It’s MBS’s World…

They say a picture can be worth a 1000 words, and so today I bring you two, which, together show the diametrically opposed world view which Donald Trump is going to have to adjudicate.

I am told by multiple well-placed sources, Trump already has “people” on the ground in the Middle East – never mind that’s not supposed to happen before he’s president. This isn’t that sort of government. Trump wants peace and he wants it sorted asap.

Above is the official AP photograph from today’s Arab summit in Riyadh, convened by the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) to discuss Israel’s “continued aggression” towards the Palestinians in Gaza and Lebanon. (The prince amped up his position, called on Israel to respect Iran’s sovereignty and accused Jerusalem of genocide.)

So, you want to look carefully at everyone’s positions to ascertain the new hierarchy in the region. It’s doubtful that MBS said to his guests, “Just find a mark and stand there…”

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

The Democrats’ Disastrous Disconnect

Yesterday, Sam Nunberg and I chewed over Trump’s victory.

The biggest take-aways to me are :

1 – Trump’s off-the-wall behavior like “the weave”, and the dancing at rallies, may well be part of a strategy taught to him by his mentor, the late Roy Cohn. “Drive Your Enemies Crazy and they’ll end up making mistakes and it will help you.” It worked.

2 – Trump overrode his advisers to go to rallies in places like New York, New Jersey, California and New Mexico, where he knew he wouldn’t win, because he wanted to win the popular vote.

3 – The majority of Americans have moved on from January 6th and are tired of hearing about it.

4 – If the Democrats and the media don’t find a different way to frame Trump, they are on a path to irrelevance.

The transcript, edited for clarity, and the audio are below:

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Who’s Gonna Win?

It’s here. The phone is ringing off the hook. No rumor is too off-the-wall not to take seriously, especially after David Plouffe’s pronouncement last night on CNN that Kamala Harris is well positioned to take all seven swing states

So in the Trump universe, the operatives yawned and said, “That’s just David doing his job, to keep hope alive.” But in the New York Times newsroom, they want to believe him.

I’ve even heard this morning that the Harris campaign believes Indiana is in play. And that if Trump loses North Carolina (which he may, courtesy of the disastrous recent remarks of Governor Mark Robinson, who looks likely to be defeated), then what?

I spoke today, as my readers know I do most days, to Trump’s first campaign adviser Sam Nunberg, who has been plugged in since the early hours. (At the end he has to hop off to take one more campaign call).

Here’s his take on where we are. I think he sounds less confident than he was a couple weeks ago but he says the Trump campaign thinks Pennsylvania is “doable” and, says they are optimistic.

And yet the Harris team says the same thing.

You can read the transcript below or listen to it here:

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

The Jeffrey Epstein Tapes and Donald Trump

Michael Wolff has got a new book on Trump coming out, and I am looking forward to it immensely.

I am sure that like his previous three Trump books, this new one will be the kind of fast-paced yarn you devour in one sitting.

I’m particularly looking forward to reading about the morning in August when I’m told Trump woke up and said to his startled campaign team: “I’ve decided I am pro-choice…deal with it…”

Michael is a very shrewd marketer and one presumes that’s why Thursday, on his podcast Fire and Fury, he aired a snippet of a recording of Jeffrey Epstein in 2017 discussing the way Trump played his senior White House lieutenants against each other, and why today, he’s releasing more in which, according to the Daily Beast, Epstein talks about his friendship with Trump – he says that for ten years he was Trump’s closest friend – and he also meanderingly talks about Trump’s salesmanship, Trump setting up his friends with models and recording the conversations for their wives to hear, in order to seduce them himself, and Trump having a scalp reduction.

The Trump campaign has called the tapes “false smears” and “election interference,” and described Michael as “a disgraced writer who routinely fabricates lies in order to sell fiction books because he clearly has no morals or ethics.”

Ok, for my money, what’s interesting about these tapes, so far, is not what they tell us about Trump – which is not really anything new. It’s all variations on a theme.

I could have told you, for instance, that Epstein and Trump were often together when meeting beautiful women, and I could have told you that Trump was a good salesman and doesn’t spend his spare time reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I reported here and for Rolling Stone that Melanie Walker, one of Epstein’s proteges, who became a neuroscientist and close associate of Bill Gates, originally met both Trump and Epstein in New York’s Plaza Hotel, over tea in 1992…

No, what’s interesting about the tapes is what they reveal about Epstein: they show something that’s crucial to understanding why he was able to inveigle himself into the world of the plutocracy: they show what a consummate con-artist he was.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Beware The Yard Sign Thieves!

