Donald Trump has tested positive -- for the bulls**t virus

[marmar]

(Salon) APRIL 11, 2020 12:00PM (UTC)
There was a brief moment, back in the late '70s and early '80s, when I was on fire in New York City. I had a novel on the New York Times bestseller list. I had a new wife, and we had been dubbed a "literary power couple" in the tabloids. I had a movie deal in Hollywood, and Gore Vidal had been signed to adapt my novel for the big screen. I was invited to Upper East Side dinner parties, at one of which I found myself seated next to Henry Kissinger and across the table from Norman Mailer. But I knew I had really reached the top when my phone rang one morning, and the famous New York Post gossip columnist Steve Dunleavy was on the line, asking if it would be all right to publish on Page Six in the next day's newspaper that Donald Trump's latest starlet girlfriend had been my date the night before at Elizabeth Taylor's birthday party at Studio 54.

See all the star power in that sentence? And most of it was true! I had been at Elizabeth Taylor's birthday party at Studio 54, the night when she rode into the place on a white stallion with the famous Studio image of the man in the moon sniffing from a teaspoon of cocaine behind her. But I hadn't been with Trump's new girlfriend, although I had spotted him at the party, standing in a gaggle that included the infamous red-baiting lawyer Roy Cohn and the designer Halston. It seemed that Trump's then wife, Ivana, had learned he had been at the party with the starlet, and Trump had called Dunleavy with a favor to ask. Could he print a rumor that the girlfriend was with someone else, to get Ivana off his back? Dunleavy had seen me at the party, and for some reason selected me as the beard for Trump's girlfriend.

....(snip)....

Trump was everywhere in those days in New York. You couldn't avoid him if you dug a cave under one of those gigantic rocks in Central Park and buried yourself. Somehow you knew he would find you there in your underground hiding place, dig you up and force you to get back out there on the sidewalks and walk past another mirrored masterpiece with his name emblazoned in gigantic ugly letters. TRUMP. You couldn't avoid him. He was like … what was he anyway? Oh, I've got it! He was like a plague! And New York City had caught it!

It's kind of funny looking back at those days in New York, when he was so ubiquitous that even my phone rang with cheapo-Aussie gossip-mongers asking favors for Trump. Except it wasn't funny when you think of the fact, and it is a fact, that those were the days when Trump honed his entire shtick, the same shtick he went on to ride all the way into the White House. ......(more)

https://www.salon.com/2020/04/11/donald-trump-has-tested-positive--for-the-bullst-virus/

[Arkansas Granny]

1. Surely it's a chronic condition in his case.

[Mc Mike]

2. Great writing, history, and analysis. Rec, thanks, nt.

[MurrayDelph]

3. Tested?

He's currently Patient Zero.