The following article by Nina Burleigh with Newsweek was posted on the AlterNet website September 25, 2017:
Leaked interview transcripts offer fresh insight into the president’s twisted psyche.
Donald Trump thinks Ivanka “looks down on me,” concedes he groped Melania in public and knows his compulsive hand-washing “could be a psychological problem,” according to a new archive of all the conversations he had on air with the Howard Stern Show.
Those comments, along with various eyebrow-raising but predictable vulgarities, can be found in a new, online archive of Trump’s 15 hours of radio banter with the shock jock. In them, he discusses the relative hotness of his wives (and almost every other female celebrity of the moment) and his feelings about his daughter Ivanka, while chortling with Stern’s crew as they joked about who was more “gay,” and whether getting vomited on was more gross than eating food that had been on someone’s anus.
In one September 2004 call, he and Stern were bantering about how Ivana was dating a “blueblood” from Bedminster, New Jersey, and joking about how their kids were more blue blooded than they were. “I think my daughter looks down on me,” Trump admitted. “She said, ‘oh my god—”
The two then turned to how much money Trump was going to leave his growing brood (Barron was not yet born). “I’m going to give them Trump Online University,” he said. “And charity gets a lot.”
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Stern refused to re-air any of his conversations with the Republican nominee. “I feel Donald Trump did the show in an effort to be entertaining and have fun with us and I feel like it would be a betrayal to any of our guests if I sat there and played them now where people are attacking him,” Stern said on his Sirius XM show.
Newsweek exclusively obtained the full audio and transcripts of all 15 hours of Trump talking to Stern from 1993 to August 25, 2015. Taken together, the Stern interviews are a rich Freudian case study, a gold mine for anyone trying to understand the president of the United States. The real estate magnate usually called in when he had something to hawk- a book, a prizefight, his TV show – but almost always stayed around to banter with Stern, whose preoccupation with sex and unctuous questioning style led the real estate magnate to free-associate on everything from his parents, children, upbringing, money, enemies, politics, and, of course, breasts, enhanced or not.
The interviews are collated and searchable in a massive new archive of conversations that also show Trump and his third wife, now first lady Melania Trump, were more than willing to discuss intimate details of their sex lives, even as The Donald tested the water for a presidential run in 1999. An anonymous person earlier this month sent the audio files of 35 full and unique Trump-Stern interviews by dropbox to the website factba.se. The site developers had made a public request for Stern/Trump interview audio files on various Stern fan sites and on Reddit earlier this year. The site allowed Newsweek to search the files before making them available to the public for the first time on Monday.
Trump has talked more to Stern than to any other single journalist or media personality, including Joe Scarborough, Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Chris Matthews, Larry King or Don Imus. The voluminous archive contains more than 104,357 words Trump uttered on the Stern Show, a number which is, by the site’s calculations, 21 percent longer than “The Art of the Deal,” Trump’s first best-seller, which weighed in at 86,575 words.
Most of the conversations happened after Trump started dating Melania, and Stern usually tee’d off by asking intimate questions about the former model. In a conversation on November 11, 1999, transcribed for the site, Trump called in to hawk an upcoming prize fight at the Taj Mahal casino, then talked about PDA with Melania and how their first night went.
Stern: Have you ever felt her up in public?
Trump: Yeah.
Stern: Yeah. As I know.
Trump: I’m very well-behaved actually and almost always I’m very down the middle.
Stern: How did you meet this supermodel?
Trump: I met her at a very big party in New York. And she was there along with other supermodels and I greeted all of them and I said, that’s the one that’s the most beautiful.
Stern: Wow.
Trump: And she is considered beautiful by the other girls, I mean they, she’s really considered most beautiful, but she’s-beyond beauty, she’s a very nice person.
Stern: And you got stank on your hangover the first night?
Trump: I didn’t do well with her the first time.
Stern: You didn’t.
Trump: No, it was not working. The whole thing was not working the first night.
On May 24, 2002, Trump again referred to getting “the right price” for Melania on a billboard.
Stern: She must be great in the sack. She must have magic. … She must do something.
