Back in 1990, Ivana Trump told her divorce lawyer Michael Kennedy that “from time to time, her husband [Donald Trump] reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, ‘My New Order,’ which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed.” This information, which comes from a startling 1990 Vanity Fair profile of Trump, certainly does not prove that he is anti-Semitic (a daughter recently converted to Judaism) and is cited here just because, as with so much about Trump, it makes no sense at all. It is just another grenade that comes rolling out of the profile — yet another detail about Trump that is just plain weird, sordid, compellingly interesting and, upon reflection, terrifying. Nothing stops the man…

Such a man cannot become president. This is the required sentence. But the import, the gravamen, the theme of the Vanity Fair piece was more or less that Trump was finished — too much bad publicity, too many bad real estate deals, too many enemies, too much of just plain excess. And yet, like Melville’s whale or Spielberg’s shark, he keeps coming, coming, coming. His TV show thrives. His real estate empire survives. In this city, I look out my hotel window as I write this column. Before me is a huge box of bling. The desert sun enflames the name at the top: “T-R-U-M-P” in bold gold letters.

It spells BEWARE!