Donald Trump Made This Reported Sexist Move To Bolster His Ladies' Man Reputation

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Donald Trump may have gone from marriage to marriage over the years, but that didn’t seem to stop his “playboy” image and the rampant rumors of affairs. It was reportedly a source of pride for him over the years, and he even tried to lean as far as he could into that reputation with a reported Playboy profile, featuring the good-looking staff at the Trump Organization. 

A resurfaced report on Wayne Barrett’s 1991 book, Trump, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, The Downfall, The Reinvention, claimed that he tried to get his female staffers to pose in Playboy. He reportedly wanted them to follow in the footsteps of the unauthorized pictorial spreads of the “Women of Enron,” and “Women of Starbucks.” It’s quite a bit creepier when your boss is allegedly doing the pitching. 

“He even tried to get Playboy to do a spread called ‘The Girls of Trump,’ wooing his most shapely staffers, including a former beauty queen secretary, into posing for the magazine with a sliding scale of offers on everything from full nude to breast to ‘wet-lip’ shots,” Barrett wrote in his book. “It was all part of the rakish ethos of phony glamour that he consciously fostered, even to the extent of concealing from public view a very efficient secretary with a pimplish facial condition. The author believed it was part of Donald Trump’s “projecting a larger-than-life image and reveling in it, a dangerous psychic combination.”

While Donald Trump’s camp denied the allegations in 2016, a former Playboy editor, Bruce Kluger, sort-of debunked the story to Jezebel. “If it happened at all, it was presumably pitched (and presumably rejected) by the powers-that-be before it reached my desk,” he wrote. “There was, indeed, a sliding pay scale for models who appeared in Playboy’s ‘Women of…’ pictorials, but the ‘wet-lip shots’ detail you mention is total fiction. If that categorization was actually on the table, it undoubtedly had to come from the Trump camp, not the magazine.” Perhaps the whole thing was a weird fantasy made up by Donald Trump just to add an interesting chapter to the tell-all book.

Before you go, click here to see all the celebrity women who have posed for Playboy.