue jeans from Italy was a big deal. And, and she was a beauty. But I don't think very comfortable in her skin. Also, I don't think she was somebody who was super interested in like the world. She was, you know, kind of an introvert and, but she was beautiful. So they, she got into the modeling business and that at that point when the wall fell, all of these Eastern European women and Russian women who were pretty were instantly commodified, instantly.

They took it on themselves, actually, because everything was for sale. Now it's sex and money. Once that wall fell, it was like people who had been deprived of water or something. And suddenly they just, you know, so they come pouring out. And what happened was this float therapy and beauties, they call them the Natashas, just came over to the United States and they wanted to be models. And New York City was overrun with these goddesses,

these tall, beautiful, high cheekboned model looking women who unfortunately supply and demand, there were too many of them. You can't all be supermodels. And she comes around in that period. So what happens? Well, if you can't be a supermodel, you're not going to be, you know, they're only going to be a few of them that come out, but there's a plethora of them. And then you've got these men who are perfectly happy to be moving around herds of them to parties, to entertain, to look cool, to have a beauty next to you.

So that's what, you know, if you, everyone who's looked into her past, you know, there's a lacuna, there's a black spot between, she leaves Slovenia, shows up in New York, all of a sudden she's on, you know, the Times Square ad or something. There's no, she wasn't a supermodel before she hooked up with him. She may have been doing catalog modeling. We don't know because those pictures didn't survive. They didn't go into the internet age. You can't find them. My photo researcher found one picture of her in heroin chic, dark circles under her eyes and this white, looked like a Kate Moss era kind of outfit on a catwalk. And that's an interesting picture. And then you start going into the pictures that she took with Donald, where she's half nude on

the bear rug in the Oval Office, or she's wearing chain mail and S&M gear outside of a fake Air Force One around 2000. My source tells me, you know, the fake lesbian photos that were famous, that were put in the New York Post during the campaign, probably to head off this kind of revelations. That photo shoot was in 95 or early 96. She was already telling people at the photo shoot my boyfriend is donald trump well that's not the story they tell the story they tell is they met cutely at a at a victoria's secret model party in 98 much later than when they actually met so it's all murky um what she was doing when she came over here,

how she got here. Of course, there's the story that they tell and they've got lawyers that, but I don't know why they try to hide it, except that maybe because he was still married to Marla. Maybe there's some issues with the immigration or who knows. I mean, she's gone to great lengths to hide her past. And I went to Slovenia, and I went to her small town, and I tried to interview people, and people were terrified to talk to me. I mean adult men, businessmen were terrified. They were getting visited by goon squads. I'm not kidding.

It was very, very strange. Wow. Wow. I don't suppose the wooden edifice of statue of her was up. The wooden edifice wasn't up yet. The interesting thing about her is that both she

and Ivana come from shoe factory towns. Her town, when you drive into it, there was a giant wooden shoe, like sort of like, it was on a pillar, but it looked like it was floating in space, a huge giant wooden shoe. And the townspeople, they were so proud that this woman had was the first lady of America. Oh my God. So they were making like Melania wine and Melania cake.

And, and she had a lawyer go down there and tell them to take her name off making Melania wine and Melania cake. She had a lawyer go down there and tell them to take her name off everything. Oh, wow. Again, what is that? This is your little town that you came from. They're proud of you. At least let them celebrate you. It's just baffling.'re a strange clan chris i think they just burnt the the wooden statue as well but they've now they've built a a concrete

one i guess oh have they well it'll probably go with the right thing so the biggest part of your book seems to be about Ivanka, his wish wife. Sorry, that's my joke. And tell us about this chapter. What goes into this? Well, Ivanka is the first Trump to the manor born. She speaks with the prep school accent. She was raised in a palace, not in Queens. She was raised with a lot of money. She belongs, as much as you can belong, to the New York money set. I mean, the old money will never accept the Trump group, but the new money and the children of the very rich, she was part of that. She hung out with Georgina Bloomberg and other scions of wealth

and Palm Beach, old money place. So she is to the manor born. She is the ultimate extension of the Trump brand. The female, she is, I write, she is the female future of the Trump, the Trump

brand's future is female. She has, she learned at her daddy's knee, perception more important than reality. Number one, if people don't, if people believe something, don't correct them. Writes about this. She's utterly strategic. She is, she comes into the White House, you know, it's a nepotistic system. So she basically has unlimited portfolio, technically an unlimited portfolio. in international development for women and job creation. But the main thing for her is that she has used this time wisely in those heels, going to conferences all over the world and meeting every world leader and every tech titan on the planet and getting their home phone number and their cell number and getting hooked up with them. So I guarantee you that even if he, he fails in this effort and is not reelected,

and gets in a lot of trouble because if he's not reelected, the law, the jaws of the law are waiting. I think she doesn't go to jail or get hooked up in all, snagged up in the legal issues, I think that the Republicans will run her as a presidential candidate. You know, and she's, you know, she's done things to, she's been very clever with the, you know, the, the world, the GDP, what do you call it? GDP women program that she's done raising money for third world women.

