Epstein Estate Documents - Batch 7 / TEXT / 002 from House

[admin]

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_033233
txt
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/9bq6uj0p ... tracking=1

From: Thorbjpn Jagland
Sent: 4/16/2017 3:04:37 PM
To: Jeffrey Epstein [[email protected]]
Importance: High
Hope you recover quickly. We have had wonderful days. Tell me when you are coming to Paris so that we can
talk. I really don't understand Trump. Today I have to deal with the referendum in Turkey. Endogan is another
difficult to understand
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 033233

[admin]

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_033234
txt
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/9bq6uj0p ... tracking=1

From: Gino Yu
Sent: 4/24/2017 8:32:33 AM
To: jeffrey E. [[email protected]]
Subject: The Party Girl Who Brought Trump to His Knees - The Daily Beast
Importance: High
Stayed with this woman in st moritz. Was in NYC for a while.
Gino
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... knees.html
Sent from my iPhone
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 033234

The Party Girl Who Brought Trump to His Knees. Verina Hixon, who lived below Donald Trump in his famous Fifth Avenue tower, was protected by very wealthy and very powerful men—the kind of men who, it is said, could make young Donald cry.
by Christopher Dickey & Michael Daly
Daily Beast
10.31.16 10:15 PM ET
https://web.archive.org/web/20161104044 ... knees.html

[x]
Photo Illustration by Lyne Lucien/The Daily Beast

ST. MORITZ, Switzerland — She is in her 70s now, but it is easy to see, still, why she broke hearts and made and lost fortunes with her looks and her charm. Once, asked in a deposition how she earned her living, “That’s a good question!” she answered. Asked another time what it was she did for a powerful Teamsters boss, she said, “I lit up his life.” Along the way there was a Texas billionaire, an Arab billionaire, a Caribbean private equity investor. Big money. Quiet money. Powerful money.

And then there was the matter of Donald Trump. But he was not her kind of man and, defiant and stubborn, she definitely was not his kind of woman.

For decades now, when investigative reporters have dredged up court records linking Trump to the mob in New York City, her name has floated to the surface.

The basic oft-repeated tale is this: Trump was erecting his signature tower on Fifth Avenue in the early 1980s and that put him at the mercy of local Teamsters boss John Cody, who allegedly was tied to the Gambino crime family. Cody could slow or stop the flow of building materials, concrete could dry up in the trucks, and construction would grind to a halt. But in Trump’s case Cody did not do that, according to these accounts. Indeed, even when Teamsters went on strike everywhere else in the city in 1982, Trump Tower kept going up.

A payoff was assumed, and that was presumed to be several apartments combined into two huge apartments just below Trump’s own at the top of the tower. At the time they were worth upward of $10 million. But they were not in Cody’s name, as the story went, they were in the name of his friend (the general assumption was his girlfriend or mistress). And that person was Verina Hixon.

Then, as now, Hixon would not sit down for an on-the-record interview. As a result, much that has been written about her was by way of inference and innuendo. But through sources intimately familiar with her story, friends, acquaintances, and public records, we’ve been able to piece together a detailed picture of her life in those heady days of the 1980s when Gotham was ruled by would-be “masters of the universe” like Trump and, sometimes, the mob put them in their place. Indeed, sometimes the real tough guys this woman knew could make The Donald cry.

***

Verina tells her friends that she was born in Austria to German parents in 1944 at the height of World War II. Public records show, precisely, that Verina Herud first saw the light of day on May 14 of that year in the tiny village of Alberschwende in the Austrian Alps near the borders of Germany, Switzerland, and Lichtenstein.

Her family came from the German port of Hamburg, where British and American warplanes had carried out a devastating campaign, “Operation Gomorrah,” only 10 months before. The Allied bombing had slaughtered some 40,000 people.

When the fighting ended, the Herud family returned to Hamburg and Verina grew up amid its ruins. There were no shortages of food for her or her siblings. Her family owned some farmland where they raised what was needed. But she would play in streets where one house had been left standing, one had been utterly destroyed, and another was only half intact. It was the Aleppo of its time, but far worse.

Because of this background, whatever kind of party girl, whatever kind of enchantress, she became, she was cut from a different mold than many of the other bacchants who shared the strobe lights of Studio 54 and Xenon in the 1970s.

