In a beautiful and yet deeply meaningless coincidence, Buzzfeed News is reporting that Louise Linton, the Scottish actress who wrote a moderately racist and very silly memoir about living in Zambia, is dating Donald Trump’s finance chairman. The human heart is a mysterious place, much like “darkest Africa,” as our friend Louise’s publisher might put it!
Buzzfeed reported that Linton is dating Steve Mnuchin, appointed in May to serve as Trump’s finance chair, even though he’s donated to Hillary Clinton in the past and worked at a firm funded by George Soros, archnemesis to conservatives. Mnuchin has also worked for Goldman Sachs as well as OneWest Bank, where he made a lot of money as OneWest merrily foreclosed on many, many families of color. And he’s friends with Donald Trump. Real, enthusiastic friends, he told the Times:
In a telephone interview Monday, Mr. Mnuchin emphasized the friendship part of the equation. “I was there at the beginning when he decided to run for president, and I’ve been a supporter and quiet adviser behind the scenes to him,” he explained. The day after Mr. Trump won the New York primary, Mr. Trump called Mr. Mnuchin and offered him the job. “I told him on the spot I would,” he said.
Linton and Mnuchin chaired some kind of gala in Los Angeles together. There are pictures of them attending the premiere of some movie. Oh, and Mnuchin is listed as the executive producer for a film made by Linton’s production company, Stormchaser. (Linton’s bio says she formed Stormchaser after graduating from University of Western Los Angeles, a private, for-profit law school.)
The question you have here is whether the woman who wrote the ridiculous book has ever met the ochre man with the ridiculous possible weave, and the answer, of course, is yes. In an interview with the Edinburgh News, Linton reminisced about her “brush with death” in Zambia and also the time she sat near Donald Trump at a dinner:
Linton has met dozens of big names in the US, and has even dined with Donald Trump.
Describing the experience, she said: “I sat next to him at dinner and he was charming and engaging.
“I appreciate he is polarising individuals politically, but in person he is thoughtful, personable and polite.”
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Donald Trump is an OK seatmate: noted!
Heat Street reported that Linton has been Mnuchin’s companion since he broke up with Heather Crosby, a Goldman Sachs director he married in 1999. Linton, then going by Hay, married a lawyer named Ronald Richards in 2005. The couple were still married around 2011, but now, clearly, they are not.
What do we do with this information? Can we draw any inference here? About love? About Donald Trump? About Louise Linton and what one British tabloid termed her “heart of daftness” memoir? We cannot! None of this means a thing, and yet it is somehow, nonetheless, very funny.
Mnuchin and Linton at a film premiere, February 2015. Photo via Getty