The Grifter's Club by Sarah Blaskey

Author:Sarah Blaskey [Sarah Blaskey, Nicholas Nehamas, Caitlin Ostroff and Jay Weaver]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2020-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

DEMAND FOR ACCESS to Mar-a-Lago was so high that it didn’t matter what the event was, so long as tickets were available. Yang experienced no shortage of supply. The club’s post-Charlottesville newcomers were eager to sell her tables.

Among the first to sell to her was Steven Alembik, a Republican activist and die-hard Trumper known for sporting a custom-made stars-and-stripes blazer. (He’s also remembered for once calling Barack Obama a “f******* Muslim n*****.”18) Even before Charlottesville, Alembik had been planning an event to commemorate the forty-fifth anniversary of the 1972 Munich attacks on the Israeli Olympic team.19 The idea came to him, he said, after the suicide bombing at South Florida pop star Ariana Grande’s concert in Manchester, England, in 2017. Alembik’s brainchild, held to benefit a pro-Israel charity called the Truth About Israel, was originally scheduled to take place at the Boca Raton Resort & Club.

Mar-a-Lago had been booked on February 25, 2018, for an Israeli disaster-relief organization’s fundraiser.20 But the group canceled after the president’s remarks on Charlottesville. Alembik pounced.

“I picked up the phone, I call Mar-a-Lago, they think I’m calling to cancel some other gala or some event, and I said no. I’d like to come here and show our support for the president of the United States,” Alembik said at the time.21

He called the charities that pulled out “spineless.”

Alembik got to work selling tickets, dangling the hope that Trump would show up.22

In fact, all he could do was hope and pray that the president might be in town that weekend—and would deign to stop by.

Cindy Yang and Charles Lee seized the opening presented by Alembik’s event.

In advertisements Lee described the evening as a “dinner” with Trump and said his clients would receive a group photo with the president.23

Other promoters picked up on the event too. On Chinese social media and blog posts a flyer circulated that featured a headshot of Trump and advertised a black-tie, invitation-only event at Mar-a-Lago the same night as the Truth About Israel gala.24 “Because this event is a charity dinner,” one ad read, “the price of taking a photo with the president is lower than usual!”25

A Chinese cryptocurrency platform purporting to be “the world’s first transaction platform to buy and sell the time of celebrities” advertised the event as a private dinner with US politicians and business people that would give attendees the chance to shake hands with the president and snap a photo with him.26

When the big day rolled around, the mainland Chinese tourist contingent numbered upward of a hundred, more than a quarter of the total guests. Some said there were as many as 250 Trump tourists in attendance. They were decidedly not there to learn the truth about Israel.

“To the Chinese, Mar-a-Lago is like the Taj Mahal,” one bemused attendee told Shiny Sheet society columnist Shannon Donnelly.27 “They want to see it.”

Though Mar-a-Lago was no stranger to the bizarre bordering on absurd, Alembik’s Truth About Israel event stood out. A Chinese Michael Jackson impersonator roamed the crowd. The pro-Trump social media stars Diamond and Silk fangirled over the impersonator.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.