Verina went to college in Geneva, Switzerland, in the 1960s, she tells people. Although how much she studied, and how much she made the social scene in that city of very private bankers, is hard to determine at this remove.

Some time in 1969, when she was 25, a girlfriend invited her to a party in Texas—in San Antonio, which was a pretty sleepy town back then. Among the people she met was George C. “Tim” Hixon, a young heir to an enormous Texas family fortune. As she told the story later, he showed up on her doorstep in Geneva not long afterward with “a huge diamond.”

Rather like Marilyn Monroe’s adorable Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Verina found herself persuaded this was the guy for her. (“Don’t you know that a rich man is like a pretty girl?” says Lee. “You don’t marry her just because she’s pretty. But, my goodness, doesn’t it help?”)

But the Hixons were not to live happily ever after. Verina found San Antonio small and boring, and was less than enthusiastic about her husband’s passion for hunting. According to Texas divorce records, the marriage produced one son, then ended in divorce after two years and 100 days.

By the end of November 1971, Verina Hixon was a single woman once again, and apparently quite a wealthy one. Certainly she had enough wherewithal to make it into gossip columns dating the likes of Mexican millionaire Bruno Pagliai, previously married to movie star Merle Oberon.

“Verina and Bruno had eyes only for each other when they arrived at the posh party given by Richard Gully at Buddy Greco’s opening at the Princess Hotel in Acapulco,” wrote Dorothy Manners in 1974. “Verdict of the South-of-the-Border insiders is that this is a serious romance.”

By the late 1970s, Verina Hixon was living in Manhattan at the exclusive Olympic Tower, built by Aristotle Onassis on Fifth Avenue next to St. Patrick’s Cathedral and across from Rockefeller Center. She has told friends she could look from her apartment directly into the office of Steve Ross, the tycoon who built his Warner Communications into Time Warner. He would wave to her and invite her to lunch, and of course she’d join him.

In 1979, Donald Trump, the brash heir to the real-estate development business of his father, Fred Trump, was determined to make his own mark on Fifth Avenue, and he started building his eponymous tower.

By then, Verina was living in New York with the son of one of the richest men in the United Arab Emirates, which is saying something. She was in her mid-30s, he was in his early 20s. And this is where the plot thickens.

***

In 1982, Verina Hixon decided to pour all the money she had, and then some, into the collection of apartments at the top of Trump Tower just below Donald Trump’s own sky-high palace. Among the amenities she was determined to have: the only swimming pool in the building.

As she has explained to friends, she spent some $12 million, including a mortgage of about $3 million arranged with the help of her Arab boyfriend’s father. She signed the deal in 1982; Trump Tower’s official opening was in February 1983, and she moved in later that year or at the beginning of 1984.

During this same period, as she’s told the story, she got to know John Cody, president of the Teamsters union Local 282: a man who could make or break the projects of New York real-estate developers and who, Verina understood, had a close relationship with Fred Trump, Donald’s father.

Verina, her young Arab boyfriend, and Cody, along with Cody’s pregnant mistress, who normally lived in Queens, all took a trip together down to Florida. They rented a yacht, and it must have been quite a scene aboard: Cody was in his early 60s; Verina was pushing 40; her boyfriend was about 25; and Cody’s mistress? She was pretty young, too, but Verina remembered her as distinctively “dreary.”

At the time, as Verina has told the tale, Verina was being dressed by the likes of Yves Saint Laurent. She was resplendent. Which is why, when a friend asked what it was she did for Cody, she said, “I lit up his life.”

When, several years ago, New York investigative reporter Wayne Barrett asked Verina about the nature of her relationship with Cody, Verina said it was platonic, and Cody told Barrett the same thing. She has continued to insist that was the case.

In fact, the rubric “it’s complicated” would hardly begin to describe the tangled web of relationships that surrounded Verina Hixon and her Trump Tower apartments in the early 1980s.

***

John Cody was fun to be with and loved a good time, as Verina has recalled. But he was also a hard man who’d grown up tough in mean times. Born in Hell’s Kitchen when it really was Hell’s kitchen, he started driving trucks in his teens, served in the Marines, and did seven years for burglary before he started working his way to a position of extraordinary power in New York as a Teamsters boss.

