Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has made a name for himself via his misogyny, and reporter Wayne Barrett can attest to that.
In his 1991 book, Trump, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, The Downfall, The Reinvention, Barret describes an attempt to pimp out his staff to pose for Playboy,
“He even tried to get Playboy to do a spread called ’The Girls of Trump,’ wooing his most shapely staffers, including a former beauty queen secretary, into posing for the magazine with a sliding scale of offers on everything from full nude to breast to ’wet-lip’ shots.”
The concept itself is not new, as Playboy has run features with the staff of other companies, such as “Women of Enron,” “Women of Starbucks,” and “The Girls of the Big 10.”
The difference is that those weren’t pitched by the companies themselves. Barret explains:
“It was all part of the rakish ethos of phony glamour that he consciously fostered, even to the extent of concealing from public view a very efficient secretary with a pimplish facial condition. This unappeasable appetite led him, as his own notoriety soared, into celebrity worship, and he became a starstruck groupie, attaching himself to Don Johnson, Michael Jackson, and just about anyone else who would allow him to climb into photographs with them. He was both projecting a larger-than-life image and reveling in it, a dangerous psychic combination.”
When Jezebel investigated, they received the following explanation form the former Playboy editor, Bruce Kluger,
“There was, indeed, a sliding pay scale for models who appeared in Playboy’s ‘Women of…’ pictorials, but the ‘wet-lip shots’ detail you mention is total fiction. […] If that categorization was actually on the table, it undoubtedly had to come from the Trump camp, not the magazine.”
However, during Kluger’s time at the magazine from October 1985 to February 1999, he couldn’t recall the feature being pitched:
“If it happened at all, it was presumably pitched (and presumably rejected) by the powers-that-be before it reached my desk.”
Even though the pitch is not confirmed to have happened, by looking at the way Trump likes his women (half naked), and taking into consideration his relationship with Playboy and attending events at the Playboy mansion, one would conclude that trying to pimp out his staff does fit his profile.
Pictures of his naked wife Melania Trump are circulating the internet, as well as similar shots of his daughter Ivanka, in stark contrast to pictures of President Obama’s Harvard-attended wife and daughters. He is said to have a compulsive urge to rate women’s bodies.
The real question is what kind of message he’d be sending women around the world from the White House?
This video further details the presumptive president’s priorities in life:
Featured image compiled of screengrabs from Youtube of Melania Trump, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump.