How (gossip columnist, the late) Liz Smith invented Donald Trump

How Liz Smith invented Donald Trump
By Marc Fisher November 13


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Liz Smith in New York 2009. The gossip columnist, who died Nov. 12 at 94, helped put President Trump on the celebrity map. (Stephen Chernin/AP)

Liz Smith claimed to have invented Donald Trump, and in a powerful and enduring way, she did.
Trump’s rise to celebrity was the product of an energetic injection of tabloid journalism into New York’s media bloodstream in the 1970s and ’80s, and it was Smith who turned Trump into one of the main characters in the city’s soap opera. The legendary gossip columnist, who died Sunday at 94, started delivering her daily dish about New York celebrities in 1976, the same year the brash Australian press lord Rupert Murdoch bought the New York Post and transformed it into a British-style splash of lurid headlines, crime-drenched reporting and juicy gossip. Smith’s column ran in the competition, the Daily News, and the two tabloids tumbled into a classic newspaper war. One of the bloodiest battles centered on the dissolution of Donald and Ivana Trump’s marriage. Smith and Trump were made for each other. She was a kinder, gentler gossipmonger, winning access to celebrities by telling the stories they wanted told rather than the more slashing tidbits that turned some columnists into personae non gratae among the boldface names. And he was a young real estate mogul hungry to establish himself as one of the city’s biggest names.

Trump had been schooled in the art of manipulating the news media by his mentor Roy Cohn, the New York lawyer who had launched his own career in the 1950s by enlisting the 20th century’s greatest gossip columnist, Walter Winchell, as a booster for Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s communist-hunting crusade. Now, Cohn was guiding Trump toward tabloid fame as a means of gaining power and greater fortune.

From the start of Trump’s career as a builder of hotels and apartment towers, Cohn had urged him to cultivate the gossip columnists, to make appearances at the right nightspots, to make certain that he was being seen and recorded with the hottest models and rising stars on his arm.


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https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/how-liz-smith-made-donald-trump-a-leading-character-on-the-new-york-stage/2017/11/13/1c94168e-c88f-11e7-aa96-54417592cf72_story.html?utm_term=.3bb006571503