According to a report prepared for New York’s governor in 1989 (PDF), Teamsters Local 282 had been “closely associated with or controlled by members of Cosa Nostra for decades.” The same report noted that, “From 1976 to 1984, Local 282’s president was John Cody, a close associate of the Gambino Crime Family. An investigation revealed that Cody paid $200,000 per year to Carlo Gambino, the Family’s boss.”

Nothing major got built without Cody’s cooperation, and he made that clear to the younger Trump on several occasions.

As Cody’s son Michael recalls, Trump was “a guy who would talk tough, but as soon as you confronted him, he would cry like a little girl. He was all talk, no action.

“My father walked all over him. He did. Any time Trump didn’t do what he was told, my father would shut down his job for the day. No deliveries; 400 guys sitting around.”

When asked at one point about Cody, Trump told a reporter, “I didn’t really know him. He was a bad guy.” Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to request for comment on this story.

One time Trump’s then wife, Ivana, hired a painting contractor, apparently for their apartment. “My father found out,” Michael Cody recalls. “He said, ‘No, no, you don’t do that.’ They had to hire who my father told them to hire.”

Michael says his father stayed in the apartment directly below Trump—Verina’s apartment: “I believe he slept there now and again,” and Michael, for one, does not believe that Verina and his father “were just very good friends.”

As Verina settled into her new Trump Tower home, in any case, she fought one battle after another with the builder of that eponymous edifice and Cody became her protector.

Trump would tell Cody, “Anything for you, John.” Michael says he was with his father one time when Trump called, desperate to have the job reopened. Michael says Trump ended by telling him, “Whatever you say, John.”

According to Barrett, when Verina was $3 million short on financing, Cody got Trump to arrange the money and Verina was not even required to file a financial statement.

Verina has told friends that Trump never made any moves on her, very possibly because he was afraid. But her relationship with Cody seems to have driven Trump crazy, and Trump would make crass remarks: “Foulmouth and dirty fantasy,” as she told Barrett.

At one point, Verina wanted the wiring in her apartment to go to the central switchboard. Trump wanted otherwise. So Cody put a guy on Verina’s door to keep Trump’s people out. She has claimed, as well, that Cody used his clout to shut down the building for up to three days even when it was completed.

In 1983, according to Barrett’s reporting, Verina was running short on money for renovations and Cody channeled $500,000 to her, drawn on a Swiss bank account that was then routed through a contact he had in London.

At the time, Cody was in prison—he'd been convicted of racketeering and tax evasion in 1982—but he was still president of Local 282, and Verina would visit Cody in jail, but she also started a relationship with a handsome young banker and investor who came from an influential family in the Caribbean.

Then, in 1984, Cody was forced out of his position as president of Local 282. And Trump, it seems, started looking for ways to take revenge. He sued Verina Hixon for back payments on maintenance. She counter-sued for $20 million.

Her plan had always been to keep one apartment—the one with the famous pool—and sell the other for a hefty profit. But, she complained, Trump had so many workmen in and out of his own apartment above her, and made so much noise, it was impossible to get the price she was asking.

As Verina’s litigation dragged on, Cody made his own bad situation worse. He was caught plotting to murder the man who’d replaced him as head of Local 282. He was no longer in a position to protect Verina. Her Arab friend no longer backed her. And her Caribbean banker boyfriend did not have the kind of money she needed, now, on increasingly short notice.

At this point, as Verina has told the story, Trump made his move. According to her, he got word to the most promising potential buyer that she was in trouble with the banks and behind on her mortgage. She found a friend who was willing to front her $6 million, but now the banks wouldn’t take it. And then there was the matter of the money she had continued to get over the years from her ex-husband in Texas. Verina says that Trump had his secretary call her ex and tell him she was “living with a black man.”

***

By the end of the decade, Verina Hixon had lost her Trump apartments and much of the money she’d put into them. But Verina still managed to keep up a certain lifestyle. She bought a co-op on East 64th Street just two doors down from Ivana Trump’s post-divorce digs, and the two of them became friends. After 13 years, Verina once again ran out of ready cash, started litigating, fell behind in her maintenance, and was evicted. But by then she’d bought the respectably palatial apartment in Switzerland where she now lives, and she still makes the gossip columns occasionally.

