Quote of the Day (Mary McGrory, on DC and Trump, Nearly 3 Decades Ago)

“The defense budget is the closest we come to the sums being talked of in the divorce settlement between Ivana and Donald….We in the capital are into greed, of course, and we do a lot of lying…. Viewing Wall Street, watching the Trumps, Washington thinks of itself as wholesome.”— Political columnist Mary McGrory (1918-2004), “What Cards Those Trumps Are,” Washington Post, Feb. 18, 1990, reprinted in The Best of Mary McGrory: A Half-Century of Washington Commentary, edited by Phil Gailey (2006)

Twenty-five years ago today, Donald Trump wed Marla Maples, the Southern blonde who broke up his marriage to his first wife, Ivana, another blonde. (The latter would not be the last check--oops, I mean Czech--he would bounce.) The celebration, befitting someone of his ego and love of wretched excess, took place in New York’s Plaza Hotel.

Mary McGrory, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist of the Washington Post, could never have imagined that the randy real estate tycoon who diverted D.C. from weightier matters would one day obsess the capital—let alone that he would be in charge of the defense budget, and everything else related to national security. 

But, long before he was the Twitter King, Trump was the next best thing for the media: the Tabloid King. At the height of the love-triangle craze involving him, Ivana and Marla, New York area residents were exposed to a near-daily barrage of headlines from the New York Post about their tussles in the sack and the court: “Don Juan,” “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had” (which, that paper’s editor later crowed, was libel-proof because what would Trump say—he wasn’t the best sex Maples ever had?), “Safe Sex” (about a brief separation agreement between Donald and Ivana allowing them to date partners), and “Unsafe Sex” (the collapse of said agreement).

The Donald so reveled in his “Don Juan” image that he even tried to get Playboy magazine to run a "Girls of Trump" spread featuring his employees, according to an early biographer, journalist Wayne Barrett.

Trump has been tabloid executives’ delight for so long, in fact, that suspicions were bound to arise about why The National Enquirer has treated him with kid gloves for so long. The supermarket-aisle fixture, after all, made hay over John Edwards' rumored liaison, correctly surmising that readers would be offended at the prospect of a candidate fooling around behind the back of a wife who had been stricken with cancer. 

Now, we know that the Enquirer’s owner, American Media Inc. head David Pecker, a longtime friend of The Donald, bought the silence of adult film actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, then quashed their stories so they couldn’t damage Trump in the 2016 Presidential election.

Fooling around on one's pregnant wife--the circumstances that existed regarding Donald and Melania over a decade ago--is not, to my way of thinking, a significant improvement over pulling the wood over a wife who's dealt with cancer. But the recent situational ethics of GOP voters invites the same type of excited discovery that Europeans must have felt 150 years ago in pursuing the source of the Nile.

Nearly three decades ago, as McGrory observed, Trump’s greed and lying were already on such a colossal scale that they made Capitol Hill grandees feel virtuous by comparison. These days, on the GOP side, no such assurance exists. 

Terrified as much by the President’s tweets as being “primaried” by far-right wingnuts even before facing a Democratic opponent in the fall, they have either cooed about what a great President he’s been or maintained a skittish silence. 

Now comes the reckoning for their complicity. The capital was astonished by the spectacle of greed and lying swirling around the Clintons in the 1990s, but in its constant movement, the Trumps exceed even that tawdry tabloid standard. 

But we’re now learning the consequences of it all: routine violations of the Constitution’s “emoluments” clause, manipulation of the press to invent scandals about opponents while hiding real ones about the President, and a Russian leader with a background in the KGB who knew these secrets—and, perhaps, far more than we can ever imagine right now.