It was spring, four years ago. Donald and Ivana Trump were seated at opposite ends of their long Sheraton table in Mrs. Marjorie Merriweather Post’s former dining room. They were posed in imperial style, as if they were a king and queen. They were at the height of their ride, and it was plenty glorious. Trump was seen on the news shows offering his services to negotiate with the Russians. There was talk that he might make a run for president. Ivana had had so much publicity that she now offered interviewers a press kit of flattering clips. Anything seemed possible, the Trumps had grown to such stature in the golden city of New York.
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Besides, she [Ivana] often told her friends, however cruel Donald could be, she was very much in love with him.

This night Ivana had managed to wedge in the publisher of the local social paper, “the Shiny Sheet.” As usual, Donald’s weekend guests were paybacks, for he trusted few people. (....)

This past April, when his empire was in danger of collapse, Trump isolated himself in a small apartment on a lower floor of Trump Tower. He would lie on his bed, staring at the ceiling, talking into the night on the telephone. The Trumps had separated. Ivana remained upstairs in the family triplex with its beige onyx floors and low-ceilinged living room painted with murals in the style of Michelangelo. The murals had occasioned one of their frequent fights: Ivana wanted cherubs, Donald preferred warriors. The warriors won. “If this were on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, it would be very much in place in terms of quality,” Trump once said of the work. That April, Ivana began to tell her friends that she was worried about Donald’s state of mind. (....)

“When a man leaves a woman, especially when it was perceived that he has left for a piece of ass—a good one!—there are 50 percent of the population who will love the woman who was left,” he told me. (....)

was already fodder for the dailies and the weeklies, but he was desperate for national attention. “Did you see that The New York Times said I looked like Robert Redford?” he asked me.

Trump hasn’t changed much physically in the last ten years. Then, as now, he was all cheeks and jaw, with a tendency to look soft in the middle. He retains the blond hair, youthful swagger, and elastic face that give him the quality of the cartoon tough Baby Huey. Trump is a head swiveler, always looking around to see who else is in the room. As a boy, he was equally restless. “Donald was the child who would throw the cake at the birthday parties,” his brother Robert once told me. “If I built the bricks up, Donald would come along and glue them all together, and that would be the end of my bricks.” (....)

Donald had already made his alliance with Roy Cohn, who would become his lawyer and mentor. (....)

“I want five children, like in my own family, because with five, then I will know that one will be guaranteed to turn out like me,” Donald told a close friend. He was willing to be generous with Ivana, and a story went around that he was giving her a cash bonus of $250,000 for each child. (....)

“What do you think? Do you think blowing up the sculptures has hurt me?” he asked me that day at “21.”

“Yes.”

“Who cares?” he said. “Let’s say that I had given that junk to the Met. They would have just put them in their basement. I’ll never have the goodwill of the Establishment, the tastemakers of New York. Do you think, if I failed, these guys in New York would be unhappy? They would be thrilled! Because they have never tried anything on the scale that I am trying things in this city. I don’t care about their goodwill.” (....)

He had invited Stanley Friedman to join us. Friedman was a partner of Roy Cohn’s and, like Cohn, a legend in the city. He was part of the Bronx political machine, and would soon be appointed the Bronx County leader. Later, Friedman would go to jail for his role in the city parking-meter scandal. (...)

The fear of boredom has always loomed large in Trump’s life. He has a short attention span. He even gave the appearance of having grown bored with his wife. He told me he had grown weary of his deals, his companies, “New York phonies,” “Palm Beach phonies,” most social people, “negative” writers, and “negatives” in general. (....)

“Donald is a believer in the big-lie theory,” his lawyer had told me. “If you say something again and again, people will believe you.”

1) Waiting periods

The Supreme Court upheld a 24-hour waiting period in 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision, with the rationale that it’s OK for the government to try to persuade women to forego abortion to protect potential life. Since then, states have gone beyond that requirement and passed 48-hour and 72-hour waiting periods, forcing patients to make multiple trips to clinics and incur the extra costs associated with child care, hotels and gas or bus tickets.

2) Mandatory ultrasounds and biased counseling

A number of states require providers to tell women there are links between abortion and breast cancer or abortion and depression, even though medical authorities say there are no such links. The same goes for requiring providers to perform abortions where they describe features of the fetus to the patient with an ultrasound before the procedure can take place.

3) Restrictions on insurance coverage for abortion

The Hyde Amendment, which prevents Medicaid from covering most abortions, essentially punishes low-income women for being poor — and that’s exactly what former Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) had in mind in the late 1970s when he advocated for the proposal. More women are punished when states prohibit private insurance plans from covering the procedure.

4) Banning the most commonly used method for second-trimester abortions

Kansas and Oklahoma have tried to ban dilation and evacuation, a method used in the vast majority of second-trimester abortions and one that providers say is the safest.

5) Parental notification laws

Republicans advocate abstinence-based education in schools, and then punish the teens who inevitably get pregnant by requiring them to get permission from their parents to have abortions. Some states, like Texas, make the process of getting a “judicial bypass” to have an abortion without the permission of a parent especially difficult.

6) Laws requiring abortion clinics to look like mini-hospitals

Legislators have passed laws requiring abortion clinics to be constructed as “ambulatory surgical centers” out of a purported concern for women’s health. In reality, this is done because it means clinics are later forced to close when they can’t afford the prohibitive cost of the upgrades.

7) Laws requiring abortion providers to have admitting privileges at local hospitals

Clinics close when hospitals won’t grant admitting privileges to abortion providers out of a fear of harassment and violence from anti-abortion activists.

8) Tele-medicine bans

Republicans in a number of states have blocked patients from accessing medication abortion via tele-medicine when they live in rural areas without a clinic they can easily travel to.

9) Requiring an outdated regimen for administering medication abortion

Many abortion providers, until Wednesday, had been using an off-label protocol for providing medication abortions to patients, because the Food and Drug Administration’s directions were medically outdated and dictated that the medication be provided at too high a dose. States with Republican-controlled legislatures took advantage of this disconnect between what abortion providers do and what the FDA said they should do to pass laws preventing providers from going off-label, which meant more side effects for patients.

10) Pre-viability abortion bans

Severe fetal abnormalities are usually only detectable after the 20th week of pregnancy, but Republicans in Congress and at the state level have passed laws banning abortions after this point, based on the medically unproven claim that fetuses can feel pain.

11) Congress telling D.C. what to do

In 2011, while trying to avoid a government shutdown, President Barack Obama famously told then-House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), “John, I’ll give you D.C. abortion” — thus trading away the city’s right to fund abortions for low­-income women using its own locally raised revenue. Now, Republicans punish abortion patients for wanting abortions, and punish D.C. for not being a state, by preventing the district from funding abortions for low-income people through Medicaid.

12) Telling patients to go to another state if they want to have an abortion

In its fight over ambulatory surgical center and admitting privileges requirements that’s being considered by the Supreme Court, Texas has argued that patients in the western part of the state could simply travel over the border to New Mexico to have an abortion if clinics in that region are forced to close.

13) Actually jailing women for miscarriages or self-inducing

This is something that is already happening.

In an attempt to clarify his comments, Trump said on Wednesday that he thinks states should be able to decide if and how to punish patients who seek abortions. As Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsburg noted last year, if Roe v. Wade were to be overturned, low-income patients would be punished for seeking abortions even more than they are now, because they’d face more difficulties traveling to states where abortion would remain accessible.