What They Voted For: Trump Family Values

#familyvalues | #WhatTheyVotedFor

Ah! scandal! Or, via Page Six:

Years before Vanessa Trump filed for divorce from Donald Trump Jr., their marriage was rocked when—around the time she was pregnant with their third child—he cheated on her with a contestant from “The Celebrity Apprentice.”

Page Six has exclusively learned that Don Jr.—then a so-called “adviser” on the NBC show—fell for busty Danity Kane star Aubrey O’Day while filming “Celebrity Apprentice” in 2011.

Sources say that Vanessa—who filed for divorce from President Donald Trump’s eldest son last week after 13 years of marriage—was devastated when he told her that he planned to leave her for O’Day.

Vanessa was pregnant with their third child, Tristan, around that time.

That was yesterday; the New York Post gossip team rolls on, today asking, “Is Aubrey O’Day’s song ‘DJT’ about Donald Trump Jr.?”

What will the post-presidential reality show be called? Trump Family Scandals? Trump Shore? The Real Assholes of Manhattan? The Ballad of “Donny Smalls”?

Additionally, it is worth noting that apparently we now must give a damn about who Aubrey O’Day is. That is to say, branded celebrity is easy enough to avoid until it isn’t, and the crossing of such thresholds ought to count for something.

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Image note: Donald Trump, Jr. (Photo: Manish Swarup/AP Photo, File)

Bacardi, Francesca. “Is Aubrey O’Day’s song ‘DJT’ about Donald Trump Jr.?”. Page Six. 20 March 2018.

Coleman, Oli and Carlos Greer. “Donald Trump Jr. romanced Aubrey O’Day during marriage to Vanessa”. Page Six. 19 March 2018.

The Perfect Sense (Tennessee Intellectual Remix)

Simon McCormack tries, desperately, to explain the situation, for Huffington Post:

A Tennessee judge said the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize gay marriage nationwide has left him unable to determine what constitutes divorce.

A Signal Mountain couple, Thomas and Pamela Bumgardner, are still legally married even though they don’t want to be because of Hamilton County Chancellor Jeffrey Atherton’s stance, according to the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

“The conclusion reached by this Court is that Tennesseans have been deemed by the U.S. Supreme Court to be incompetent to define and address such keystone/central institutions such as marriage, and, thereby, at minimum, contested divorces,” Atherton wrote in his decision last week.

“With the U.S. Supreme Court having defined what must be recognized as a marriage, it would appear that Tennessee’s judiciary must now await the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court last to what is not a marriage, or better stated, when a marriage is no longer a marriage,” he added.

It is true that the question occurs to wonder why conservatives are the ones so often complaining about judicial activism.

This is the pertinent question: What the hell is wrong with these people?

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McCormack, Simon. “Judge Won’t Divorce Straight Couple Because Gay Marriage Is Legal”. The Huffington Post. 3 September 2015.

The Supremacist’s Lament

“Public officials are ministers of God assigned the duty of punishing the wicked and protecting the righteous.”

―Win Johnson

The disgraceful derby scrambling in the wake of Obergefell has yet to settle out; with presidential candidates struggling to find ways to evade the U.S. Constitution, or taking up the notion of just calling the whole marriage thing off, an Alabama attorney named Win Johnson has appealed to Gov. Robert Bentley (R) to opt out of the U.S. Constitution. Mr. Johnson, for his part, is a state official, a director at the Administrative Office of Courts, which in turn oversees the courts for state Chief Justice Roy Moore.

It seems a striking letter; Charles J. Dean reported, for AL.com:

In harsh words and a lecturing tone, a lawyer who works for Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore has written a letter seemingly directed at Gov. Robert Bentley rebuking him for saying Alabama will obey the U.S. Supreme Court ruling declaring same-sex marriage legal.

More appropriately, it really is a striking letter, so wild-eyed and seemingly irresponsible that the Souther Poverty Law Center has called for Johnson’s resignation.

And let us be clear; part of the problem with excerpting the letter is that the whole thing really is a show and a half. Christian supremacism, abdication of duty, rejection of the Constitution, and hey, even a Godwin violation just to hit for the cycle. Again, let us be clear: All for hatred in Jesus’ name, amen.

Almost Funny

No, really, this is very nearly funny:

Last month, Nick Jensen wrote an op-ed for the Canberra CityNews in which he claimed that he and his wife Sarah would “as a matter of conscience, refuse to recognize the government’s regulation of marriage if its definition includes the solemnization of same-sex couples.” Jensen went on to attribute his beliefs to the definition of marriage as a “union of a man and a woman before a community in the sight of God.”

In response to these claims, Jesse Mount, also an Australian citizen, created a Facebook group for people who will celebrate the Jensen’s divorce by having a massive party once marriage equality comes to the country as a whole. The group currently has over 175,000 members who have RSVP-ed for the party.

(Nichols)

In the end, though, it’s just sad. You know, though, that couple probably shouldn’t be married, anyway. If the fact of gay people having human rights is enough to compel them to get divorced, it occurs to wonder why the hell they ever got hitched in the first place. Seriously, this is enough to wreck the marriage? What the hell kind of marriage is that?

Very nearly funny. In the end, though, this is just sad.

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Nichols, JamesMichael. “175,000 Pledge To Party If Anti-Gay Australia Couple Divorces Over Same-Sex Marriage”. The Huffington Post. 19 June 2015.

The O’Reilly Spectacle

There are so many unfortunate things about this rising scandal:

Three weeks ago, a Nassau County Supreme Court justice ended a bitter three-year custody dispute between Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly and his ex-wife, Maureen McPhilmy, by granting custody of the couple’s two minor children to McPhilmy. Though nearly all documents pertaining to New York family court cases are sealed, Gawker has learned that the justice in the case heard testimony accusing O’Reilly of physically assaulting his wife in the couple’s Manhasset home.

According to a source familiar with the facts of the case, a court-appointed forensic examiner testified at a closed hearing that O’Reilly’s daughter claimed to have witnessed her father dragging McPhilmy down a staircase by her neck, apparently unaware that the daughter was watching. The precise date of the alleged incident is unclear, but appears to have occurred before the couple separated in 2010. The same source indicated that the daughter, who is 16 years old, told the forensic examiner about the incident within the past year.

As J. K. Trotter explains for Gawker, this is the latest sordid chapter exposed in an ongoing ugly dispute between FOX News host Bill O’Reilly and his ex-wife.

Painful

Er … um … ouch:

And, well, yeah, about that.

So much of life is about leave-taking: moving from home to college, from love to love, from city to city and from life stage to life stage.

In earlier times, leaving was defined by distance, but now it is defined by silence. Everybody everywhere is just a text away, a phone call away. Relationships are often defined by the frequency and intensity of communication between two people.

The person moving on and changing a relationship no longer makes a one-time choice to physically go to another town. He makes a series of minute-by-minute decisions to not text, to not email or call, to turn intense communication into sporadic conversation or no communication. His name was once constant on his friend’s phone screen, but now it is rare and the void is a wound.

(Brooks)

And so on.

Anyway. Yeah. About that.

Life transitions are.

Still, though. Ouch.

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Tomorrow, Tom. “Go read David Brooks’ column in the NYT this morning and tell me that’s not just one giant subtweet from a man going through a divorce”. Twitter. 3 March 2015.

Brooks, David. “Leaving and Cleaving”. The New York Times. 3 March 2015.