Trump in the wilderness
By 
Just for the heck of it, I decided to do my own research on the question of what place Donald Trump had in the American cultural and political consciousness during his years in the (relative) celebrity wilderness. Trump’s first peak of fame was in the late 1980s, when his publicity machine was making sure he was constantly featured in People Magazine, on network infotainment morning shows, etc., while the commercial success of “his” book The Art of the Deal had made him a more general household name. For example it’s no coincidence that the sociopathic serial killer protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis’s classic period piece 1991 novel American Psycho is obsessed with Donald Trump.
In the early 1990s Trump went through a series of bankruptcies, because he’s a terrible businessman, and he became the butt of a lot of late night comedy joking, while — the horror, the horror — fading somewhat from the public consciousness, despite his publicity machine’s unceasing attempts to feed his bottomless narcissism.
The other thing of significance that happened during this time is that Trump manipulated his father, who was clearly in the early stages of dementia, to transfer Fred Trump’s billion dollar real estate empire to his children, via a series of transactions designed to fraudulently evade hundreds of millions of dollars in estate and gift taxes. (This fraud was successful, and the Fred Trump estate ended up paying about 5% in such taxes, approximately one tenth of what it legally owed the federal government and the state of New York). Donald Trump, needless to say, tried to steal the entire estate, but was thwarted in that attempt by Fred Trump’s other surviving children, so he ended up being gifted/inheriting something on the order of just $300 million between 1992 and 1999, when Fred Trump finally died.
This was enough money to at least temporarily resurrect Donald Trump from the ashes of his early 1990s financial disasters, but culturally speaking he was still, by the end of that decade, something of a washed up punchline. The eventual resurrection of his media image would have to wait until Mark Burnett cannily chose him to represent the epitome of a “successful businessman,” for Burnett’s fantasy concoction The Apprentice, launched in 2004.
So I decided to take a quick glance at where Trump stood in the public consciousness in the middle of the Donald Trump as Washed Up Punchline era — roughly 1992 to 2004. I did a media database search for the month of December, 1999, and found at total of 918 results for a search of stories containing the exact phrase “Donald Trump.” which for you Ohio State math PhDs is just slightly less than 30 per day. Now to be scrupfair, this does include quite a few duplicates in the form of reprints in various publications, so the real number is probably about half that, but still.
Typical headlines:
Melania Knauss, Donald Trump’s Girlfriend, Discusses How She Feels About Trump Exploring Run For President (NBC News)
Donald Trump Discusses World Trade and Tax Proposals (ABC News Transcripts)
Donald Trump Says Trade Officials Are Viewed As Saps (Associated Press)
Donald Trump Talks About Various Things Ranging From Religion to Women (Good Morning America)
And so forth.
In the midst of this unending torrent of narcissistic bullshit there’s a nearly 3,000 word (!) profile of this washed up bankrupt publicity whore in the Washington Post, which I read in full, so I expect you to thank me for my service. It’s from the December 23 Style Section. Characteristic passages:
Trump is the phoenix of real estate whizzes. From the smoldering cinders of the real estate crash of the ’80s, he rose from more than $9 billion in debt to create a fortune he estimates at $5 billion. From Trump Tower to 40 Wall Street, from Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City to Mar-a-Lago, a private club in Palm Beach, Trump has dotted this country’s landscape with bold strokes of glass, chrome, gold leaf, marble and his moniker molded in shiny brass relief. He has dabbled in blondes, thrown admiring glances at brunettes. Then the fox bought the whole henhouse with the rights to the Miss Universe pageant.
I would bet some serious LoomCoin that this passage was “suggested” word for word to the “journalist” who “wrote” this thing by Trump’s flaks, who got the piece commissioned and eventually published in the first place.
The director of Trump’s exploratory campaign, Roger Stone, says now is the time for a Trump candidacy because popular culture has overwhelmed the political establishment. We have more faith in the law of “The Practice” than in the law of the land. We’re ready to snub career congressmen for Krusty the Klown. Who needs issues and passion and idealism when you’ve got money and widespread name recognition? Style over substance.
You can say that again . . . and believe me, you will.
In the midst of all this there are outbreaks of something resembling journalism:
Slick, smooth and positively slimy. Trump’s cool evolves into excess and then into the grotesque not because of anything he says or does–not really–but because this 727 is simply so much, so beyond what is conceivably necessary.
And yet Trump knows people love this stuff. Who wouldn’t love flying from New York to Palm Beach for the weekend on their own jet with their name emblazoned on the fuselage in glistening gold letters? Slime me, baby, and tell me about your stance on health care.
Climb the stairs into the plane and enter Trump world.
It is a place where all the women are beautiful, and look to be half the age of the very wealthy men around whom they flutter.
And so on and so forth, very much ad nauseam.
The point here is that really nothing has changed for Trump himself in the past quarter century. He’s exactly the same utterly empty blowhard he was back when he was a washed up celebrity, except he’s beginning to show signs of early dementia, just like Dear Old Dad at the same age. And the media have always loved him, because he provides the easiest of entertaining copy. He’s the apotheosis of what Neil Postman was talking about 40 years ago in Amusing Ourselves To Death — a frighteningly prophetic book that everybody should read — in that he represents the transformation of politics into a kind of pornographic infotainment: a triumph of the narcissistic will.
In retrospect, it all has an uncanny sense of inevitability, as if the mental worlds of American Psycho, and before that Network and Being There, were doomed to become political documentaries instead of the blackest of comedies.