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Wow, this 1990 Vanity Fair article on Donald and Ivana Trump is an interesting read...
Ran across this while looking for something else, and found it so interesting I read all the way through.
https://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2015/07/donald-ivana-trump-divorce-prenup-marie-brenner
(Note -- there's a July 2015 date in the link, but the 1990 article on the Trumps and their divorce battle was from their archives then.)
‘We have an old custom here at Mar-a-Lago,” Donald Trump was saying one night at dinner in his 118-room winter palace in Palm Beach. “Our custom is to go around the table after dinner and introduce ourselves to each other.” Trump had seemed fidgety that night, understandably eager to move the dinner party along so that he could go to bed.
“Old custom? He’s only had Mrs. Post’s house a few months. Really! I’m going home,” one Palm Beach resident whispered to his date.
“Oh, stay,” she said. “It will be so amusing.”
It was spring, four years ago. Donald and Ivana Trump were seated at opposite ends of their long Sheraton table in Mrs. Marjorie Merriweather Post’s former dining room. They were posed in imperial style, as if they were a king and queen. They were at the height of their ride, and it was plenty glorious. Trump was seen on the news shows offering his services to negotiate with the Russians. There was talk that he might make a run for president. Ivana had had so much publicity that she now offered interviewers a press kit of flattering clips. Anything seemed possible, the Trumps had grown to such stature in the golden city of New York.
-snip-
“Old custom? He’s only had Mrs. Post’s house a few months. Really! I’m going home,” one Palm Beach resident whispered to his date.
“Oh, stay,” she said. “It will be so amusing.”
It was spring, four years ago. Donald and Ivana Trump were seated at opposite ends of their long Sheraton table in Mrs. Marjorie Merriweather Post’s former dining room. They were posed in imperial style, as if they were a king and queen. They were at the height of their ride, and it was plenty glorious. Trump was seen on the news shows offering his services to negotiate with the Russians. There was talk that he might make a run for president. Ivana had had so much publicity that she now offered interviewers a press kit of flattering clips. Anything seemed possible, the Trumps had grown to such stature in the golden city of New York.
-snip-
Emphasis added. Note that the writer of the article is talking about an evening in 1986, with Trump already considering a presidential run and thinking he could negotiate with Russia better than anyone else.
‘Anybody who is anybody sits between the columns. The food is the worst, but you’ll see everybody here,” Donald Trump told me ten years ago at the “21” Club. Donald had already cut a swath in this preserve of the New York establishment; we were immediately seated between the columns in the old upstairs room, then decorated with black paneling and red Naugahyde banquettes. It was the autumn of 1980, a fine season in New York. The Yankees were in the pennant race; a movie star was running for president and using the term “deregulation” in his campaign. Donald was new then, thirty-four years old and very brash, just beginning to make copy and loving it. He was already fodder for the dailies and the weeklies, but he was desperate for national attention. “Did you see that The New York Times said I looked like Robert Redford?” he asked me.
Trump hasn’t changed much physically in the last ten years. Then, as now, he was all cheeks and jaw, with a tendency to look soft in the middle. He retains the blond hair, youthful swagger, and elastic face that give him the quality of the cartoon tough Baby Huey. Trump is a head swiveler, always looking around to see who else is in the room. As a boy, he was equally restless. “Donald was the child who would throw the cake at the birthday parties,” his brother Robert once told me. “If I built the bricks up, Donald would come along and glue them all together, and that would be the end of my bricks.”
-snip-
Trump spoke in a hypnotic, unending torrent of words. Often he appeared to free-associate. He referred to himself in the third person: “Trump says. . . Trump believes.” His phrases skibbled around and doubled back on themselves like fireworks in a summer sky. He reminded me of a carnival barker trying to fill his tent. “I’m more popular now than I was two months ago. There are two publics as far as I’m concerned. The real public and then there’s the New York society horseshit. The real public has always liked Donald Trump. The real public feels that Donald Trump is going through Trump-bashing. When I go out now, forget about it. I’m mobbed. It’s bedlam,” Trump told me.
-snip-
“Donald is a believer in the big-lie theory,” his lawyer had told me. “If you say something again and again, people will believe you.”
