What's Your Price?

Trump’s intimidation and blackmail schemes may be under the spotlight, but they’re nothing new

“He has no power in there.” - Olivia Nuzzi on All in With Chris Hayes

Don’s not an ex-con yet, but he is no stranger to the law. Or a certain kind of law, anyway. Not the law you and I encounter when we go to pay a parking ticket, or the kind of law campus protesters are facing right now in grimy holding pens in Manhattan, New Haven and Cambridge, nor the kind a street criminal confronts when cuffed and dragged to Rikers. 

Throughout his luxurious catch-me-if-you can career, from the 1970s when transmogrified-serpent mob fixer Roy Cohn was schooling him in the dark arts of legal manipulation, to the last year traveling by limo and private jet from law office to law office and courtroom to courtroom, Trump has spent countless hours of his life conferring with lawyers, being deposed, scowling at conference tables in corporate backrooms where settlements get hammered out - all venues in which he can scream and pound the table with his ham-fists, glower and drift off to focus on his phone. As trial scribes have pointed out, Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom in Manhattan is probably the first legal venue in which he has had to shut up and behave.

Shortly before Trump was elected president, USA Today cataloged an astounding number of legal skirmishes - 4,095 to be exact - he was involved in over the prior three decades. It is not unusual for big corporations to face litigation, it’s the cost of doing business. But the thousands of pre-2016 cases involving Trump’s personal life, brand and corporate entities are orders of magnitude above average.

Trump was constantly in court fighting over unpaid taxes — every year from the 1980s onward. He faced off against rivals in court over branding issues. He was always suing or being sued by contractors (his habit of not paying the last invoice was problematic), in addition to bankruptcies and other disputes large and small.

It might be no exaggeration to say that by the time he got elected President, Trump had a kind of basic legal training, not the kind that produced Abraham Lincoln, but a legal idiot savant, with an eye ever keen to the possibility of time-wasting ploys and insisting on the most cunning dodges and audacious gambits — without ever having opened a law book (he never overcame some version of dyslexia*).

In one random deposition for example, involving a Fort Lauderdale Trump-branded condo development that failed, he schooled lawyers in the fine points of English, observing,  “Well ‘developing,’ it doesn’t mean we’re developers.”

Millions of clever words have already been spilled on the trial, an historic operatic, Shakespearian, cartoonish and vulgar spectacle in Manhattan. Everything from his daddy issues to his sleepiness, to his uneven gait, his rumpled look, even his farts are getting detailed attention.

But this little trial is about a foundational pillar of Trump’s entire life, upon which all his lives – personal, political and business, depend: the transactional relationship. What can you do for me? is arguably the only form of human connection Trump has ever engaged in. And: What’s your price? He has no other means of interacting with human beings. 

If he ever did you what looked like a kind deed, you knew you could expect to be asked for repayment. He learned at father Fred Trump’s knee that only chumps believe in altruism. These are not men who have ever caught a whiff of the milk of human kindness.

Everyone has a price, son. 

The flip side of the transactional model of existence is threat and menace. You catch more flies with sugar but when that doesn’t work? Blackmail, humiliation, exposure, bullying, physical harm and ultimately exile lurk in the shadows in every single Trump relationship, personal, business or political. 

A hush money scheme suggests something salacious but perhaps a little sweet .. hush little baby, dont you cry. It is just one of the more benign points on the spectrum of coercion - silencing with cash - that underline all human interaction in Trumpland. There are other, more disciplinary strategies.

There's no indication in the charges that Manhattan prosecutors plan to mention Stormy Daniels’ account of being accosted in a Vegas parking in 2011 by a strange man who issued an implied threat to her and her daughter if she talked about Trump. This was five years after her assignation with Trump, and a year before the 2012 presidential election, with Trump considering challenging Barack Hussein Obama.

Daniels has said she and her daughter were approached in a parking lot at dusk by a 30-something fit, good-looking man who said: “Oh it’s a beautiful little girl, would be a shame if something happened to her mom. Forget about this story, leave Mr. Trump alone.”

Daniels said she did not report the threat at the time because she would have had to reveal the alleged affair — and because she was afraid. Speaking on The View after the Wall Street Journal revealed the payoff for silence deal in 2018, Daniels talked about how after the paper outed her, life had become “downright scary.” She had got a tutor for her daughter and bodyguards for herself.

Trump’s defense team will try to defang and discredit his former enforcer, Michael Cohen and pretend he was rogue. The idea that Cohen acted on his own is ludicrous on its face. The adoring dopey fifth tier law grad with the straight outta central casting New York mobster accent was the Big Man’s perfect tool.

As former Trump advisor Sam Nunberg said after Trump initially tried to discredit Cohen: "He [Cohen] was supposed to say and act the way Donald wanted him to act. Michael had even expressed sometimes regret that he did certain things, or had to send nasty emails, or give nasty phone calls to certain reporters that he personally liked — because it was at the direction of Donald."

Jurors might not hear how Michael Cohen routinely bullied and threatened all of Trump’s adversaries. In one famous example, Cohen threatened a reporter planning to publish a (previously published) account of a deposition in which first wife Ivana accused him of marital rape. In a phone call, Cohen went into pit bull mode, shouting that marital rape was legal and bragging that he had already “destroyed” the life of a beauty contestant and could do the same to the reporter. (The story of the beauty contestant’s wrecked life is here.)

