Not a lot of people knew the real scuminess of Trump unless they read papers. Even as a kid I read articles about him abusing eminent domain laws to kick small businesses and poors out of their businesses and homes from Manhattan to the Jersey shore.
But he was THE face of 80s wealth back then. The days when Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and Dallas were riding high.
Then again, so was ALF…
Even Jar Jar would be an improvement.
As a kid I vividly remember his involvement in Wrestlemania IV and V at Trump Plaza (which I would later learn was a lie and it was actually an unrelated adjacent building), and of course his later involvement in various WWE story lines. Between that and The Apprentice I really didn’t know much about him beyond how he was being portrayed and he seemed like this awesome rich guy to aspire to be. I mean he had it all! It wasn’t until I started reading about Apprentice contestants that were getting fucked over and doing more digging that I found that he was actually a pretty awful person, and then the birther tweets started…
(I also vividly remember as a kid my mom once told me how he wasn’t as successful as he said he was and that he had filed for many bankruptcies - almost as if to warn me some 30 years too early to distrust this person.)
Speaking as someone who was the film’s target demographic at the time, my reaction would have been “Hey, it’s the board game guy!” We had the Trump board game, and, as a kid, I liked the gold and black color scheme and the colorful art of majestic skyscrapers. That was the sum total of my knowledge about the guy.
Like Biff from Back to the Future II, who is so completely Trump it’s painful to watch that now.
Before people learned about her politics, a lot of people preferred Ivana to him. Not sure when she stopped bad-mouthing him publicly, but here’s her cameo in The First Wives Club:
What a shame she didn’t take everything he had in real life when they split up.
Hell, he even insisted on publicly humiliating her in a pizza commercial.
I have a memory of a show done during the GWB administration, by the History Channel, or maybe it was Discovery, or possibly TLC, but it was something like:
“Donald Trump Buys/Evaluates America”. Or maybe something like “What’s America Worth”
I can’t find it now, unfortunately, but basically it went state by state and Donald Trump figured out the values of all the important and cool buildings in the big cities and added them all up, and at the end declared “The US is worth [N] billion dollars”
I remember being confused and thinking “what the hell does some apprentice TV guy know about how much america is worth?”
I was also confused at the sloppy methodology. I was only maybe 12 at the time but I do remember thinking that the people and what we do are what make america valuable, not the buildings.
I remember mainly knowing he was rich at the time.
No idea why anyone would cheer for a famous rich person. But then, these are people who were watching Home Alone 2, and I’ve never figured out why someone would watch the first one and then voluntarily watch a second one.
This is a long one, but a good one. Cody explores all the many examples in pop culture of trump the comic villain.
It dominated the news coverage in Boston at least for days … but then, Boston.
Sure, but NYC and Boston are within spitting distance, considering the rest of the country.
This came up last year, when the CBC decided to cut out his part (and maybe other networks?). Someone commented here that Trump expected cameos if his buildings were used.
He shoukd have had to pay for product placement.
I wouldn’t have cheered his appearance, but I saw the film when it came out, and memory says I recognised him. He was in the news, a “celebrity” at the time
Unfortunately, his Hell-spawn will be fleecing chumps in his name for many years to come.
I knew there was a good reason why I didn’t bother to watch HA2. Now I know.
Legend has it, Trump bullied his way into his name being dropped in We Need to Talk About Kevin.
He also modestly wanted them to rename it “Home Alone With The Greatest Man On Earth.”
It would have been unfair to the paint bucket.
Shoot somewhere else. Nobody would have given a fuck whether he was in it or not. International audience wouldn’t have had a clue who he was, any arsehole could stand in for him. He’s an utterly generic real estate villain, a type which has existed in American movies right from the beginnings. He didn’t define the role, he acted an already written role. He’s the baddie in a wonderful life.
I remember Doonesbury started featuring him, generally as he is, in 1987, but fairly sure I was aware of him as a pompous ass before then. I was in Upstate NY then, but we got the Sunday NYT, may have learned of him then. Thought of him as a venal self-important Gordon Gecko type, as long as I can recall.
