Sex in the First Lady's Separate Bedroom, Then Thousands in Hush Money: Meet Trump's 'Bottom-Feeders'
A new book by a pair of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists presents a fresh take on decades of headline-grabbing reports about Trump's circle
People Magazine
By Sam Gillette
Before his inauguration, President Donald Trump vowed to “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C.
But a new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters documents how Trump’s past is just as murky as the political arena he promised to clean up.
Joe Palazzolo and Michael Rothfeld’s The Fixers — subtitled The Bottom-Feeders, Crooked Lawyers, Gossipmongers, and Porn Stars Who Created the 45th President and published this month — presents a fresh take on decades of headline-grabbing reports that have surfaced about Trump and the aides and associates who have been willing to get into the muck for him.
The new book focuses on Trump’s relationships with men such as former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker; Trump’s disgraced personal attorney Michael Cohen; and Rudy Giuliani, a Trump attorney and former mayor of New York City now at the center of the Ukraine scandal that led to Trump’s impeachment.
All three men, as The Fixer reports, protected the real-estate mogul and reality TV star and made deals that helped Trump rise to the top, first in business and later as a politician.
The result, according to the book, is a shadowy narrative that encompasses Trump’s mob-connected real estate days and infidelities as well as backroom deals and favors that he brokered to maintain his high-rolling image as a presidential candidate — including the hush-money payments made to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, who both said they had affairs with Trump.
(He’s denied this, just as he has denied the dozen-plus other allegations of sexual assault or misconduct against him.)
With The Fixers, Palazzolo and Rothfeld also detail how Trump’s machinations affected two of the most important women in his life: wife Melania, the first lady, and daughter Ivanka, who is a senior aide.
A White House spokeswoman initially claimed she was unaware of The Fixers or its reporting. (The authors disputed this.) She did not comment when PEOPLE sent a list of specific details from the book which are recounted in this article.
The Fixers is based on more than two years of reporting and interviews with “hundreds of people,” according to the writers. Even before the book was conceptualized, Palazzolo and Rothfeld won a Pulitzer for their Wall Street Journal series of stories about Daniels and McDougal. (Rothfeld now works at The New York Times.)
The focus of that first series wasn’t on the illicit sex but the fact that Trump participated in the women’s silencing through money payments and non-disclosure agreements. Cohen’s $130,000 payment to Daniels and his help arranging a payment of $150,000 to McDougal from The National Enquirer to ensure their silence during the 2016 election — payments he said were made at Trump’s direction — was the impetus behind his three-year jail sentence.
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