Trump: Well, I let her do advertising down there because I got her for the right price, Howard [referring to Melania on a New York City billboard ad].
Stern: She must be driving you crazy.
Trump: I really made a good deal. She did go on the billboards and I got it for the right price.
Stern: And she’s not a — she’s not a pain in the ass like Ivana?
Trump: No, she’s great.
Stern and Trump also discussed his various marital prenups. In May 1993, Trump notes that even though he gave Ivana $25 million, she violated the prenup, “spitting all over” him by writing a roman a clef. That provoked Stern to ask him about his germ phobia. Trump admitted he washes his hands “as many times as possible,” per day.
Stern: You realize that’s a psychological problem.
Trump: It could be a psychological problem.
Stern: There’s no way for you to get … You cannot overpower this problem you know that — I mean theoretically you know, because that’s obsessive-compulsive, right? Have you ever gone to a psychiatrist to eliminate that problem?
Trump: No. I like it. I like cleanliness. Cleanliness is a nice thing. Not only hands, body, everything.
Stern then asks if Trump makes the models he dates (many of whom they had rated together) take AIDS tests.
Trump: I own 25 percent of Goodyear Tire and Rubber.
Stern: You wear a rubber? There you go, there’s something interesting you don’t hear every day on TV.
After putting Melania on the phone with Stern once, Trump also explained that he likes women with accents, and Stern reminded him of Ivana’s Czech accent.
Trump: She’s got accent.
Stern: Well, you know what it is, the accent’s cute now, but you better not get married. Because you know what happened, Ivana’s accent was cute for a long time.
Trump: Yes, it was amazing and then one time I woke up that [sic] it was terrible I couldn’t stand it.
On October 10, 2001, discussing ways to prevent another 9/11, Trump had a novel suggestion. “You have a red button in the plane and the pilot has a huge problem in the back he’s got two or three terrorists, you know crazy,” Trump said. “He presses a button and sleeping gas comes out the entire back of the plane goes to sleep.”
Trump usually took the bait whenever Stern tried to get him talking about which celebrities he would “bang” or how often he and Melania had sex, but occasionally he deflected him: In May 8, 1993, he noted in the recordings, “I like Howard but I have to be crazy to be here.”
But Trump kept coming back for more.
The interview archive resembles livestream from the boys’ table in a 7th grade cafeteria. Trump eagerly rated women’s bodies, shared details of sex with his wife and roared at scatological jokes.
In a new book released this month called “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump”, 27 psychiatrists and mental health experts assess Trump from afar. Psychologists Rosemary Sword and Philip Lombardo write that Trump’s impulsivity and immaturity are signs of a person exhibiting “unbridled and extreme present hedonism,” a syndrome related to arrested emotional development due to childhood trauma.
“Without proper individual assessment we can only make a best guess about whether Trump suffers from arrested emotional development which may or may not be a factor in his extreme present hedonism,” they write. Yet, based on “his bullying behavior, his immature remarks about sex, and his childlike need for constant attention, we can speculate that the traumatizing event was when he was sent away to military school at the age of thirteen.”
Trump first expressed interest in running for president in 1988, he ran briefly in 1999 and then considered again in 2011. Trump’s last appearance on Stern was August 25, 2015, two months after Trump announced his candidacy. That day, Trump declined the deejay’s request to rate the hotness of Megyn Kelly. “Well, you know in the old days I would not have minded answering that question, but today I’ll take a pass,” he said.
After the “grab ‘em by the pussy” Entertainment Tonight hot mic tape release in October last year, Melania Trump went on CNN and told Anderson Cooper she had warned her husband that Stern was bad for him. “He was pushed on and many times, I give him an advice and I didn’t agree to do all the tapes on Howard Stern, with Billy Bush,” she said. “Because I know those people. They hook him on, they — they try to get from him some — some inappropriate and dirty language.”
In April last year, candidate Trump explained that the Stern conversations were simply good fun. “I never anticipated running for office or being a politician, so I could have fun with Howard on the radio and everyone would love it. People do love it,” Trump said. “I could say whatever I wanted when I was an entrepreneur, a business guy.”
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