She gets good marks from progressives for that. So she's all, she's going to use all of that. And, and, you know, she's very well spoken. And again, that she's the, she's the Trump who is to the man are born um and people when i say this to them they just shiver and are grossed out because she's him in a different body great that's just what we needed more of him uh no i agree with you i i saw that early on he was gonna try and create a destiny a dynasty kind of like a kind of like the kennedy sort of dynasty only only with trump's yeah and she's all in with that yeah and i i i

just see everything she does every time i see her doing something on tv i'm like she's prepped she's laying a foundation to run for office and she might win because she's beautiful uh she certainly can articulate better than him of course who can at this point two-year-olds can do it um but uh you know one thing that's interesting to me is as i watch her because i'm like is she the narcissist like her father is she a hidden hiding monster or is she really um what's the what's the saying where you you get kidnapped and you decide to love your kidnappers? What's the term for that? Yeah. Is she just a subject of Stockholm?

Has she been brainwashed by him? You know, the sexualization of her was disgusting. Over the years I watched, you know, I used to be a Howard Stern fan, and I would see him come on and, you know, just the comments he would make toward his daughter. I don't have a daughter. I don't have a son either. But to me that's just creepy. Like he would make toward his daughter. I don't have a daughter. I don't have a son either. But to me, that's just creepy.

Like, that's just creepy, creepy. One of the things that someone said to me is, because I watch her delivery and how she is, and I just try and figure people out. And she's hard to figure out because she puts on a good facade. Someone said to me that there's this there's this thing on the internet and i think it's semi-erotic as near as i can tell it's called asmf or something it's where they whisper into stuff they go oh there's a you know they and they they like just make sounds of them eating and crap and someone said that she uses that sort of delivery in the way she talks. It's very non, like if you're a male person,

like say from around the world and maybe you're intimidated by women or you have issues with women, she talks in a way that's kind of melodic and very non-threatening. It's like having your back scratched. It's that sound. Yeah, I don't know what that acronym is, but I know what you're talking about. And I've never heard that, but that's actually what it is. And I've always said, Chris, that the first woman president will come from the right because of that,

because really naked power in women is not acceptable in this country. You cannot go out there and be in man clothes and then wield power. You're going to have to be wearing high heels and look very feminine. And then you can get the retrograde vote that is that is really not for women having power if you can cloak it then you're okay and she is going to do that i mean maybe somebody else will beat her to it you know because the other the other right-wing women all know how to do that too i would agree with you completely uh it's called asf or asm i think it's audio sensory but it's this it's semi-erotic. There's a sexual nature to it.

There's also just, like you say, getting your back scratched or some sort of peaceful meditation. People need to sleep and stuff. I watched a few of the videos of some examples of the person who referred it to me, and I just want to punch them in the face all the time because that drives me mental. But maybe I have issues. Who knew? But, yeah, just watching her and her marketing and how they're marketing her and presenting her, and she presents herself, and she's very coy.

I think she's smart. And, yeah, it will be interesting to see how she comes out. Hopefully the first female president will be biden's kind of getting old he may she may um camel harris may fall right into the thing uh he's promised one term so hopefully he'll get another keep our fingers crossed uh especially what after is going on today uh we may have a guaranteed biden run but yeah it'll be interesting to see what avanka and then you get in the prologue of your book what do you wrap in the prologue of the book after avanka well i mean you mean the pro the at the end epilogue i'm sorry yeah i'm just wrapping the um

the other women because you know he's hired a lot of women i mean not he's not you know and so there's you know i had this guy from politico magazine call me last week and say, hey, you know, I'm writing a story. And I kind of think we can make a case that he's a champion of women and because he's hired a lot of women. And now he's putting a woman on the Supreme Court. What do you have to say about that? And I said, well, you know, it's true. He has hired, you know, Barbara Raz was an architect or an engineer working for him at the Trump Tower when she, when women weren't being, it was very beginning of women being hired in those positions in the seventies. And she was, you know, he did have a woman salesperson, a big,