It’s count-down to Election Day and we are all feeling the heat.

Some more than others…

How else to explain the flurry of yard sign thefts that are going on reportedly around the country, particularly out on the eastern end of Long Island.

In Bellport, a small bucolic town where I rent a little writer’s cabin, I opined at a dinner party last weekend that I was surprised by the vast number of Trump/Vance signs along the highway, because the community is full of liberal writers and artists.

My fellow dinner guests were quick to explain: there’s a dearth of Harris/Walz signs because they keep being stolen in the middle of the night. And when the frustrated owners have replaced them – forking out another $20.00 – they’ve disappeared again.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

It’s Celebrity-Election-Line-Up!

This morning as I walked like a granny to my office, I was listening, as usual, to Morning Joe. Suddenly, Jennifer Lopez was in my ear, urging me to vote for Kamala Harris. Lopez is energized, apparently, because of comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s jokeabout Puerto Rico being a “floating pile of garbage” at the Trump rally in Madison Square Garden; so, she’s now going to perform at the Harris/Walz rally in Las Vegas tomorrow.

And, within an hour of listening to Lopez, I’m at my desk and a news alert flashes on my screen: I read that …oh my god…Arnold Schwarzenegger is endorsing Harris.

But, swiftly on the heels of that, news breaks of another celebrity endorsement… Buzz Aldrin.

Buzz Aldrin? I didn’t know he was still alive…but yes, he is (at 94)…and he is endorsing Trump because Trump (well, Elon really) is big into the extremely pressing voter issue of space exploration. Footballers Brett Favre and Nick Bosa have also come out for Trump. But the rapper Bad Bunny is for Harris. So too is Barbara Bush…and on it goes. It’s the game of Election Celebrity Line-Up, in which there are no real shocks – and, I’d argue, no real impact.

Are you going to change your mind about who you will vote for because of Jennifer, Arnold, or Buzz? Do let me know if so, and send in your reasoning. If space exploration is your top priority I’d be fascinated to hear all about that…

More seriously, I’m reminded that in 2016, instead of knocking on doors, Hillary Clinton disastrously spent the Friday before the election, at a concert in Cleveland, hobnobbing with Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Chance the Rapper, J. Cole – and Diddy.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Ivanka Hands the Microphone to Jared

Greetings from the ER.

Ok, so I know that sounds a bit melodramatic, but my bosses at Substack tell me that part of the appeal of a Substack is rawness and authenticity. They tell me that Substack readers like to know how the proverbial sausage is made – or not made – which is what happened today.

I was racing to my office with all sorts of ideas for today’s column when I did a face-plant on the sidewalk. How it happened, I have no idea. But I will say this: the kindness of the people who rushed to help me was one of the most heartwarming things I’ve experienced in these past few weeks, a time in which I think we’ve all felt unusually anxious.

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Putting on Ayers!

Happy Monday everyone.

So a couple of thing to unpack today.

First, thank you to the very helpful reader who pointed out to me that last week, Nick Ayers, Mike Pence’s one time “man in the swamp” and White House chief of staff, was back from obscurity in the nick of time to suck up to Donald Trump by appearing on Fox News to trash-talk Gen. John Kelly after Kelly told the New York Times that Trump occasionally remarked that “Hitler did some good things” in an interview to the New York Times. (Ayers said that this was “egregious” on Kelly’s part, and that Trump never said this; other former Trump White House staffers have meanwhile lined up to support Kelly’s version.)

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

Tiffany Trump’s Big Moment: Finally!

Some people have all the luck.

Consider the case of the fortuitous timing of Tiffany Trump’s pregnancy, announced last week in Detroit, by her proud father.

At first, when I read about it, I thought naively: Oh, how nice! It’s great that he cares so much about Tiffany that he wants to share this…

And then, I realized after I watched his interview on Sunday with the Saudi government funded TV network, Al Arabiya, that I was being dumb.

Tiffany Trump’s husband, Michael Boulos, is Lebanese. He was born in Lebanon and raised in Nigeria.

