Donald Trump was up to his eyeballs in infidelity in 2006

Susan Wright at Red State takes a fairly exhaustive look at revelations that Stormy Daniels wasn't the only extramarital dalliance the Very Stable Genius was having as his third wife was giving birth to his fifth child. In the course of it, she relies heavily on a just-published New Yorker expose on the subject by Ronan Farrow.

Not only did Squirrel-Hair have both of these relationships going on at the same time, he had both women at the same social events:

Behold, it is the hay-haired idol of American “Christians.”

With a new book coming out that (laughably) makes excuses for Trump’s abuses and infidelities, called The Faith of Donald J. Trump, you’d think somebody is probably not thrilled with another story of Trump’s absolute unfaithfulness seeing the light of day.

On the contrary, according to the authors, sexual infidelity is the equivalent of searching for God.

So, rejoice, fellow, lukewarmers. There’s a new tale of Trump’s quest for God, today.

Ronan Farrow, who broke Hollywood wide open with his New Yorker report of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s crimes and abuses, has set his sites on Trump, and another 2006 affair with Playboy model, Karen McDougal.

It’s not just the affair, but the planning that went into juggling multiple affairs and covering them up, including payoffs and nondisclosure agreements, all while his new wife and baby were home.

In this instance, the model, McDougal, kept handwritten notes of the affair, which Farrow obtained from her friend, John Crawford, for his piece. When shown the notes, she didn’t deny, and confirmed it was her handwriting.

The affair began after Trump met McDougal at a Playboy Mansion pool party, thrown by Hugh Hefner for contestants of “The Apprentice.”

McDougal was Playmate of the Year in 1998, and was voted runner-up (behind Pamela Anderson) for Playmate of the 90s in 2001.

Trump apparently took a liking to her at this party, took her number, and the affair began shortly after.

Trump and McDougal began talking frequently on the phone, and soon had what McDougal described as their first date: dinner in a private bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. McDougal wrote that Trump impressed her. “I was so nervous! I was into his intelligence + charm. Such a polite man,” she wrote. “We talked for a couple hours – then, it was “ON”! We got naked + had sex.” As McDougal was getting dressed to leave, Trump did something that surprised her. “He offered me money,” she wrote. “I looked at him (+ felt sad) + said, ‘No thanks – I’m not ‘that girl.’ I slept w/you because I like you – NOT for money’ – He told me ‘you are special.’ ”

Afterward, McDougal wrote, she “went to see him every time he was in LA (which was a lot).” Trump, she said, always stayed in the same bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel and ordered the same meal—steak and mashed potatoes—and never drank. McDougal’s account is consistent with other descriptions of Trump’s behavior. Last month, In Touch Weekly published an interview conducted in 2011 with Stephanie Clifford in which she revealed that during a relationship with Trump she met him for dinner at a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Trump insisted they watch “Shark Week” on the Discovery Channel. Summer Zervos, a former contestant on “The Apprentice,” alleged that Trump assaulted her at a private dinner meeting, in December of 2007, at a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Trump, Zervos has claimed, kissed her, groped her breast, and suggested that they lie down to “watch some telly-telly.” After Zervos rebuffed Trump’s advances, she said that he “began thrusting his genitals” against her. (Zervos recently sued Trump for defamation after he denied her account.) All three women say that they were escorted to a bungalow at the hotel by a Trump bodyguard, whom two of the women have identified as Keith Schiller. After Trump was elected, Schiller was appointed director of Oval Office Operations and deputy assistant to the President. Last September, John Kelly, acting as the new chief of staff, removed Schiller from the White House posts. (Schiller did not respond to a request for comment.)

We’ve heard Schiller’s name, a lot. Hey, now we know why Trump was so upset when Schiller left the White House.

McDougal wrote that Trump would fly her out to public events to be at his side, but he never purchased the tickets, himself. She would purchase the tickets and make the arrangements, then he would reimburse her, so as not to leave a paper trail.

She was with him in July 2006 at the American Century Celebrity Golf Championship, at the Edgewood Resort, on Lake Tahoe.

Do you know who else was there?

Stormy Daniels. He reportedly began his affair with her there.

According to Daniels’ account, Trump didn’t mention that he was sleeping with someone else there, at the time. Another porn star, Alana Evans, claims Trump and Daniels invited her to join them at that weekend romp.

Trump also invited both McDougal and Daniels to the 55th Miss Universe pageant in Los Angeles.