“One of my lawyers said that?” Trump said when I asked him about it. “I think if one of my lawyers said that, I’d like to know who it is, because I’d fire his ass. I’d like to find out who the scumbag is!”
-snip-
Donald Trump appears to take aspects of his German background seriously. John Walter works for the Trump Organization, and when he visits Donald in his office, Ivana told a friend, he clicks his heels and says, “Heil Hitler,” possibly as a family joke.
Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed.
-snip-
The phrase “Stockholm syndrome” is now used by Ivana’s lawyer Michael Kennedy to describe her relationship with Donald. “She had the mentality of a captive,” Kennedy told me.
-snip-
I thought about the ten years since I had first met Donald Trump. It is fashionable now to say that he was a symbol of the crassness of the 1980s, but Trump became more than a vulgarian. Like Michael Milken, Trump appeared to believe that his money gave him a freedom to set the rules. No one stopped him. His exaggerations and baloney were reported, and people laughed. His bankers showered him with money. City officials almost allowed him to set public policy by erecting his wall of concrete on the Hudson River. New York City, like the bankers from the Chase and Manny Hanny, allowed Trump to exist in a universe where all reality had vanished.
-snip-
Trump hasn’t changed much physically in the last ten years. Then, as now, he was all cheeks and jaw, with a tendency to look soft in the middle. He retains the blond hair, youthful swagger, and elastic face that give him the quality of the cartoon tough Baby Huey. Trump is a head swiveler, always looking around to see who else is in the room. As a boy, he was equally restless. “Donald was the child who would throw the cake at the birthday parties,” his brother Robert once told me. “If I built the bricks up, Donald would come along and glue them all together, and that would be the end of my bricks.”
-snip-
Trump spoke in a hypnotic, unending torrent of words. Often he appeared to free-associate. He referred to himself in the third person: “Trump says. . . Trump believes.” His phrases skibbled around and doubled back on themselves like fireworks in a summer sky. He reminded me of a carnival barker trying to fill his tent. “I’m more popular now than I was two months ago. There are two publics as far as I’m concerned. The real public and then there’s the New York society horseshit. The real public has always liked Donald Trump. The real public feels that Donald Trump is going through Trump-bashing. When I go out now, forget about it. I’m mobbed. It’s bedlam,” Trump told me.
-snip-
“Donald is a believer in the big-lie theory,” his lawyer had told me. “If you say something again and again, people will believe you.”
“One of my lawyers said that?” Trump said when I asked him about it. “I think if one of my lawyers said that, I’d like to know who it is, because I’d fire his ass. I’d like to find out who the scumbag is!”
-snip-
Donald Trump appears to take aspects of his German background seriously. John Walter works for the Trump Organization, and when he visits Donald in his office, Ivana told a friend, he clicks his heels and says, “Heil Hitler,” possibly as a family joke.
Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed.
-snip-
The phrase “Stockholm syndrome” is now used by Ivana’s lawyer Michael Kennedy to describe her relationship with Donald. “She had the mentality of a captive,” Kennedy told me.
-snip-
I thought about the ten years since I had first met Donald Trump. It is fashionable now to say that he was a symbol of the crassness of the 1980s, but Trump became more than a vulgarian. Like Michael Milken, Trump appeared to believe that his money gave him a freedom to set the rules. No one stopped him. His exaggerations and baloney were reported, and people laughed. His bankers showered him with money. City officials almost allowed him to set public policy by erecting his wall of concrete on the Hudson River. New York City, like the bankers from the Chase and Manny Hanny, allowed Trump to exist in a universe where all reality had vanished.
-snip-
16 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
posting!!
“To her credit, Ivana still served the dinners her husband preferred, so on that warm night the guests ate beef with potatoes. Mrs. Post’s faux-Tiepolo ceiling remained in the dining room, but an immense silver bowl now rested in the center of the table, filled with plastic fruit.”
to become even worse over time. I didn't think anyone could become more vulgar but he sinks to new depths with every passing second. 
he was as much of an asshole then as he is now. He's just a more experienced asshole now. 
All the enablers, . . . [who do know better]. Compounded by various 'likes' . . . what a mess . . . hard to comprehend.