Detroit is in the swing state of Michigan, where there is a big Arab American community that’s voted Democrat for over 20 years, following 9/11.

But that community, according to today’s Washington Post, is now divided over whether to vote for Kamala Harris, seeing her as aligned with President Biden’s staunch support of Israel. According to the Post, many may not vote at all.

After, his speech to Detroit’s Economic club, Trump reportedly met with two local Imams, courtesy of Michael Boulos’s businessman father, Massad Boulos, who has reportedly been lobbying Michigan’s Arab Americans on behalf of the Trump campaign for the past six months.

And Tiffany’s pregnancy enabled Trump to talk out of both sides of his mouth on his Al Arabiya interview last Sunday: on the one hand saying Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu should feel free to do whatever he wants in terms of bombing Lebanon and Iran, and on the other saying that he’s thrilled he’s going to have a grandchild who is half-Arab and he wants Lebanon to be a place his family can visit.

“I’m happy about it. I have many friends who are Arab, as you say, but from different countries, but Arab, and I’m very happy about this. They’re very warm people. It’s a shame what’s happening over there. They’re the warmest people. Michael’s father’s so great; his mother’s so great. They’re friends of mine. Michael’s such a great young man. He’s such a smart guy. And they’re gonna have a baby and I’m very happy about it.”

I’ve never thought much about Tiffany Trump or Michael Boulos.

It’s possible that, until recently, neither has Donald Trump. You’ll recall that Trump’s personal assistant Madeleine Westerhout was fired in 2019 after knocking back a couple of drinks and telling reporters that Trump couldn’t pick Tiffany out of a crowd.

But that was before Tiffany got married to Michael at Mar-a-Lago in 2022 following a courtship conducted far from proletariat view, in a bunch of private members clubs in London and Europe.

Thus an opportunity arose. Coincidence?

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates

The Art of The Distraction

Trump is nothing if not a master of distraction. He’s got the pundits on cable news hyperventilating over his very hectic weekend. His musings on Arnold-Palmer-in-the-shower, by my watch, got more airtime this morning than any other Trump story, including his cameo appearances at McDonalds and at the Jets-Steeler game, and his doubling down on Fox News of the Nazi-era phrase: “The enemy within.”

It’s a lot to chew on.

So you would be forgiven if you did not notice that, between all this, he slipped in a quick interview with Saudi Arabia’s State TV Al Arabiya, in which he was positively glowing about Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed Bin Salman. Trump calls him, “A great guy.” And also says:

I have so much respect for the king, so much respect for Mohammed, who is doing so great. I mean, he’s really a visionary. He’s done things that nobody else would have even thought about. His very long city that he’s building, he’s really doing something. He’s a great guy. And he’s respected all over the world.

So, you know where I’m going with this…

Mohammed Bin Salman is not only a guy with a questionable human rights record, he’s the main “backer” – how else to put it? – of the lavish lifestyle of Trump’s daughter, Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner.

Trump makes it very, very easy for people to forget this — and the very serious risk Kushner’s business ties pose to American foreign policy and national security – with his continual, successful poking-of-the-bear that is the mainstream media. No journalist seems to be asking him any questions about the national security risk that his daughter and son-in-law could pose to a future Trump administration, because he’s got the media exactly where he wants them: doing deep-dive research into which presidential candidate has now spent more hours working for McDonald’s.

I’d argue that journalists should spend more time studying the Instagram accounts of Ivanka and Jared and think about the deeper meaning beneath the surface imagery, which, as I’ve written here before, could be easily confused with an episode of Real Housewives of Miami.

To the unthinking and sympathetic eye, Ivanka’s social media shows the former First Daughter having a well-earned rest. She wakeboards; she foils; she golfs; she goes boating with the girls; she and Jared entertain in their new $24 million home in the private enclave of Indian Creek.

And, unlike the awkward years of her father’s presidency – remember when Christine Lagarde rolled her eyes when Ivanka tried to insert herself into a conversation with French President Emmanuel Macron, and British PM Theresa May at the G20 summit – the couple is now wanted at the parties of the global elite! Perhaps Christine Lagarde is not issuing them an invitation, but as a consolation prize there’s the Ambani wedding in India, and Kim Kardashian’s 43rd birthday party!

It all seems to be going so well for the couple…

Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates