I first witnessed this phenomenon as an undergraduate in my Biology 101 course. Students who were making A’s and B’s on previous tests suddenly made F’s when we covered evolution. These weren’t stupid people, they simply refused to engage in any meaningful way with any of the lectures or the chapters in the book covering evolution.
Willful ignorance is frightening. When you talk to diehard Trump supporters they typically discount any evidence of Dear Leader’s malfeasance by either calling them lies or resorting to “What about…” typically Biden. Ask them to defend Trump without mentioning Biden and watch their heads explode.
I can say this - When he ran I rolled my eyes. When he won the primary I was a concerned. The night of the 2016 election, was, for me, "You have to be f’ing kinding me’.
I knew plenty. And I really didn’t follow the news that much.
I’m pretty sure The Apprentice explains a lot of Trump’s support. That show is what turned him from a somewhat well-known New York real estate mogul, who was occasionally in the news for his messy divorces, into a household name. It gave him a level of fame and a reputation as a super-successful rich guy to middle America that he probably could have never achieved on his own.
I used to teach classes that covered HIV. It was one of the criteria for a state certification as a chemical dependency counselor. In my lecture, PowerPoint, and posted notes, I explained how HIV jumped species, and that humans didn’t acquire HIV because Africans had sex with monkeys (which I’ve heard many times). I said very clearly, in speech and written, that if anyone gave me that answer on a test, they would fail the test and therefore the class. The test included the question, “How did HIV move from simians to humans?” Every single student from China still said “Africans had sex with monkeys.”
Midwesterner too, but nothing had changed my opinion since this, my initial source:
Beyond you-know-who, there’s an issue that occurred to me while watching The Guilded Age: in the other powerful nations, everyone (starting in the age when vital distances had to be measured in brief carriage rides) kept everything close. The (financial) City of London next to the Palace of Westminster (and later BBC HQ). The Paris Bourse near the Élysée Palace, etc. Whereas the distance between NYC and Washington DC created a cultural divide that did more harm than good
I beg to differ with you folks who think Trump wasn’t particularly well-known, or was even a Robin-Leach-level celebrity. Trump’s hogging of the limelight guaranteed that he was a very familiar face long before The Apprentice came along .
Trump’s ghost-written Art of the Deal was published in 1987 and hit #1 on the NYT Bestseller list and stayed there for 13 weeks, lasting on the list for almost a year.
He was on the cover of Playboy in March 1990 and was interviewed in the same issue
Berkeley Breathed made Trump (in the body of Bill the Cat) a semiregular character in his Bloom County strip in 1987, and kept him around for quite a while.
Gary Trudeau started running cartoons with Trump as a character in them around the same time.
There were, of course, plenty of articles and interviews with him i magazines in the 1980s and 199os, as well. Even if you didn’t read some types of magazines, Trump would be hard to miss – he was in the National Enquirer, Fortune, New Republic, and plenty of others.
His business ventures were so well-publicized they were hard yo miss - Trump Shuttle, Trump Steaks, his multiple casinos in Atlantic City (and their spectacular failure).
And in 1989 he came out with Trump - the Game, which was advertised incessantly in TV commercials. (Like the other ventures, it was a flop, selling 800,000 copies, where they expected at least 2 million.)
My point is that, LONG before The Apprentice (which started in 2004), Trump wasn’t just a semi-obscure celebrity only known because of his marital partner-changing. He was, by dint of his own efforts, extremely high profile and easy to make fun of and absurdly highly publicized. If you didn’t know about Donald Trump and who he was in the 1990s you had to be working at it.
Of course, people have abysmal memories. They recalled TRump as a rich businessman, not a serial failure, and it was that hook that got The Apprentice started, which, in turn, convince too many gullible people that he was the epitome of American business. And that started our present decline.
