Donald Trump Was Obsessed with my Great-Grandmother for 10 Minutes

My great-grandmother was an average woman. I loved her and she made the best butter cookies ever but she was like most women of her time: rather uneducated, engaged at 16, married by 20, raising three kids by 30. She didn’t work and her husband was a blue collar worker of some kind (I have been told what his job was several times but it was the kind of boring job my brain has refused to memorize).

She was an Orthodox Jew (although she wasn’t religious by the time I met her) whose parents came over from Russia during World War I(or really Kiev but it was all Russia back then) and she was the first of her siblings born in America (she had several older siblings all of who died in Russia before her parents came over—ah, infant mortality). She spent the majority of her life in Philadelphia. My great-grandfather died when my own mother was 16 and she never remarried. She ended up moving down to Florida when I was young.

It was during this time that my grandfather and his wife (who had already been living in Florida for a decade) decided to take her around so she can see her new place of living (she never learned to drive either). My step-grandmother’s cousin is a member of Mar-a-Lago so they decided to take her to lunch there one day (keep in mind this was 2005).

Donald Trump and Melania (pre-marriage) happened to be there that day and came over to say hi to the cousin. However, according to my step-grandmother he was immediately taken by my great-grandmother. Apparently he “lit up” when he saw her (I just threw up in my mouth writing that) and went straight to her, ignoring everyone else at the table. Then he spent the next 10 minutes only talking to her and holding one of her hands in both of his in apparently great rapture. This was notable as according to my Republican grandfather he’s “usually such a germaphobe” which cued a knowing Pee-Gate look between me and my mother.

I was horrified and confused by this story the first time I heard it and if I’m being honest I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. Especially when I heard how taken my great-grandmother was by this moment. Logically I know this was probably only because he was the richest man she had ever met and if she had lived to see him run for president she would’ve hated him with every fiber of her Democrat being. But it’s still disturbing and weird to think that the terrible future president of the United States was taken by your great-grandmother for some unknown reason.

And yes that reason is still very much unknown. As I mentioned she was not a terribly fascinating woman and she would’ve already been in her late-80s when that story took place so I doubt that he was attracted to her (Is he attracted to any woman over 50? My gut says no.).

My current theory is that she reminded him of his mother somehow and in some mommy-issues way he just had to talk to her. She would’ve only died about five years before and apparently she shared a close relationship with her son-he has been quoted saying “part of the problem I’ve had with women has been in having to compare them to my incredible mother” which gross but it definitely helps my theory. I don’t really know if they shared any sort of resemblance but they were both old white women from European ancestry who spent their lives in the Northeast so I’m betting they didn’t look that different.

Anyway, I’m open to suggestions and theories and I hope you all found this story as horrifying as I have. Cheers!