one of his high level salespersons was women, but, you know, and he's got Kellyanne Conway and right, he's got women around him, but he doesn't have women in real serious positions in the cabinet. He's got fewer women than I think all the going all the way back to George H.W. Bush. So there's a big step backwards. little bit about the sisters in that in that end chapter as well and you know what was going on with them and i mean i think we know a lot more about that the judge sister now because of mary trump's book and those tape recordings and mary trump's you know his sister is an interesting cat she was the oldest very much older than he is uh went to one of the women one of the women, one of the seven sisters colleges, single mother for a while before she remarried, moderate, right? And, you know, I think she's kind of like, she was like a Republican kind of Hillary almost, like she's that generation. And that's why you, of course, had Ted Cruz going after him early on. Oh, his sister loves to kill babies or something because she was a moderate on abortion,

which, by the way, he is too. Let's not forget that. I mean, he just put on a new suit, a new set of clothes for the evangelical Christians, who he didn't even want. You know that he didn't want tents to be his running mate. He would have rather had Chris Christie, Zumba. Yeah, that would have been interesting.

And it's even interesting now because we've heard the tapes of his sister from Mary Trump. I'm sure you've listened to him. Yeah. I mean, like I said, I mean, the family members that I talked to said, you know, they didn't think very highly of him. One of the,

one of the interesting chapters I'm going to enjoy reading is chapter number 27, catfights in Trumplandia. And you know, that is, that is a problem for them. In fact, I thought that a great satirical TV series would just be about these scheming women around this mad dictator

because the stuff that they scheme over is hilarious. I mean, apparently, well, you know Ivanka and Melania are not, they don't get along, stepmother and stepdaughter stuff. But you know, then you throw them in the white house and it's like, well, who gets to go to Africa first? Who gets, who gets to hold the black baby in a photo? You know, it's like this kind of crazy, it's just like another level in that whole, I don't care. Do you jacket thing?

And because Valania supposedly can't well she couldn't speak English because she spent all of her time down on the 60th floor with her parents not with Trump in all those years that they were married she was with him in the Slovenian bubble I mean she would go up there when he wanted her but she wasn't

she doesn't speak English very well you notice that in the campaign she's better now but she she's very She doesn't speak English very well. You noticed that in the campaign. She's better now. But she's very, you know, she's not somebody who's accustomed to being on the world stage. So that I don't care do you jacket thing, I've always said it was a message to directly to Ivanka. Wow. You know, because Ivanka, when Trump finally said, you know what, I'm going to stop doing this thing with the babies down there. I'm not going to cage them up or not separating them anymore.

They still can't, but I'm not going to separate them. He said to the Republican caucus, I'm doing this because Ivanka told me it's bad for optics, daddy. And I think Melania had probably said the same thing to him at some point, but he credits the brains of his daughter. And I think that was the, like, you know,

wow. I never thought of that angle when I saw that jacket, you, it became a real big, it was small. She's playing to a small audience, Chris. She doesn't have the... She's not power mad like Ivanka is. The people she needs to present to and to influence

are the ones who are the most immediately going to affect whether she can continue to clack her pearls and diamonds against marble, the thing that she loves the most to do, and have expensive moisturizers and designer clothes and so on. That's what she wants. She wants luxury. Because when you grew up where you couldn't get a Coke or a pair of jeans, now she's got Hervé Pierre bringing Dolce & Gabbana for her to choose from.

Yeah, I love the meme that recently came around during the GOP convention where Ivanka walks by Melania and Melania gives her that, hi. Yes. It was like, and then I remember the little tiff that happened with Ivana and Melania. And she's like, well, she's not really the First Lady. Remember that? I am First First Lady. Yeah, that was an interesting little thing.

So let me ask you the final question. Do you think let's say Trump right now, of course, we discussed this pre-show. He's being flown to Walter Reed. He has COVID. It's just the first day. He might be sick.

Assuming that he lives through the presidency, there's a lot of things waiting for him when he comes out the other side. Let's just play the game that Biden wins because this is looking bad for him. And there's probably a few different subpoenas and arrest warrants that are waiting for him as he steps off the White House lawn. Does Melania stay with him? I think she renegotiated the prenup. She didn't want to go to Washington and she used that as leverage. I think it all depends on whether she can get that money.

