ALL THE PRESIDENT'S WOMEN

Abundant testimony regarding how the current president is a bully, a narcissist, and a sexual predator.

Offering information about 67 incidents of alleged inappropriate behavior, some from women speaking out for the first time, investigative reporter Levine and Paris-based journalist El-Faizy (God and Country: How Evangelicals Have Become America’s New Mainstream, 2006) create a disturbing exposé of Donald Trump’s relationships with women. Raised by a diffident mother who ignored her husband’s philandering, and a cruel, demanding father, the young Donald was a bully; at the age of 13, was sent to the New York Military Academy, where he fit right in to the school’s culture of violence. As a young adult, he took sexual libertine Hugh Hefner and sleazy lawyer Roy Cohn as role models. Tall, good-looking, and rich, he had no trouble attracting the “fake blondes with boobs” that he preferred, including Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech ski champion and model, whom he met in 1976 and married the next year. Beautiful, intelligent, and ambitious, she became a helpmate to the rising real estate mogul, proving herself so competent that Trump came to resent her. Although they were touted in gossip columns as the “golden couple” of the 1980s, Trump pursued “very young women”—younger than 21—one model told the authors, whom he subjected to groping, forcible kissing, and exposure when he barged into their dressing rooms. Besides partying at Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion and frequenting hot nightclubs, in the 1990s, Trump started his own modeling agency and bought the Miss Universe Organization, the better to supply his demand for women. The authors recount his 1993 marriage to Marla Maples, after their daughter Tiffany was born; and to Melania Knauss. Besides anecdotes and testimony, including from a few women who defend their admiration for Trump, a 50-page appendix augments details about women mentioned in the book, as well as others. Despite revealing a few new voices, the authors present little that most readers don’t already know about America’s crude, crass leader.

A thoroughly depressing portrait.