He casts himself as an irresistible sex god yet Donald Trump is quick to stamp on women. What is his problem with the opposite sex? Selina Scott, who has been subjected to his wrath, has some answers
DONALD TRUMP always knew who his real opponent would be in the race to the White House and some time ago opened fire for the first time on what he perceived to be her fatal weakness.
Just after Christmas, before any primary or caucus votes had been cast, he released an online video that focused on Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern. Clinton had initially denied having sex with her but later confessed to “a relationship that was not appropriate”.
Trump’s video implied, through scurrilous innuendo, that Hillary Clinton had in some way enabled her husband’s predatory behaviour and that much of his philandering was her fault for refusing to confront his rapacious sexual appetite.
This was a classic example of Trump’s unerring instinct to attack the most vulnerable emotional element of an adversary, especially his readiness to try to eviscerate any woman he feuds with, as I discovered myself many years ago.
Last week, after his victories in seven out of 11 states on Super Tuesday, Trump, in a valedictory rally at his seafront mansion Mar-a-Lago in Florida (which was adorned with so much golden marble that it looked as if Saddam Hussein had been on a shopping spree with Liberace), was in an even more belligerent mood.
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He told his supporters that Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state was “a criminal act”. He said this should stop her running for the presidency and then menacingly boasted: “Once we get all of this finished I’m going to go after one person and that’s Hillary Clinton.”
And Hillary’s response to this declaration of war? “You’ve got someone running for president who is insulting people, insulting their religion,” she said, urging voters to reject “the demagoguery, the prejudice, the paranoia” that Trump represented.
Oh dear, Hillary. You are going to have to do better than that in what will be a knock-down, drag-out battle.
There seems little doubt that it will be Clinton versus Trump for the presidency if both do as well as expected in the Ohio, Illinois and Florida primaries in nine days’ time — and Trump is wasting no time in sharpening his sword for Clinton’s head.
Trump was an unruly child and was 13 when his father sent him to the New York military academy, a boys’ school known for its intimidating culture. From this early age Trump knew that bombast and bullying defeat opponents. Yet it is a paradoxical truth of this strange man that he also considers himself to be devastating to women.
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At the academy the cadets identified him as the “ladies’ man” of his class in their yearbook. This was followed in 1986 by Playgirl magazine listing the 40-year-old Trump as one of the “10 sexiest men in America”, boosting his overblown image of himself as a sex god.
Yet perversely gallantry towards women is a stranger to him. His first wife, Ivana, recalled that when she proved to be a far better skier than him and rushed past him on the slopes, he was so angry that he took off his ski boots, walked up to a restaurant barefoot and said: “I am not going to do this shit for anybody, including Ivana.”
“He could not take it that as a woman I could do something better than he did,” Ivana said.
It was an early indication of his deep-rooted misogyny, which has found vivid and public expression since he began his run for the presidency.
On television, in response to the Fox News pundit Megyn Kelly’s question about why he had called women “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals”, he said he was “only” talking about Rosie O’Donnell, a lesbian American comedian.
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After being reminded that he had told a contestant on his Celebrity Apprentice television show that he would like to see her on her knees, Trump responded: “I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct.”
Later he suggested Kelly had asked the question because she was menstruating and retweeted a comment that referred to her as a bimbo.
What is it about the lady and the Trump? What’s his problem with women?
“His white leather bed wasn’t in the least enticing. Neither was his Elvis pout, which I caught him practising in his reflection in the aircraft window
As readers of The Sunday Times may recall, I have no small experience of this. After my hour-long documentary for ITV in 1995 had exposed Trump as, at best, economical with the truth about his business dealings, he launched a savage attack on me on breakfast TV that he followed with an avalanche of personally abusive letters denigrating me both as a woman and as a broadcaster.
ITV offered me no right of reply. Indeed, when one of the big channels in America wanted to buy the programme, Trump’s threats of legal action forced ITV to capitulate. I had in effect been gagged and felt that if I got into a kind of playground slanging match with him it would only give his disgusting accusations the oxygen of publicity.
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It is instructive that neither O’Donnell nor Brande Roderick, the contestant in Celebrity Apprentice he wanted to see on her knees — nor indeed any of the other women he has insulted over the years — has raised her voice against him. Why?
Is it simply that the female sex is still traditionally brought up not to engage in demeaning slanging matches in public? Or does Trump truly possess some almost cosmic intimidating force where women are concerned? It is nothing to boast about, but he clearly knows how to make girls cry.
After all, even Marco Rubio, one of his rivals for the Republican nomination, managed to suggest that if Trump had not inherited a $200m fortune from his father, he would have ended up selling watches in Times Square like any other cheap hustler. But we have heard little from the women he has maligned.
