© Linda CataffoBarbara Res on a Trump construction site in 1980.
I was that woman.
My view on his statement, and his candidacy more generally, in light of my experiences working directly for him and his then-wife Ivana: Even though he just went out of his way to repeat a pejorative reference to female anatomy to describe Ted Cruz, Trump is not as bad as he sounds. But he's a lot worse than he says.
I worked with and for Trump over a period of about 18 years, from 1978 to 1996. I started out as an employee of the company that built the Hyatt Hotel, then served as his vice president in charge of construction of Trump Tower, later as his executive vice president in charge of development and finally as a consultant.
In 18 years, Trump changed as much as he stayed the same, and we went from being almost friends to total strangers. I think of Trump now as a celebrity. He is best known as a TV star, not a builder. They call him a developer, but mostly he just licenses his name. He no longer gets involved in looking at plans or talking to contractors as he did in my day.
When I worked for Donald, especially in the early days, you could just walk into his office. At least, I could. I spent time with him every single day when we did Trump Tower. Not so much after that project, although we did spend a lot of time together when I was doing the Plaza. When I started with Trump there were eight or nine people in his office. He used to answer the phone in the morning when no one was there. We walked to meetings together. There were no bodyguards. He was totally approachable and accessible. When he hired his long-time assistant, that all started to change. In time, she became his gatekeeper; later she became a vice president and had her own gatekeeper.
Now he has an entourage. But in the beginning, Donald was a very rich but otherwise ordinary man.
Trump told me when he hired me that I was a "killer." He said men are better than women but a good woman is better than 10 men. Feminists might call this sexism. I don't. Put into the context of the times, Trump was just making sense of a social reality. Women had to be twice as good and work twice as hard as their male counterparts to get anywhere. So when you found a successful female, it was guaranteed that she was by far the best of the bunch. My bosses held me to higher standards than the men; they told me so.
Donald saw a good thing and grabbed it. He counted on me to work like a dog to prove myself, in his mind, as women must do. He was notorious for finding good talent, as he will tell you. He also picked quite a few clunkers. The team that did Trump Tower was top notch.
Later, he would hire and promote many people with questionable qualifications. I could see, over time, his growing need to be coddled and agreed with, the kind of need that leads to being surrounded by yes-sayers. Now, one only has to watch his public appearances to know that Trump is not getting professional advice as to how to conduct himself. He is not being handled by anyone.
In my heyday, Trump had several extremely strong women working for him. They were all "killers." As a matter of fact, Trump told me that wanting to be liked by my subordinates was a weakness. He said I was too nice. I was also too honest. But Trump knew how to work my characteristics to his favor. He knew how to exploit the skills of everyone who worked for him.
While wanting to be liked was a vice in me, Trump will tell you that everyone likes him. This is not the case. He can be very charming and ingratiating, but he is not nice. In my experience, he is nasty to the people who work for him. He can be very abusive and curt. He has an incredible temper and he lashes out at everyone, including Ivana.
Of all the people I know who worked for or with Trump, including contractors, lawyers, architects, employees, only a very few actually like him. Some respect him, some don't. Many hate his guts.
Does he discriminate against women? I never thought that Trump would hire a man over an equally qualified woman. On the contrary, I think he is more comfortable around women. He was close with and had tremendous respect for his mother. He treated his assistant with the deference you would give to your mother. All the other women were treated exactly the same as the men. I think that went for pay scales as well, although he could have paid me more, and I often wondered if I were a man, would he have.
He has his fixed idea of how women work. He also used to have fixed ideas about certain nationalities, such as who are the best with money, who are the sternest masters, who are the cleanest. Just reflecting society — he profiled, but didn't discriminate. He would always hire the person he thought was best without regard to gender. I know I never got a break like the one I got from Donald.
Every employer I have ever worked for has considered me in terms of my gender. I would say that in that way, Trump was the best of them.
Is he a sexist? By the late 1980s, Trump had taken to decorating his office with beautiful women. The receptionists and his assistants looked like models. When he had a meeting, only the most beautiful secretaries were allowed to greet the guests or serve coffee. Does that make him a sexist? He certainly hired not-so-attractive females, he just hid them when people were around. Trump was, again, only giving the people what they want. Being gorgeous was just a BFOQ (bona fide occupational qualification) for working the front office.
To be fair, Trump thought everyone should be attractive, not just women. He was very critical of ugly people, especially fat people, but he never discriminated in hiring them, as far as I can tell. We had plenty of heavy people working for us. However, as I predicted, the overweight contestant on the first "Apprentice" show was the first to go.
What about the way Trump talks about women? Well, I can tell you this kind of behavior wasn't prevalent until the time he became involved with Marla Maples. He started talking a lot about all the women he was intimate with, bragging about being with top models, movie stars. Then he began talking about women, in public, in terms of their physical attributes. He became very macho. There is no question that he said some very sexist things in front of me, but not to me.
He leered at attractive female employees. Yet I would call him more of a womanizer than a sexist, sort of like Bill Clinton. Trump says he loves women and I suspect he does, in his own way. But his public denigration of women and his association with objectifying activities like Playboy and pageants have the overall effect of blunting any assertion that he is not sexist, regardless of how many women Trump has hired.
So, then, would Trump be great for women? He is against reproductive freedom. He is against raising the minimum wage to a fair and equitable rate. He wants to do away with the Affordable Care Act. He wants to deport unregistered aliens. All of these issues impact women profoundly. Even a cabinet full of women would not mitigate the disastrous effect implementing his proposals would have on the welfare and progress of women in our country. No, Donald Trump is not great for women and therefore not right for the United States.
Res is an engineer and attorney living in New Jersey. She is the author of "All Alone on the 68th Floor: How One Woman Changed the Face of Construction," a memoir about her experiences in the construction business.
Did you see or look into what he was running against????