It's just a sliver, a slice of magazine, at the bottom of the pile of newspapers underneath the plate that held the china bowl that held the taco bowl that Trump acted as if he might be eating. There are many details in the picture that captured everyone's attention 2 days ago, and Buzzfeed's Benny Johnson won the prize for noticing it first....
... and then everyone wanted to talk about that. It's an old picture of Marla, from 1985, so you might at first think he's got an old memento, but it turns out it's the May 2d issue of People, an article about him, "Marla Maples Opens Up About Surprisingly Modest Lifestyle After Her Split from Donald Trump: 'I Laugh When People Think I Walked Away with a Fortune.'" It makes sense that he'd have that magazine, open to that page, so you can go any way you want, asking whether the old man was ogling a picture of his ex-wife. He was maybe going through what's in the current press in a businesslike fashion, maybe enjoying/treasuring/"creeping on" the photograph.
But, come on! It's intentional! It's such a specific sliver — the woman in a bikini — barely visible, but framed neatly in the lower right hand corner, just under his thumb...
That was meant to be discovered and to spark a whole new round of attention to the absurd taco-bowl picture. We're dragged into the old story of Trump's cheating on his first wife, his access to beautiful women, his cheerful nonchalance about the whole crazy overstuffed life as he's about to overstuff his smiling face with an insanely large portion of faux-ethnic glop. And we're caught peeking, guilty of peering into details that he — we might imagine — didn't mean to expose. Oh, bad us! And let's take a closer look at that bikini-pic, as all the articles about Taco Bowl, Phase 2 contain glaringly clear, large photos of the bosomy 21-year-old. How are we to feel about all this — about him, about ourselves, about all the young women in bikinis and the older men who are able to have sex with them, and our exclusion from and, now, inclusion in their glamorous life?
This is the place he's brought us to, with that little sliver, that tiny slice we got for lunch when he was seemingly wolfing down 20,000 calories
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