Nobody was ever spanked with a more appropriate object than the one Stormy Daniels recalls employing on Donald Trump.
“He’s like, ‘have you seen my new magazine?’ Daniels recounted to Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes of her encounter with Trump in 2006.
Some have suggested that the magazine was Forbes. But the timeline doesn't add up. The spanking took place in July 2006 and the Forbes magazine with Trump on the cover came out in September 2006, with a dateline of October 2006.
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The only new magazine that Trump would have called his own at that time was the premiere issue of TRUMP magazine. It had just been produced under a licensing agreement with Trump in the way of other properties to which he lent his name and spoke of as if they were his, in this instance all the more so because he was a major shareholder in the publishing company.
He was, of course, on the cover.
“He was showing you his own picture on the cover of a magazine,” Cooper remarked to Daniels. “Right, right,” Daniels said.
“And so I was like, “Does this-- does this normally work for you?’ And he looked very taken-- taken back, like, he didn’t really understand what I was saying. Like, I was, ‘Does, just, you know, talking about yourself normally work?’ And I was like, ‘Someone should take that magazine and spank you with it.’”
Daniels laughed at the memory. She continued, “And I’ll never forget the look on his face. He was like-- I don’t think anyone's ever spoken to him like that, especially, you know, a young woman who looked like me. And I said, you know, ‘Give me that,’ and I just remember him going, ‘You wouldn’t.’ ‘Hand it over.’ And-- so he did, and I was like, ‘turn around, drop ’em.’ So he turned around and pulled his pants down a little-- you know had underwear on and stuff and I just gave him a couple swats.”
Along with Trump’s photo, the magazine’s cover was emblazoned with the words ON TOP OF THE WORLD. Another cover line read:
“BUBBLE? WHAT BUBBLE? Real Estate Tips From Trump U.”
What made it the perfect paddle to be used on such a supreme con man was that TRUMP magazine led investors to lose their savings in three distinct ways.
One way was by investing in the company that published it.
Premier Publishing Group celebrated going public in 2006 with a big party at Trump Tower attended by The Donald, his daughter Ivana and his son, Eric. The ebullient elder Trump was slated to get a six-figure annual license few as well as 16 percent of the stock. The New York Post knew nothing of the elder Trump’s tryst with Daniels and was just being clever when it when it asked what name he would adopt if he went into porn.
“Big,” Trump said, then offering a second choice: “The Trump Tower.”
The hype, along with an insistent sales force making cold calls a la “The Wolf of Wall Street” convinced investors as far away as Holland to put in sums as big as six figures. Most of them appear to have lost whatever they invested.
A second way to lose money through Trump magazine was to follow the tips from Trump University touted by the cover line and detailed by the accompanying article. The magazine relayed reassurances from Trump that that there was no real estate bubble. And, even if there were, and even if it burst, he would welcome it because he could go in and make a lot of money.
A bubble bigger than anybody imagined did in fact burst two years later, nearly wiping out Trump himself, not to mention investors who followed his advice. The global economy almost collapsed.
The third way to lose money through Trump magazine was to be persuaded by the article not just to follow bum tips from Trump University, but also to enroll as a student and begin paying excessive fees for instruction of little value.
Trump University was a passionately for profit, ostensibly educational enterprise. Ronald Schnackenberg, its sales manager in 2006, would describe it, as “a fraudulent scheme” that “preyed upon the elderly and uneducated to separate them from their money.”
Trump University’s victims would subsequently sue and receive a $25 million settlement in restitution for the tuition and other fees they were hustled into paying. Nothing at all has gone to investors who lost by either investing in the magazine itself or by following the advice offered by its pages.
One person who almost did make money as a result of TRUMP magazine was a publishing executive named Mitchell Schultz. He suggested that an animated cartoon series called Trump Takeover would be a good way to promote the magazine and might even become a hit on its own. The episodes he proposed included one in which the hero SuperTrump becomes the President of the United States.
“And saves America,” the episode summary reports.
Tramp liked the idea and entered into a licensing agreement with Schultz, who received 300,000 shares in Premiere Publishing. The stock briefly topped a dollar and it seemed Schultz might actually profit from his efforts. The one hitch was he proved unable to sell it.
“I was running around trying,” he told The Daily Beast. “I said, ‘I’ll give you half price.’ I couldn’t do it. Nobody would bite.”
He wistfully added, “Everybody lost money.”
In recent days, Schultz became aware that Stephen Colbert and Showtime were coming out with an animated series called “Our Cartoon President.”
Schultz still had a licensing agreement with Trump for a cartoon series and he has been consulting with an entertainment lawyer to see if he has ground for legal action against Colbert.
Unlike with Stormy Daniels, Trump actually signed the agreement with Schultz.
“He did,” Schultz told The Daily Beast. “We have a written agreement.”
Schultz reported that since his publishing days he embarked on a new career in a fledgling industry that has a future, however distant.
“I’m a certified space tourism specialist,” he told The Daily Beast.
Meanwhile, Schultz has maintained a SuperTrump website and blog, along with a bitcoin endeavor called SuperTrump’s CryptoMANIA Investment Club. He sometimes calls himself Mr. SuperTrump. He allows that he was amazed when the hero of his proposed cartoon went on to become president in real life.
“Can you believe that, right?” Schultz said.
And now that surreal reality has been joined by Stormy Daniels’ revelation that she spanked the future president with a copy of TRUMP magazine, the most perfect of paddles.
“I got a kick out of that one,” Schultz said.
