Buncha white guys sittin' around talkin' about wimminn gettin' fat

On Wednesday night, Gingrich defended Trump by saying essentially that he had every right to call Machado fat because she did get fat.

“You’re not supposed to gain 60 pounds during the year that you’re Miss Universe,” Gingrich said, according to Politico. Gingrich was speaking in front of the Log Cabin Republicans, a group devoted to representing LGBT conservatives and allies.

Trump also defended his comments on Wednesday night, telling Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly that he “saved her job because they wanted to fire her for putting on so much weight.” Trump commented that despite wanting to save her job, he never really spoke to her.

“I’ll bet you if you put up and added up all the time I spoke to her, it was probably less than five minutes,” he said, according to Talking Points Memo. “I had nothing to do with this person.”

After the Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes opened for play in 2005, its world-famous owner didn’t stop by more than a few times a year to visit the course hugging the coast of the Pacific.

When Trump did visit, the club’s managers went on alert. They scheduled the young, thin, pretty women on staff to work the clubhouse restaurant — because when Trump saw less-attractive women working at his club, according to court records, he wanted them fired.

"I had witnessed Donald Trump tell managers many times while he was visiting the club that restaurant hostesses were 'not pretty enough' and that they should be fired and replaced with more attractive women,” Hayley Strozier, who was director of catering at the club until 2008, said in a sworn declaration.

Trump told managers to fire restaurant hostesses who were “not pretty enough” and replace them with “more attractive women,” Hayley Strozier, former catering director at the golf club, said in her court declaration.

Initially, Trump gave this command “almost every time” he visited, Strozier said. Managers eventually changed employee schedules “so that the most attractive women were scheduled to work when Mr. Trump was scheduled to be at the club," she said.

A similar story is told by former Trump employees in court documents filed in 2012 in a broad labor relations lawsuit brought against one of Trump’s development companies in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

The employees’ declarations in support of the lawsuit, which have not been reported in detail until now, show the extent to which they believed Trump, now the Republican presidential nominee, pressured subordinates at one of his businesses to create and enforce a culture of beauty, where female employees’ appearances were prized over their skills.

A Trump Organization attorney, in a statement to The Times, called the allegations “meritless.”

In a 2009 court filing, the company said that any “allegedly wrongful or discriminatory acts” by its employees, if any occurred, would be in violation of company policy and were not authorized.

Employees said in their declarations that the apparent preference for attractive women came from the top.

“Donald Trump always wanted good looking women working at the club,” said Sue Kwiatkowski, a restaurant manager at the club until 2009, in a declaration. "I know this because one time he took me aside and said, ‘I want you to get some good looking hostesses here. People like to see good looking people when they come in.’ ”

As a result, Kwiatkowski said, "I and the other managers always tried to have our most attractive hostesses working when Mr. Trump was in town and going to be on the premises."
[...]
As part of the lawsuit over a lack of meal and rest breaks at Trump’s golf club about 30 miles south of downtown Los Angeles — his largest real estate holding in Southern California — several employees said managers staffed Trump’s clubhouse restaurant with attractive young women rather than more experienced employees in order to please Trump.

The bulk of the lawsuit was settled in 2013, when golf course management, without admitting any wrongdoing, agreed to pay $475,000 to employees who had complained about break policies. An employee’s claim that she was fired after complaining about the company’s treatment of women was settled separately; its terms remain confidential.

The former employees’ statements primarily describe the club’s work culture from the mid- to late 2000s. The Times spoke at length to one of the ex-employees, who described in detail the allegations about workplace culture. The person declined to be quoted by name, citing a fear of being sued.

In their sworn declarations, some employees described how Trump, during his stays in Southern California, made inappropriate and patronizing statements to the women working for him.

On one visit, Trump saw “a young, attractive hostess working named Nicole ... and directed that she be brought to a place where he was meeting with a group of men,” former Trump restaurant manager Charles West said in his declaration.

“After this woman had been presented to him, Mr. Trump said to his guests something like, 'See, you don't have to go to Hollywood to find beautiful women,'” West said. “He also turned to Nicole and asked her, ‘Do you like Jewish men?’"

Female employees said they faced additional pressures.

Strozier, the former catering director, said Vincent Stellio — a former Trump bodyguard who had risen to become a Trump Organization vice president — approached her in 2003 about an employee that Strozier thought was talented.

Stellio wanted the employee fired because she was overweight, Strozier said in her legal filing.

"Mr. Stellio told me to do this because 'Mr. Trump doesn't like fat people' and that he would not like seeing [the employee] when he was on the premises,” wrote Strozier, who said she refused the request. (Stellio died in 2010.)

Hayley Strozier, the former catering director, said a vice president from the Trump Organization told her to fire an employee because “Mr. Trump doesn’t like fat people.”

A year later, Mike van der Goes — a golf pro who had been promoted to be Trump National’s general manager — made a similar request to fire the same overweight employee, Strozier said.

“Mr. van der Goes told me that he wanted me to do this because of [the employee's] appearance and the fact that Mr. Trump didn't like people that looked like her,” Strozier wrote.

When Strozier protested, Van der Goes returned a week later “and announced he had a plan of hiding [the employee] whenever Mr. Trump was on the premises,” Strozier wrote.

West, who worked as a restaurant manager at the club until 2008, wrote that Van der Goes ordered him “to hire young, attractive women to be hostesses.” West also said Van der Goes insisted that he “would need to meet all such job applicants first to determine if they were sufficiently pretty."