I was often given a glimpse into the aura of threat, silencing and menace while researching my book on the Trump women. In one memorable example, I had identified and contacted a member of the Trump female circle who was willing to talk to me, off the record. We met at one of the Upper East Side boîtes where the crowd liked to lunch. The woman - who insisted that I never publish her name, -proceeded first to tell me her life story, how she found herself in Trumpworld. 

From the book:

A stunning woman is seated across the table from me. People stare when she walks in.She grew up like this: glorious, dizzying in her beauty, impossible to hide. One of the global billionaires plucked her out of a beauty pageant—as they do. Prince Charming was married and whisked her far away. Extreme hijinks ensued, up to and including drug abuse, violence, hundreds of thousands of dollars blown on trashed hotel rooms, secret trips to hospitals, reluctant or forced participation in creative kink.

She escaped, and thanks to his money and her looks, resides among a slice of New York society where other leggy beauties attached to other men with big money live in the same few zip codes, shop at the same designer stores on 57th Street, party with bold-faced names, and grab casual lunches at exclusive, high-dollar restaurants the way Seinfeld and friends would hang out at Monk’s Cafe.

On the table in front of the woman is a pen and a piece of paper. We are here to talk about the Queens of Trumplandia, some of whom she knows.

But she won’t actually talk. There are too many ears within earshot. The entire conversation will take place on pieces of paper, like a communication between prisoners. On the paper, she will scrawl the first initials of some of them. M. I. J. T.

She will draw maps and arrows, and scribble down words. After she writes something down and I indicate I understand, she will scribble it out. She will crumple up all the paper before we leave, and take the evidence out with her.

The food will be delivered and left untouched. At one point she will spy a Trump Organization lackey, a man she knows well, and will draw an arrow on the paper in his general direction.

I’m not supposed to turn around and look.

The stories she weaves about Trump’s wives and daughter aren’t even that salacious. They hint at embarrassing secrets, plastic surgery, affairs, seamy financial arrangements, but what she really wants to share is her own story. It is, it turns out, a common one among the great beauties in the realm she inhabits. It involves a kind of long-term enslavement that would, in a different social set, lead to, at the very least, a restraining order.

But it will not because of Money and Fear.

The man who so terrified her happened to be sitting within her line of sight, behind me. When I rose to leave I turned and saw it was Michael Cohen.

“Women have one of the great acts of all time. The smart ones act very feminine and needy, but inside they are real killers,” Trump (or his ghost-writer) wrote in Trump: The Art of the Comeback. “The person who came up with the expression ‘the weaker sex’ was either very naive or had to be kidding. I have seen women manipulate men with just a twitch of their eye—or perhaps another body part.”

But he could fight back, and make it work for him. Smaller bikinis, higher heels, was how Trump announced his plans after buying into the beauty pageant industry. All Trump’s women since he ditched first First Lady Ivana for becoming a Trump Organization Working Girl have submitted to the same deal —- being branded and sexualized. 

According to Stormy Daniels, Trump actually held out a spot on his TV show during or after their sexual encounter. Deals, deals, deals, what’s your price? As I wrote in my book, the women who choose to participate in transactions with Donald Trump reaped and still do reap rewards personal and political: the narcissistic pleasure of the attention of a powerful and rich man, exalted at weddings fit for Marie Antoinette, attended by dignitaries and political panderers, further ego-gratified by modeling, advertising and the odd theater or movie or TV part. 

And now he has an added tier of reward, a political career, MAGA prominence. Elise Stefanik and Kristi Noem, if they do their HMU right, practice the stiletto walk, and keep their lips zipped, might get to wear the crown, hold the bouquet, be the lucky girl wiping tears and strutting away with the VEEP prize. 

For that, like all of them, they pay a price in humiliation, if not outright fear and paid silencing. 

Most women who encounter men like Donald know what it takes to navigate leers, sexist jokes, octopus hands. They deploy the many tricks of female subservience, smiles, gentle brushings-away, changing the subject. They try to conduct business, and then  - usually -  get the hell out. The ones who stick around for any length of time - wives, girlfriends, and now, right-wing female political candidates - must submit. They know exactly what lighting and cameras can do to a woman’s face and body. That is the first requirement, their part in the bargain. 

The second is never breaking the omertà of the deal in which they’re engaged.

Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels busted that agreement. It has fallen to Alvin Bragg and his prosecutors and Judge Juan Merchan and a jury of very fallible New Yorkers to do something with the evidence. None of these characters is the perfect tool with which to confront the man who built a career on manipulating the law and whose political rise is powered by a strong minority’s desire to shove American women and girls back into regressive reliance on men for power - back to take the money and shut up, to accept the trade-off in dignity and self-respect for power and money and even bodily safety —- or else.

But they’re the best we have right now.

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*See Chapter 4 (Child Donald) of my book, The Trump Women: Part of the Deal. His inability to read was part of a set of childhood behaviors including impulse control and attention that today would very likely have been identified as a ADHD learning disability, and treated. As an adult he has turned relative illiteracy into a selling point for a crowd of Americans who have decided that democracy means ignorance is as good as knowledge. “The most important thing I learned at Wharton was not to be overly impressed by academic credentials,” Trump wrote in The Art of the Deal. “It didn’t take me long to realize that there was nothing particularly awesome or exceptional about my classmates, and that I could compete with them just fine.”