Donald Trump: An Unauthorized Biography

By Jack Edwards

My wife and I went on a free vacation to Las Vegas last year.  I’m still not sure who paid for it.  It was either Donald Trump, the Hilton Corporation, or (and this is my best guess) the Las Vegas Mafia.  Anyway, in exchange for suffering through a two hour timeshare pitch, we got a voucher that covered several nights at the Trump International Hotel.  We felt very fancy and entitled walking through its sumptuous lobby.  Here it is-

Trump was still running for the Republican nomination at the time, so we asked everyone who worked there about him.  They said Trump stayed there whenever he was in town, and they really liked him.  Of course, there were a few who didn’t like him.  Those people LOVED him.  I’m not kidding.  But, as I’m sure you would expect, there were exceptions.  There was the occasional employee who neither liked nor loved Trump.  These few people WORSHIPED him.  This made me conclude that:

  1. They really did like him, or
  2. Trump had contracted with the Las Vegas Mafia to hold all their relatives hostage to keep them in line.

And if you doubt my claim that there is a Las Vegas Mafia, I present this photograph as Exhibit #1 –

The only group of people sinister enough to drop a four story M&M store smack in the middle of the Vegas Strip is organized crime.  It’s not enough that they suck your wallet dry on the casino floor, they clean out your kid’s piggy bank too.  At least the kids whose parents are stupid enough to take them to Las Vegas.

My two criticisms of the Trump International, which you may or may not choose to attribute to Donald Trump (although I blame him personally), are:

1.  The elevators weren’t equipped with those key card inserts to ensure that only guests can travel up their floor. (I kid you not, in the evening, they assigned a stocky guy to stand in front of the elevator bank who made us show him our key cards before he’d let us pass.)

And,

2.  More than once, while taking a shower, the water went cold.  That’s a deal breaker.  If the Mafia weren’t paying for my room, I would have lodged a very sternly worded complaint.

Side note: As you know, Las Vegas visitors are required by law to attend a Cirque du Soleil show.  We went to see “O.”  Here’s my review:  Watching people do one amazing high dive after another was incredible… for the first 30 minutes.  Then it’s time to wrap it up and let us get back to the bar, uh, … I mean the casino.

When we got back to the hotel on our final evening, we decide to hit the lounge.  This is where the The Donald, in no uncertain terms, convinced me that he can get Mexico to pay for his wall.  He got me, the biggest cheapskate in the Northern Hemisphere, to pay $500 for this drink-

Okay, not quite $500, but WAY too much.  Embarrassingly too much.  Although it did go down quite smoothly.

So, if you want to get all technical about it, I didn’t actually meet Donald Trump, but I got a pretty good sense of the guy.  And in the end, yes, I have decided that I completely agree with your assessment of him.  You are right.  You are ABSOLUTELY right.