“Page Six” reported in late 2013 that Ivana Trump and Ivana’s then boyfriend, Marc Antonio Rota, had stayed at Verina’s place in St. Moritz the previous winter. But they’d had a lovers’ quarrel, at which point Ivana locked herself in her room and Rota’s dachshunds were allowed to run riot. When Verina asked Ivana to pay for damage left behind by their chewing, clawing, piddling, and defecating all over the place, Ivana refused. “They weren’t her dogs,” Trump’s publicist, Catherine Saxton, explained to “Page Six.”

Verina takes long walks around Lake St. Moritz, and, it is said, she looks forward to skiing this winter, happily far from the presidential craziness in America and the candidate she’s called “that awful man.”

Cody, for his part, went back to jail on charges of attempted murder. Eventually afflicted with Alzheimer’s, he was released from prison in 1993 and died in 2001.

His son Michael, looking back on his father’s experiences with Verina Hixon—defending her from Trump, and sometimes making that notorious bully cry—can only shake his head and smile. “Whoever knew this guy would run for president?” he says.

Michael says of his father, “I’m sure he’s rolling in his grave, laughing.”

[admin]

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_033235
txt
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/9bq6uj0p ... tracking=1

From: Richard Kahn
Sent: 5/9/2017 9:22:35 PM
To: jeffrey E. [[email protected]]
Importance: High
http ://www. mansionglob al . com/articles/61984 -trump-lo oking-to-unlo ad-caribb ean-b each-
estate? link=TD marketwatch home_p age . 83461b39d1b fc251 &utm source=marketwatch home_p age . 83461b
39 dlb fc251 &utm camp aign=circular&utm medium=MANSIONGLOBAL&locale=
Richard Kahn
HBRK Associates Inc.
575 Lexington Avenue 4th Floor
New York, NY 10022
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 033235

Trump Looking to Unload Caribbean Beach Estate. Chateau des Palmiers, a walled compound in St. Martin, has provided rental income for the president
by Beckie Strum
Mansion Global
Originally published on May 05, 2017
https://web.archive.org/web/20170506054 ... ach-estate

[x]
Mr. Trump has marketed the tropical refuge, and claimed the asset in financial disclosures filed in July 2015 before his presidential bid. Sotheby’s International Realty

President Donald Trump is looking for a millionaire to buy his luxurious French St. Martin beachfront estate, which he has used primarily as a rental property since purchasing it in 2013.

Le Château des Palmiers, a walled compound on the northwestern tip of the Caribbean island on the Rue de la Falaise, recently hit the market with Sotheby’s Realty International. Sotheby’s lists the price as “upon request,” but another listings aggregator in St. Martin, 7th Heaven Properties, says the asking price is $28 million.

Mr. Trump has marketed the tropical refuge and claimed the asset in financial disclosures filed in July 2015 before his presidential bid.

“Greetings from Donald J. Trump. Escape to a place no other,” reads a brochure for the property.

The sprawling 4.8-acre estate on St. Martin’s Plum Bay encompasses two villas, one five-bedroom and another four-bedroom and a number of other red-tile-roofed structures, from pool cabanas to a house for the estate manager, according to the listing with Lesley Reed, who could not immediately be reached for comment.

In total, the compound contains 11 bedrooms and 12 full bathrooms. The larger villa has a two-story master bedroom with a Jacuzzi bath tub and two private balconies. The smaller villa has a number of themed bedrooms, including the “Jungle Room” with a king-size bed.

The whole property is enclosed by an eight-foot boundary wall, according to the listing.

Rental packages for the president’s tropical refuge start at $6,000 per night in the low season for the smaller of two villas and top off at $28,000 during the winter holidays, according to Sotheby’s St. Martin office.

Disclosures sent to the federal Office of Government Ethics indicate that Mr. Trump owns the St. Martin property under two limited liability companies, Excel Venture I LLC and Excel Venture Corp II, for which he owns a 100% share.

He’s collected between $100,000 and $1 million annually through rental income, according to the 2o15 disclosure, which values the asset between $5 million and $25 million.

Mr. Trump has owned the rental since 2013, when he bought Le Château des Palmiers for an undisclosed amount. It was reportedly listed at the time for $19.7 million, meaning the U.S. president is looking to turn around a 40% profit on the sale after only four years of ownership.

The White House press office and a publicist for the Trump Organization did not immediately return requests for comment.

