Donald Trump is the owner of the Miss Universe Organization, which includes Miss USA but not Miss America. And reports abound that he handpicks the winners in his pageants:
TMZ obtained an audio tape recorded during the pre-show screening portion of the 2009 [Miss USA] pageant, in which Trump can clearly be heard exercising “The Trump Rule” — which guarantees a certain number of “beautiful” women will advance in the contest.
(TMZ, November 12, 2009)
More specifically, there’s this:
[T]hanks to an interview with the pageant choreographer, we now know that The Donald himself … flies in the day before the telecast and hand-picks six of the ladies, and has been doing so since 1995.
(Guanabee, September 3, 2009)
Of course one might wonder how he then guarantees who actually wins. Well, let’s just say that it’s very easy for him to indicate to his hand-picked judges who he thinks should be crowned the fairest of them all. And it’s reasonable to assume that none of the judges would want to disappoint The Donald. Interestingly enough, nothing betrayed the fact that the fix was in for Sunday’s Miss USA contest night quite like the Associated Press reporting the following on an interview with the winner, Miss Michigan Rima Fakih:
She told reporters later that she believed she had won after glancing at pageant owner Trump as she awaited the results with the first runner-up, Miss Oklahoma USA Morgan Elizabeth Woolard. ‘‘That’s the same look that he gives them when he says, ‘You’re hired,'” on Trump’s reality show, she said.
But, frankly, I couldn’t care any less that Trump rigs his beauty pageants … lucky bastard. The only reason I’m bothering to comment is to herald the fact that he crowned an Arab-American Muslim. After all, this one gesture will probably engender more goodwill for the United States in the Muslim world than one hundred speeches by President Obama ever could.
Moreover, that Rima is winning so much praise in so many Arab and Muslim countries reflects the limited impact of the extremist ideology the Taliban and al-Qaeda proselytize. Actually, I can think of no greater repudiation of the notion that Muslim women should not be heard and only be seen covered (from head to toe) in a burqa than this Muslim woman being crowned Miss USA. Hell, did you see Rima strutting her stuff on stage in her teeny weeny bikini…?!
If you’re black, just try to recall the sense of pride you felt when Vanessa Williams became the first black woman to win a national beauty pageant (Miss America in 1984). So here’s to this 24-year-old Lebanese immigrant for making all Arabs proud and for serving as yet another symbol of the unparalleled opportunities people of diverse backgrounds have here in the good old USA.
Meanwhile, it did not take long before right-wing media folks began propagating a Prejean complaint: i.e., that first runner-up Morgan, a blond with bee-stung lips, was robbed of the crown because she gave a politically incorrect answer to her final question about Arizona’s new immigration law.
She said that she’s against both illegal immigration and racial profiling; that she’s a firm believer in states’ rights; and that Arizona had every right to enact its law, which was a perfectly reasonable answer. Indeed, I thought Morgan’s answer was far more poised and informed than Rima’s answer to her final question about insurance coverage for birth control pills. Not to mention that it wasn’t Morgan, but Rima who tripped over her evening gown.
The problem, however, is that those stoking this controversy ignore the fact that this is a beauty contest, and that beauty is in the eye of the beholder – in this case The Donald’s, as I delineated above. Never mind that nobody welcomes another controversy like this more than Trump because it only generates highly coveted free publicity for him and his pageant.
But if Morgan plays her cards right, she’ll end up being far more famous than Rima. After all, we all remember last year’s first runner-up Carrie Prejean, but how many of us remember the winner? Of course, it would help Rima if raunchy, nude photos of her were to suddenly surface on the internet….
Apropos this, nothing was more contrived than the moral outrage being aired during the week before Sunday’s broadcast over pictorials of the contestants in sexy lingerie.
For this was an obvious tease to generate interest in the show. And, more to the point, their spreads were chaste compared to the semi-pornographic fare that is featured every year in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and every day in Victoria Secretcatalogues.
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