Every reference about him was a punchline because the Northeast knew him as a huckster and con man for decades. The Apprentice created his mystique as a genius businessman for the rest of the country and now the world has to live with the fallout of that.
I still have trouble believing The Apprentice was as popular as it was. I confess to having never watched it, but the clips I saw were dreary.
Trump and Marla Maples appeared on separate episodes of The Nanny in the 90s.
Sounds pretty close to reality…except for the Reform Party bit.
I’ll bet they were using “The Donald”. I’m glad that cutesy shit has all but dissappeared.
Home Alone 2: Lost in New York had a cameo featuring Trump.
It was the only way he,'d allow filming in his hotel.
Hey, Google’s AI actually proved useful and tracked down the episode for me. It was their review of the 1990 Oldsmobile Tornado Trofeo. John Davis compared the car’s bold styling to “Donald Trump, or at least his ego.”
Bruce Willis is driving fast down a highway and says about another driver, “Who does she think she is? Hillary Clinton?”
Something like that.
Related, but it’s kind of mind-boggling that they produced nine years of Seinfeld without making a single reference to Trump. In one episode set at an airport, I think you can see a Trump jet in the distance. But that’s it, as far as I know.
There is Hulk Hogan’s insane promo at WrestleMania IV:
We recently were rewatching Veronica Mars and an episode from maybe 2005 made a joke about how Veronica wanted to have pepper spray when visiting New York in case she ran in to “that Trump Character”.
There was also the (prescient?) comic called The Wall published in Heavy Metal Magazine in 1990 about how Trump manipulates the poor in a post apocalyptic New York to serve his own ends.
He appeared in the Drew Carey Show episode S2.E24 ∙ New York and Queens.
Trump was on Larry King discussing the delays in rebuilding the World Trade Center. Criticizing how slowly Developers were submitting plans and bids
King suggested Trump should lead the way. Trump backpedaled and he obviously didn’t want to get involved financially.
If you remember, the cost of rebuilding the Trade Center was significant. They didn’t have firm commitments to lease the office space.
There were many conflicting architectural plans. How much space had to be set aside for a memorial.
Rebuilding the World Trade Center was a matter of National pride.
It was risky for Developers to sink that much money into the project.
Trump was very happy to throw stones on Larry King. But he definitely wouldn’t commit to helping rebuild the Trade Center.
Saturday Night Live had a Donald Trump sketch back in 1989, where the joke was that Merv Griffin (played by guest host Rick Moranis) had to do all the work in the Atlantic City casino he had purchased from Trump because it was losing so much money. Phil Hartman plays Trump for a bit in the segment.
October 7, 1989 – Rick Moranis / Rickie Lee Jones (S15 E2) – The 'One SNL a Day' Project says that this wasn’t Hartman’s first appearance as Trump, so there’s probably at least one up to three years earlier.
One thing I have always wonder if if the Zapp Branigan character in Futurama was inspired by Donald Trump.
In the show Head of the Class in the 80s, the gifted school class was on a trip and got into an informal debate with a British group about whether a monarchy was superior to small-r republicanism. The British team said that America could nominate someone who would just be (mostly) the ceremonial “leader” of the country to take away duties and heat from the President. And they suggested someone for this position - Donald Trump.
Which is in retrospect pretty hilarious, because Trump would make an even worse constitutional monarch than he would a President. The only upshot about choosing him rather than anyone else is that he would try to step over his appointed powers so quickly that America would soon become a Republic again.
(Then again, perhaps in previous years, he had a tight enough self-filter that it wouldn’t be a crapshoot whether on any given day you’d get the glad handing, fawning Trump or the no filter loudmouth abrasive Trump, so he might have actually been good at soft diplomacy. If that ever was the case, those days are long gone, though.)
I’ve heard that it was specifically written for Phil Hartman. I didn’t know until now that he had done a Trump impression, so it’s possible that there is truth to that.
However, I’ve never seen Futurama, so I don’t know if Zapp was going to be more informed by Trump or Troy McClure, but I have seen static memes that use a still of Zapp’s character, and I always have read them using Troy McClure’s voice, even before I knew that the part was written for Phil Hartman.
I’m pretty sure Zapp was intended as a Capt. Kirk parody. When Hartman was murdered before actually creating a Zapp voice, Billy West decided to use a distinctly Hartman voice to honor him.