[admin]

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_033236
txt
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/9bq6uj0p ... tracking=1

#Tramp’s_Daaughter
# بنت_‏ ترامب
A Funny trinding Hashtag on Twitter welcoming
Trump’s Daughter Ivanka and talking about her
beauty and joking around.
This guy asking her
for marriage
This one is saying that he
is running to the airport
with his friends to meet
her
This one saying that he
wants to take her in a
tour around riyadh
This one is
welcoming her with
a poem

Trump in Saudi
telling Ivanka:
Please Lock your
door twice.

[admin]

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_033238
txt
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/9bq6uj0p ... tracking=1

From: Martin G. Weinberg
Sent: 5/25/2017 1:02:58 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: ATTORNEY-CLIENT PRIVILEGE
Importance: High
Reid mentioned along with Ted Olson, one or two others as potential add'I lawyers for Trump in today's Law 360
Martin G Weinberg PC
20 Park Plaza
Suite 1000
Boston, MA 02116
Virus-free. www.avast.com
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 033238

[admin]

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_033239
txt
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/9bq6uj0p ... tracking=1

From: Thomas Jr., Landon
Sent: 5/30/2017 12:51:12 PM
To: Jeffrey Epstein [[email protected]]
Subject: Per your point about Trump/Aramco/Ponzi
Importance: High
https://www.fairobserver.com/region/middle east north africa/donald-trump-saudi-arabia-oil-
aramco-news-
60922Putm campaign=Daily%20Fringe%20&utm source=hs email&utm medium=email&utm c
ontent=52487236& hsenc=p2ANqtz--
UTwt81DzZpk6zyw34g9GdPZPoZwsqw1V11.28tJR1urvC0743YcshoDCCjkHnAUT aPi33tdrUG6 Pah
t5ufC1(N48qfxw& hsmi=52487236
Landon Thomas, Jr.
Financial Reporter
New York Times
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference ... e/t/landon jr thomas/index.h
tml
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 033239

[admin]

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_033240
txt
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/9bq6uj0p ... tracking=1

From: Nicholas Ribis____________________________________________
Sent: 5/30/2017 7:51:52 PM
To: Jeffrey Epstein [[email protected]]
Subject: Fw: Close friend of Trump investigated over alleged €170m tax evasion I World news I The Guardian
Importance: High
Bad news for TJB
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A http://www.theguardian.com world 2017 may 29 close-
2Dfriend-2Dtrump-2Dthomas-2Dbarrack-2Dalleged-2Dtax-2Devasion-2Ditaly-2Dsardinia-3FCMP-3Dshare-
5Fbtn-5Ffb&d=DQIFAg&c=euGZstcaTD1lvimEN8b7jXrwq0f-
v5A CdpgnVfiiMM&r=qvsWPMySvJQKJyiCbbH3 UeJCrKMWih9KXDAwYE2eSw&m=HWy8k1H7mKJ 1 s
y-3HdPAkCHdCOMhzGlxMC3 stl3GEg&s=F0WqhPv3Cj87MVTDCVx3sZahVmybNtdsoq3D V-5yAU&e=
Sent from my iPhon
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 033240

[admin]

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_033241
txt
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/9bq6uj0p ... tracking=1

From: paul krassner________________________________________
Sent: 6/3/2017 6:36:57 PM
To: jeffrey E. [[email protected]]
Subject: yikes
Importance: High
I'm against censorship, and that includes Kathy Griffin. CNN eats chickenshit. What she
did is nothing compared to Trump's murderous evil.
P.S. THIS LITERALLY REEKS WITH IRONY...THIS IS WHERE CNN GETS ITS
CHICKENSHIT. A COMMERCIAL THAT THEY'RE LOSING BECAUSE OF KATHY:
SQUATTY POTTY - KATHY GRIFFIN "FULL OF SHIT" (2017)
(USA)
09 May, 201/ By Dabitch 0 Comments
Second week of May this Kathy Griffin ad rolls out digital media only, where Kathy tells people that they are "full of
shit." Literally. See, Kathy Griffin has a potty mouth but also a selling point - the reason you'd use the squatty potty
is to properly empty your bowels. "It's like a colonic" she explains, but without that hose up your ass. A cute blue
turd bleeps her potty mouth but the point is still made.
You may remember Squatty Potty's pooping unicorn video created by the Harmon Brothers in 2015. Now Kathy
Griffin is their first celebrity spokesperson. The brand's CEO and co-creator, Bobby Edwards, finds her quirky, brave
and fearless, which makes her a good ambassador for the brand as they target women with this campaign.
Edwards says the brand team fell in love with the "full of shit" idea from Bravery Films, "it got the biggest laughs"
from staff. Howie Ronay, Bravery Films' founder and chief creative officer, a former FCB exec who worked on the
2013 viral hit "Ship My Pants" for Kmart explains: "We know a lot of people struggle with this issue, and we decided
to take a common colloquial phrase and use it literally." Basically, this is "ship my pants II." Enough about poop, not
all ads can be great.
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 033241

