Posted in: Comics, Ike Perlmutter, Marvel Comics | Tagged: Comics, donald trump, fire and fury, ike perlmutter, inside the trump white house, marvel, michael wolff, trump

The Only Mention of Marvel's Ike Perlmutter in Michael Wolff's Fire And Fury: Inside The Trump White House

Okay, I admit, it was the first thing I looked up when I downloaded it on Kindle today (here in the US, the UK and Canada). Had Michael Wolff mentioned Marvel Chair Ike Perlmutter in his new book shaking the foundations of the Western World, Fire And Fury: Inside The Trump White House? After all, Perlmutter was one of Trump's largest donors, to both his veteran's charity and to his political campaign. And, as his wife Laura Perlmutter sat on Trump's Inauguration Committee, Ike joined Trump's administration, working on Veteran Affairs. As a long-standing member of Trump's Mar-A-Lago club, he also shared a lot of intimate time with the man, including on Trump's table over Thanksgiving weekend this year, while other major political and family figures were excluded.

There is, however, one mention in the book. It focuses on the comings and going in the actual White House more than the Pop-Up White House in Florida. And it's in a section looking at Trump's relationship with Israel and the Jewish people.

The book cites Trump's father as a vocal anti-Semite, but Trump building his business in New York, with a strong media presence, had a very different approach

His mentor, Roy Cohn, was a demimonde, semiunderworld, tough-guy Jew. He courted other figures he considered "tough-guy Jews" (one of his accolades): Carl Icahn, the billionaire hedge fonder; Ike Perlmutter, the billionaire investor who had bought and sold Marvel Comics; Ronald Perelman, the billionaire Revlon chairman; Steven Roth, the New York billionaire real estate tycoon; and Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino magnate. Trump had adopted a sort of 1950s Jewish uncle (tough-guy variety) delivery, with as-sorted Yiddishisms Hillary Clinton, he declared, had been "shlonged" in the 2008 primary helping to give an inarticulate man an unexpected expressiveness. Now his daughter, a de facto First Lady, was, through her conversion, the first Jew in the White House.

Perelman bought Marvel from New World Pictures in the nineties, as well as Avi Arad and Ike Perlmutter's toy company ToyBiz and tried to merge the two to create Marvel Studios, pushing the company into bankruptcy so as to reorganise without shareholders' sayso. It was significant shareholder Carl Icahn who opposed Perelman in this, and the spat went public. A court case saw Marvel and ToyBiz merged but Perlman and Icahn ousted, and Perlmutter and Arad went on to rule the roost. Perlmutter picked up the pieces, remade the company, started making films and then sold Marvel to Disney for four billion dollars.

Trump always likes to favour the winners.

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