All this brings me to Diana, Princess of Wales. Recently in New York a radio interview that Trump gave to the “shock jock” presenter Howard Stern shortly after her death was unearthed. In it Trump claimed he could have slept with her.
Actually it was worse than that. He said he could have “nailed” her. This implied an act of cold, loveless sex.
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It is a grotesque expression that women abhor, and in some way it plumbs the deep, dark recesses of Trump’s mind and appetite. What makes this boast even more revolting is that poor Diana, of course, has no means of defence.
Trump had always been rapacious in his hunger for gossip about Charles and Diana’s marital problems. He told me when I first met him that he thought Diana was a handful, although he used a degrading word too coarse to print in a newspaper.
Trump’s image of himself as irresistible to women was demonstrated to me when he invited me to fly in his private jet from New York to Florida. Halfway through the flight he beckoned me to follow him so that he could show me a large white leather bed. It was clearly his pride and joy.
Was this his ultimate seduction pad? My reaction was certainly not the one he might have intended. I immediately thought of an overgrown kid trying desperately to impress. It wasn’t in the least enticing. Neither was his Elvis pout, which I caught him practising in his reflection in the aircraft window.
It can only be imagined what Hillary Clinton really thinks of Trump. One is a right-wing demagogue, the other a hand-wringing liberal. If only Clinton could do humour, she could burst the Trump bubble.
The one time that Trump has been comprehensively put down was when Barack Obama, who Trump claimed was not qualified to be president because he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii, produced his birth certificate.
At a White House correspondents’ dinner, to much laughter, Obama suggested that now Trump had seen the certificate he might “finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter, like: did we fake the moon landing?”. Trump, who attended the dinner, was left uncharacteristically speechless.
If Hillary weren’t Hillary she could have another magic bullet in her arsenal. If Hillary weren’t Hillary she could attack him on the women’s issue in a way a man can’t. She could question why he has been married three times. Why he appears to hate women. But that would open Hillary up to Trump’s charges that she couldn’t control her priapic husband and questions as to why she stood by him through all his sexual excesses. Was it purely derived from her desire for the Oval Office that Bill occupied?
Trump and women. It is as much a part of the Trump legend as Trump and money or Trump and bragging. But what of the women who have married him? Let me share with you a snippet of conversation I heard beside the pool at Trump’s 140-room Florida palace when he invited me to a party.
Two lawyers were discussing his then wife Marla, who stood not a few feet away. “How much do you think she got in her prenup?” one asked the other. At the time Marla seemed happily settled with her husband, but with Trump no one is in any doubt that money underlies everything, including marriage. Marla and he were divorced four years later. Trump believes that, like everything else in life, women have a price. Marla settled for $1.9m. For a man who claims he is worth $10bn, it was a fleabite.
It is not without significance that if Trump does make it to the White House, his current wife, Melania, will be the first first lady to arrive in Washington with a presidential prenup in case it all goes wrong.
Indeed the only woman who appears to have taken Trump on without fear or favour is a 90-year-old grandmother sitting in a rocking chair in a tiny farmhouse on the Aberdeenshire coast.
Molly Forbes owns a smallholding at Menie, on the edge of Trump’s Scottish golf course. For several years she has held out against his intimidatory tactics as he tries to bulldoze her home.
Water has been cut off for so long that this old lady has been reduced to having to walk down to a nearby burn to fill buckets so she can water her hens and plants. Security guards have constantly harassed her and a large wall has been built round her property . . . well, Trump is very big on walls, as we know.
For years he has tried to persuade the local authority to issue a compulsory purchase order on the home she shares with her son Michael, but Molly has stood firm.
“He’s called our home a pigsty. Well, it’s just a farm,” she says.
“I don’t suppose he knows what a farm is. This is my home; it’s what I call paradise. Donald Trump is a Yank and a stupid one at that. He is a bairn who has never grown up. He needs a skelped backside. We just laugh at anything he says. Improve the area? He’ll have to improve himself first.”
I know Molly's home turf well. I began my career at the local television station. The sand dunes that Trump bulldozed for his golf course had been described as the “crown jewels” of our national heritage. It is shameful that Alex Salmond allowed this man to desecrate this priceless coastline.
What has happened in Scotland is a microcosm of the way Trump gets his way almost everywhere. Powerful men believe his promises to make whatever he touches “great”, whether it is America or a golf course. They cave in, unlike Molly.
Please watch Molly’s five-minute video online (trippinguptrump.co.uk/molly-forbes-interview).
http://www.trippinguptrump.co.uk/molly-forbes-interview/ It is heartbreaking but it will also make you burn with fierce pride. She sits in her favourite chair in a corner of her sitting room, surrounded by photographs of her family, quietly spoken but with an undimmed determination not to be beaten by a man who has done so much to wreck her life.
It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for Hillary Clinton to take some lessons from Molly Forbes.