[admin]

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_033242
txt
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/9bq6uj0p ... tracking=1

From: [email protected]
To: Jeffrey Epstein [email protected];
Sent: 6/13/2017 11:38:59 PM


WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump held the first meeting of his full Cabinet today, vowing to take the fight against terrorism to the very end and said "we are going to starve the beast" by stopping its funding.

"One of the big things that we did - and you're seeing it now with Qatar and all of the things that are actually going on in a very positive fashion - we are stopping the funding of terrorism," Trump told reporters at the White House.


Read more at:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/art ... aign=cppst


--

please note

The information contained in this communication is
confidential, may be attorney-client privileged, may
constitute inside information, and is intended only for
the use of the addressee. It is the property of
JEE
Unauthorized use, disclosure or copying of this
communication or any part thereof is strictly prohibited
and may be unlawful. If you have received this
communication in error, please notify us immediately by
return e-mail or by e-mail to [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> , and
destroy this communication and all copies thereof,
including all attachments. copyright -all rights reserved

[admin]

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_033243
txt
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/9bq6uj0p ... tracking=1

From: Kathy Ruemmler
Sent: 7/30/2017 3:11:00 PM
To: jeffrey E. [[email protected]]
Subject: Donald Trump Can't Close Deal, Failing Salesman I National Review
Importance: High
http://amp.nationalreview.com/article/4 ... l-failing-
salesman?utm_source=PANTHEON_STRIPPED&utm_medium=PANTHEON_STRIPPED&utm_campaign=PANTHEON_STRIPPED
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 033243

Death of a F***ing Salesman
by KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
National Review
July 30, 2017 4:00 AM
https://web.archive.org/web/20170731003 ... g-salesman

Donald Trump can’t close the deal.

A few years ago in New York, Al Pacino starred in a revival of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, and the casting was poignant: In 1992, a much younger and more vigorous Pacino had played the role of hotshot salesman Ricky Roma in the film adaptation of the play; in the Broadway revival, a 72-year-old Pacino played the broken-down has-been Shelley Levene.

Glengarry Glen Ross is the Macbeth of real estate, full of great, blistering lines and soliloquies so liberally peppered with profanity that the original cast had nicknamed the show “Death of a F***ing Salesman.” But a few of those attending the New York revival left disappointed. For a certain type of young man, the star of Glengarry Glen Ross is a character called Blake, played in the film by Alec Baldwin. We know that his name is “Blake” only from the credits; asked his name by one of the other salesmen, he answers: “What’s my name? F*** you. That’s my name.” In the film, Blake sets things in motion by delivering a motivational speech and announcing a sales competition: “First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Second prize? A set of steak knives. Third prize is, you’re fired. Get the picture?” He berates the salesmen in terms both financial — “My watch cost more than your car!” — and sexual. Their problem, in Blake’s telling, isn’t that they’ve had a run of bad luck or bad sales leads — or that the real estate they’re trying to sell is crap — it is that they aren’t real men.

The leads are weak? You’re weak. . . . Your name is “you’re wanting,” and you can’t play the man’s game. You can’t close them? Then tell your wife your troubles, because only one thing counts in this world: Get them to sign on the line which is dotted. Got that, you f***ing f*****s?

A few young men waiting to see the show had been quoting Blake’s speech to one another. For them, and for a number of men who imagine themselves to be hard-hitting competitors (I’ve never met a woman of whom this is true), Blake’s speech is practically a creed. It’s one of those things that some guys memorize. But Blake does not appear in the play, the scene having been written specifically for the film and specifically for Alec Baldwin, a sop to investors who feared that the film would not be profitable and wanted an additional jolt of star power to enliven it.