I think she's in jeopardy. Jeopardy, because she will have to go back to the peasant roots that she comes from eventually. It's unthinkable for her. So she will be, I'm sure, with a lawyer trying to make sure that she gets that prenup. And does she stay with him? I think all depends on, you know, how much, how much he's going to lose. She's going to lose that triple X and, you know,

I honestly don't think that she stays with him. I think it's been a transactional situation all along. And once that's not there, once he can't give her anything, yeah, it's pretty sad. It's the story of the old man and the younger wife. And in the beginning, the power is all his, the money and the power. And the younger wife is the plaything. And then if she lasts long enough, he daughters, and she's running the show. I had someone tell me, it was one of the authors we had on, that there was a rumor going around that she had a boyfriend, a side boy. Yes, that's a rumor.

I looked into it, but, you know, it's not, I can't verify it. It's a nice story. I mean, it's a, you know, it's the person who put that out on the internet is a fiction writer um and i did you know i did hear that she put in a lot of time down there and that i guess it was the gucci store where it was supposedly he was the security guard for gucci i did find out that she liked to hang out down there but um i can't confirm that i know it was like one of the reasons they said that it makes sense when you look at her. She's beautiful.

Yeah. And he's kind of hot, right? And her husband is not. So, and they lived separate lives. I mean, they've admitted that they lived separate lives. It would make sense that she's, if she was discreet, I imagine he probably didn't. Well, I'm not even going to go there.

I don't know. It's kind of gross to even think about. Yeah, it'll be interesting. I've often looked at it from a variety of different, you know, I'm an options guy. So I'm like, okay, so what if you go this way or that way, the other. And I've often wondered if when she gets out, she'll write the poor being downtrodden woman's story of like i was never really with him he was trapped me and i hated every moment of it and it was horrible and i was abused and and you know like me now sort of thing yeah i've always wondered if that's the way it's going to

go but you know i mean you have there's a storied history of a of a first lady i mean we we kind of have a there's kind of like a theme you know most first ladies i don't think divorce after not in modern history right after you know that thing you you you get the library the legacy you kind of have to live out that whole thing uh i think even rose nixon uh wasn't really happy with, I think she tried to divorce Pat. Yes. Yeah. She tried to, was Rose the mom?

She tried to divorce him several times, I think. Yeah, his mom. Was there a Rose? Well, there's Rosalind Carter. That's maybe where, maybe that's where. Rosalind Carter never would, I mean, those two are, you know. Yeah. It's amazing.

His birthday was yesterday. He's 96, that president card god bless him man seems like a really nice guy too what did we do wrong there well well nina it's been wonderful to have you uh we could talk for hours on the book but we want people to go buy it and read it so they get the good details of it uh and there's a lot of good stuff in here I'll actually give a plug to one part that I was interested in the rate deposition. And this is in the Marla Maples chapter, but I'm sure it's about the Ivana thing that we all heard about. So grab the book and all that good stuff so you can check it out.

Nina, it's wonderful. I haven't showed you want to give us any plugs that you want to take and put out. Plugs for my book, you mean? Yeah, your dot-coms, all that good stuff. Oh, do it all. Sorry.

Yes, I'll put my dot-coms again. It's NinaBurley.com. That's my website. And Twitter, at Nina Burley, B-U-R-L-E-I-G-H. And I'm on Facebook, um, in two places actually for my book, uh, my books and my own personal Facebook page. So join me, follow me, and you can reach me through my website, Nina Burley.com. I'd love to hear from you. There you go. And guys, we've been talking about the Trump women part of the deal. I like how that's like if you cover the P, it says art of the deal, part of the deal. That's really interesting.

That's really interesting. As I was holding this up, it occurred to me, part of the deal, part of the deal. Very good. So order up the book. You can go to Amazon or any of your booksellers that are out there. If you want to see all the authors, including her, on the Chris Voss Show's Amazon page where you can shop and buy and just click away with your credit card,

you can go to Amazon.com forward slash shop forward slash Chris Voss. You can also see our newest syndicator, Amazon Music. You can see this video on YouTube.com forward slash Chris Voss. Hit that bell notification. Refer your friends, neighbors, relatives, pool boys. If you're like Melani and you've got a pool boy there who works at Saks Fifth Avenue, tell him to subscribe to the show and listen to it.

Thanks, Melani, for tuning in. Stay safe, register to vote, and we'll see you guys next time.