During Trump’s relationship with McDougal, she wrote, he introduced her to members of his family and took her to his private residences. At a January, 2007, launch party in Los Angeles for Trump’s now-defunct liquor brand, Trump Vodka, McDougal, who was photographed entering the event, recalled sitting at a table with Kim Kardashian, Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., and Trump, Jr.’s wife, Vanessa, who was pregnant. At one point, Trump held a party for “The Apprentice” at the Playboy Mansion, and McDougal worked as a costumed Playboy bunny. “We took pics together, alone + with his family,” McDougal wrote. She recalled that Trump said he had asked his son Eric “who he thought was the most beautiful girl here + Eric pointed me. Mr. T said ‘He has great taste’ + we laughed!” Trump gave McDougal tours of Trump Tower and his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club. In Trump Tower, McDougal wrote, Trump pointed out Melania’s separate bedroom. He “said she liked her space,” McDougal wrote, “to read or be alone.”

That is sort of confirmation of some of the rumored tales that are to be included in the upcoming Omarosa tell-all – that Melania and Trump do not share the same bedroom.

McDougal’s account, like those of Clifford and other women who have described Trump’s advances, conveys a man preoccupied with his image. McDougal recalled that Trump would often send her articles about him or his daughter, as well as signed books and sun visors from his golf courses. Clifford recalled Trump remarking that she and Ivanka were similar and proudly showing her a copy of a “money magazine” with his image on the cover.

Trump also promised to buy McDougal an apartment in New York as a Christmas present. Clifford, likewise, said that Trump promised to buy her a condo in Tampa. For Trump, showing off real estate and other branded products was sometimes a prelude to sexual advances.

Surprisingly, it was the nude model who got the bout of conscience and ended the affair, in April 2007.

According to Crawford, the breakup was prompted in part by McDougal’s feelings of guilt. “She couldn’t look at herself in the mirror anymore,” Crawford said. “And she was concerned about what her mother thought of her.” The decision was reinforced by a series of comments Trump made that McDougal found disrespectful, according to several of her friends. When she raised her concern about her mother’s disapproval to Trump, he replied, “What, that old hag?” (McDougal, hurt, pointed out that Trump and her mother were close in age.) On the night of the Miss Universe pageant McDougal attended, McDougal and a friend rode with Trump in his limousine and the friend mentioned a relationship she had had with an African-American man. According to multiple sources, Trump remarked that the friend liked “the big black d*ck” and began commenting on her attractiveness and breast size. The interactions angered the friend and deeply offended McDougal.

So then began the cover-up. 

That cover-up included a $150,000 payment to McDougal by the company that publishes the National Enquirer for exclusive rights to her story. The company's CEO, David Pecker (go ahead and snicker; I did.) is a personal friend of Trump's. The idea was to buy the story and then sit on it. This seems to have been fine with McDougal, as she was increasingly leaning Republican as the 2016 election cycle unfolded, and did not want to hurt Trump's chances. She has since become a Christian and had a change of mind and heart.

But consider the state of her morality at the time of the affair. After their first night together, Trump offered her money. She just kind of laughed it off, and continued to see him. She didn't appear to be insulted in the least. Also consider what it says about the state of Trump's morality as well.

She has changed as a person. Him, not so much.

As we know, no one, not even his evangelical sycophants, is claiming that he has become an actual Christian.

Which brings us to the book referenced above. There is a review of it by Erick Erickson at The Weekly Standard that, whether you read the book or not, stands as a searing indictment of the excuse-making on the part of these boot-lickers:

In The Faith of Donald J. Trump, authors David Brody and Scott Lamb provide an in-depth look at the relationship between the president and American evangelicals. Brody and Lamb—respectively a newscaster with Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network and a vice president at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University—have written what they dub a “spiritual biography,” even though they come right out and say they have no intention of answering the question of whether Trump is a Christian. Instead, they hope to convey his faith through his actions.

In the process, though, Brody and Lamb inadvertently expose the corruption and moral vacuity of the political evangelical movement in the United States.

Trump only started paying attention to evangelicals once he began to consider running for president—some five or more years before the 2016 campaign. He made a show of cozying up to evangelical pastors who write books that usually don’t sell well outside their own congregations. He reached out to the prosperity-gospel heretic Paula White and flattered her. He asked questions of other religious leaders.

As his ambitions grew, Trump cannily cultivated relationships with evangelicals, and they convinced themselves that those relationships must be sincere since they began before he openly started campaigning for the presidency. Once he did start openly campaigning, the outreach only became more intensive. As Brody and Lamb report, Trump would seek out the preachers to sit next to at events. He would bring his mother’s Bible to meetings to show it off. Evangelicals fell for it. So deluded and distracted are they by the trappings of power, they do not even see what Brody and Lamb see. “He’s the P. T. Barnum of the 21st century,” an anonymous banker in the book says of Donald Trump. These evangelical leaders have yet to realize that they are the suckers.