That’s some fine irony: Blake’s paean to salesmanship was written to satisfy salesmen who did not quite buy David Mamet’s original pitch. The play is if anything darker and more terrifying without Blake, leaving the poor feckless salesmen at the mercy of a faceless malevolence offstage rather than some regular jerk in a BMW. But a few finance bros went home disappointed that they did not get the chance to sing along, as it were, with their favorite hymn.

These guys don’t want to see Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross. What they want is to be Blake. They want to swagger, to curse, to insult, and to exercise power over men, exercising power over men being the classical means to the end of exercising power over women, which is of course what this, and nine-tenths of everything else in human affairs, is about. Blake is a specimen of that famous creature, the “alpha male,” and establishing and advertising one’s alpha creds is an obsession for some sexually unhappy contemporary men. There is a whole weird little ecosystem of websites (some of them very amusing) and pickup-artist manuals offering men tips on how to be more alpha, more dominant, more commanding, a literature that performs roughly the same function in the lives of these men that Cosmopolitan sex tips play in the lives of insecure women. Of course this advice ends up producing cartoonish, ridiculous behavior. If you’re wondering where Anthony Scaramucci learned to talk and behave like such a Scaramuccia, ask him how many times he’s seen Glengarry Glen Ross.

What’s notable about the advice offered to young men aspiring to be “alpha males” is that it is consistent with the classic salesmanship advice offered by the real-world versions of Blake in a hundred thousand business-inspiration books (Og Mandino’s The Greatest Salesman in the World is the classic of the genre) and self-help tomes, summarized in an old Alcoholics Anonymous slogan: “Fake it ’til you make it.” For the pick-up artists, the idea is that simply acting in social situations as though one were confident, successful, and naturally masterful is a pretty good substitute for being those things. Never mind the advice of Cicero (esse quam videri, be rather than seem) or Rush — just go around acting like Blake and people will treat you like Blake.

If that sounds preposterous, remind yourself who the president of the United States of America is.

Trump is the political version of a pickup artist, and Republicans — and America — went to bed with him convinced that he was something other than what he is. Trump inherited his fortune but describes himself as though he were a self-made man.

We did not elect Donald Trump; we elected the character he plays on television.

He has had a middling career in real estate and a poor one as a hotelier and casino operator but convinced people he is a titan of industry. He has never managed a large, complex corporate enterprise, but he did play an executive on a reality show. He presents himself as a confident ladies’ man but is so insecure that he invented an imaginary friend to lie to the New York press about his love life and is now married to a woman who is open and blasé about the fact that she married him for his money. He fixates on certain words (“negotiator”) and certain classes of words (mainly adjectives and adverbs, “bigly,” “major,” “world-class,” “top,” and superlatives), but he isn’t much of a negotiator, manager, or leader. He cannot negotiate a health-care deal among members of a party desperate for one, can’t manage his own factionalized and leak-ridden White House, and cannot lead a political movement that aspires to anything greater than the service of his own pathetic vanity.

He wants to be John Wayne, but what he is is “Woody Allen without the humor.” Peggy Noonan, to whom we owe that observation, has his number: He is soft, weak, whimpering, and petulant. He isn’t smart enough to do the job and isn’t man enough to own up to the fact. For all his gold-plated toilets, he is at heart that middling junior salesman watching Glengarry Glen Ross and thinking to himself: “That’s the man I want to be.” How many times do you imagine he has stood in front of a mirror trying to project like Alec Baldwin? Unfortunately for the president, it’s Baldwin who does the good imitation of Trump, not the other way around.

Hence the cartoon tough-guy act. Scaramucci’s star didn’t fade when he gave that batty and profane interview in which he reimagined Steve Bannon as a kind of autoerotic yogi. That’s Scaramucci’s best impersonation of the sort of man the president of these United States, God help us, aspires to be.

But he isn’t that guy. He isn’t Blake. He’s poor sad old Shelley Levene, who cannot close the deal, who spends his nights whining about the unfairness of it all.

So, listen up, Team Trump: “Put that coffee down. Coffee is for closers only.” Got that?

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/4 ... g-salesman