President Donald Trump routinely discriminated against Miss Universe contestants who were “too ethnic or too dark-skinned,” according to a new account from a pageant staffer.
In an excerpt of Michael Isikoff and David Corn’s new book, “Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump,” published Thursday by Mother Jones, the veteran journalists write: “Frequently, Trump would toss out finalists and replace them with others he preferred.”
They also quote an unnamed Miss Universe staffer saying, “If there were too many women of color, he would make changes.”
And a second pageant employee told Isikoff and Corn: “He often thought a woman was too ethnic or too dark-skinned.”
The unnamed staffer added, “He had a particular type of woman he thought was a winner. Others were too ethnic. He liked a type. There was Olivia Culpo, Dayanara Torres [the 1993 winner], and, no surprise, East European women.” On occasion, according to this staffer, Trump would reject a woman “who had snubbed his advances.”
Isikoff and Corn wrote that Miss Universe Organization president Paula Shugart would occasionally challenge Trump’s rejections and sometimes could persuade him to change his mind if she said the woman “was a princess and married to a football player.”
White House officials have not yet responded to the report.
The book is the latest in an avalanche of Trump-related content to flood the market in recent months. In January, Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” took the media world by storm.
“Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump” from Twelve Books will hit bookstores and Kindle on March 13.