* * *

Brody and Lamb’s book highlights everything wrong with the morphing of American evangelicalism into a post-Jesus cult of personality looking for salvation delivered by politicians—including its hypocrisy and sophistry regarding Trump and morality. The authors quote one evangelical leader saying that evangelicals’ relationship with the president is authentic, not transactional. But a few chapters earlier, the same individual described a conference call he led with the Trump campaign’s evangelical advisers just after the release of the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump bragged about assaulting women. During that call, “all of us agreed to stand behind the candidate.” After all, Trump “had sacrificed his entire life, in my viewpoint, and supported us. How could we not support him?”

We can wink-wink at Trump’s misdeeds because he does good things for us. The authors actually write that “when assessing the faith of Donald Trump, the significance of the Neil Gorsuch nomination cannot be underestimated.” Really? That is essential to assessing Trump’s faith? More than his sexual proclivities and adulteries, which are barely touched upon in the book? In a few spots in the book, the authors blame American culture for Trump’s sexual ethics, and in one passage, they even find a way to implicate evangelicals in Trump’s sexual behavior. Follow the twisted logic: First, Brody and Lamb quote another biographer who says that “Clint Eastwood, James Bond, and Hugh Hefner” are the figures who dominate Trump’s self-image. Then we are told that Trump boasted about being a womanizer roughly around the same time that Pierce Brosnan’s first James Bond movie came out. And who do we have to thank for Bond’s having a place in Trump’s mind? “Americans—including evangelicals—fund these culture-shaping products with their book purchases and ticket sales.” So if you’ve ever seen a Bond movie, you’ve contributed to the culture that made Trump Trump.

More egregiously, in another passage the authors suggest that Trump’s rapacious libido is just his misguided quest for God. I wish I were kidding. The authors prominently quote a character from a 1944 Bruce Marshall novel: “I still prefer to believe that sex is a substitute for religion and that the young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God.” Brody and Lamb’s book was printed before the appearance of press reports about Trump having had sex with a porn star around the time his wife was giving birth to their son, but one gets the sense that the authors of The Faith of Donald Trump and the evangelical casuists they quote would have no trouble spinning that infidelity as something unimportant or, in a roundabout way, even admirable.

When not justifying or shifting blame for Trump’s sexual escapades, the authors turn to anonymous sources to assure us that Donald Trump’s heart is not bent on greed. “These off-the-record friendly interviewees sense that Trump’s ambition stems from a deep-rooted need to command respect.” It is certainly true that he enjoys receiving praise and respect—including from the book’s authors. One five-page chapter recounts a lunch at the Polo Bar in New York City with one of the authors (Brody), his wife, and Trump. George Lucas, Ralph Lauren, and Michael J. Fox all come to Trump’s table to genuflect. Trump then brags to Oprah that he is meeting with the Christian Broadcasting Network. The chapter ends. Time and again the authors boast about their access to Trump, giving away the game of just how Mean Girlsevangelicalism has become.

While the authors praise Trump for his supposed authenticity in being willing to meet with them, Mitt Romney is criticized for talking to evangelical leaders through conference calls and national meetings: “Past Republican nominees like Mitt Romney and John McCain would come in front of a Christian audience but only minimally, knowing it was a political rite of passage to do so. . . . Trump, on the other hand, not only did substantially more interviews with us, his staff didn’t even bother to ask us what we planned to talk about.” See there, Trump gave them access, so he must be a believer. It clearly wasn’t a transactional relationship.

* * *

So if Brody and Lamb don’t grapple seriously with Trump’s moral character and choose not to answer the question of whether or not Trump is a Christian, how do they fill their hundreds of pages?

The book is stuffed with supposition. At one point we are assured that if Andy Warhol were alive today, he’d watch The Apprentice. This comes one page after announcing how much Warhol hated Trump. “If young Donald Trump” did something or other is a recurring theme. If he had picked up a book on church history he would have discovered all sorts of things. “If Trump recalled his Old Testament Bible stories,” he would have clearly understood what he was talking about by referencing the promised land in a speech. If frogs had wings they wouldn’t bust their asses every time they jump. That’s not actually in the book, but I kept thinking about it when whole sections of the book were premised on if Trump did or read or saw something.

Much of the book is padded with descriptions of every conceivable Christian influence on Donald Trump, no matter how attenuated. Brody and Lamb make him out to be the heir of Martin Luther, John Knox, John Winthrop, John Witherspoon, and Billy Graham.

At least Brody and Lamb try to come up with something a little less bone-headed than the "I-was-voting-for-a-president-not-a-Boy-Scout" tripe one sees in comment threads under any kind of news item or opinion piece related to Trump's character.

As I say, last May 3, in Indianapolis, one of the greatest tragedies in American history occurred. We could have had all the great policy-level achievements which Trumpists and actual conservatives alike rightly cheer without the moral taint.

The unwillingness of so many who used to deserve our respect to make look squarely at that moral taint is one of the most saddening measures of our spiritual sickness.