LAUGHINGSTOCK:

I don't remember exactly when I first saw the photo. I just know it was when Donald Trump wasn't yet president--that's why it was still funny. The Republican nominee had been photographed in a three-piece white suit, his arm around his 14-year-old daughter Ivanka, who is bizarrely stroking his face, and the two of them are both perched, somehow, on a sculpture that looks like it depicts two parrots having sex.

The parrots are not, in fact, having sex, as Slate's Matthew Dessem discovered. There are actually three parrots in the sculpture, and none of them are in flagrante delicto--it just looks like they are because of the angle. This is, if anything, weirder: If the parrots aren't having sex, how strange that a photograph of Trump and his teenage daughter was taken from an angle that made it look like they were sitting next to copulating birds. Did no one notice?

For as long as I've been obsessed with this photo, I hadn't known its exact origin until Thursday's episode of The Daily. In that episode, E. Jean Carroll, Lisa Birnbach, and Carol Martin discuss Carroll's alleged assault by Trump in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room. Carroll and Birnbach both said the attack occurred when Birnbach was in the midst of interviewing Trump for a magazine story about Mar-a-Lago. That story ran in New York magazine in February 1996, and the opening photo is the one of Trump with Ivanka perched atop the parrots. The caption reads: "A personal moment: Donald with his daughter Ivanka, poolside. You're welcome to join them."

The odd image fits perfectly with Birnbach's story, which also includes a photo of a landscaped, silvery-gold Mar-a-Lago fire hydrant (caption: "All that glitters"). Trump had recently transformed Mar-a-Lago from a private estate to a pricey golf club, where one of the perks of membership was proximity to the Trump family. The piece is structured as a near-verbatim transcript of Trump leading Birnbach on an elaborate tour, one in which the future president appears to be in on the joke. Yes, we may mock his parrot sculpture, but that's the price he's willing to pay for free publicity. And New York magazine was certainly willing to play along. The subhead of Birnbach's story: "Donald Trump spends the weekend with our lucky reporter inside Palm Beach's Mar-a-Lago Club, his first-classiest, best-people-iest, most-exclusive (and yet unrestricted) vacation home-cum-not quite hotel." In 1996, if not today, these Trumpian superlatives surely read as a harmless way for a magazine to mock its bombastic subject.

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