Ok, he may have been a failure or a success. I didn’t know because I just didn’t care. He was a rich guy in the news, of course people (and I) knew who he was. But did I know what a colossal failure he was? No, because he kept appearing in the news and kept popping up with new business ventures, and that was all I knew of him. He was nothing more than a Robin Leach/Tammy Faye/Dynasty representative of wealth to me (and I’m probably not the only one). I just didn’t pay attention to his nonsense because he brought nothing to my midwestern life and impacted it in no way whatsoever, good or bad. I just didn’t pay attention to him beyond thinking he was basically just a caricature of a rich douche. Maybe in NYC people knew what a loser asshole he was, but I’m not sure that narrative carried much into the greater US, unless you were really, really paying attention.
On X, well-known conservative British historian Niall Ferguson begs JD Vance to explain Trump’s “peace plan”:
“I supported [the Trump-Vance campaign] last year… Indeed, I praised your Munich speech. But I simply cannot understand the logic of beginning a negotiation this difficult by conceding so many crucial points to Russia.”
Wait – you’re a world-famous historian, and you couldn’t see until this week that Trump was soft on the Kremlin?
He still thinks there must be some underlying “logic” behind their plans, too. There’s just no way to explain the mental disconnect these people have. They honestly seem to think that Trump et al. actually intended to try to do a good job, and act in the interests of the United States and its allies. It boggles the mind, but there it is.
He certainly gave the impression of being successful because a.) he was in the news ; b.) he kept popping up with new things. But the failures of his casinos were VERY high-profile and hard to miss. And once you noticed that, it was easy to pick up on the rest – how the hell does a casino lose money? Why did all of these ventures disappear after the initial flash-in-a-pan? Why don’t we hear about the Trump shuttle anymore? Granted, it was easier if you lived in the New York metropolitan area, but the total of all this was realizing that Trump was all front and a con man. A 1993 biography, The Lost Tycoon pointed out his failures in 1993.
That’s a different premise. I’m specifically asking the time before someone is running.
My point being that if you didn’t already know much about Trump before he ran, and you get all your information from right wing sources, you’re not likely to hear about all the shitty things he did.
If, in the next election, someone comes out of nowhere and runs on a far-right platform, do you think the Fox viewers will learn anything about them that Fox doesn’t want them to hear (assuming Fox likes them)?
But not everyone had the same experience as you. Myself, other people in this thread and a sizeable chunk of the country didn’t/doesn’t know much about him. There was no reason to know anything about him, at least not for me. Trump Casino, Trump Steaks, Trump College and so on, are things I don’t think I had even heard of until he ran for office and the memes were all over the internet and various trials and stories started making the news.
IANAM, and this is a Pit, but you guys have a perfectly decent sub-discussion you could build it’s own thread around, regarding HOW Trump built his image and concealed his flaws. I respectfully suggest one of you does so in the Pit or even another less-flame-like forum, because I don’t need more reasoned discussion on Trump.
I want the pain of his supporters.
Not saying good things about myself right now, but well, it’s that sort of world.
From Wikipedia:
" The ideas behind the USFL were conceived in 1965 by New Orleans businessman David Dixon, who saw a market for a professional football league that would play in the summer, when the National Football League and college football were in their off-season."
"In August 1984, the USFL voted to move from a spring to a fall schedule in 1986 to compete directly with the NFL. This was done at the urging of New Jersey Generals majority owner Donald Trump and a handful of other owners as a way to force a merger between the leagues. As part of this strategy, the USFL filed an antitrust lawsuit against the National Football League in 1986, and a jury ruled that the NFL had violated anti-monopoly laws. However, in [a victory in name only], the USFL was awarded a judgment of just $1, which under antitrust laws, was tripled to $3. This court decision effectively ended the USFL’s existence. The league never played its planned 1986 season, and by the time it folded, it had lost over $163 million (equivalent to $380 million in 2023 dollars).
I was actively aware of Trump since at least 1989, when he became a major character in Bloom County.
(I read Doonesbury at the time, too, but I don’t think Trump was a big enough part of that in the 1980s that I would have remembered him from that alone.)
I think I was a high school freshman when the apprentice came out, and i was so dimly aware of reality tv (which i thought was even more fake than it actually is) and trump that until the birther stuff put him in my field of vision I didn’t realize he was a businessman at all I thought he was literally just a game show host/tv personality that played a businessman on one show on tv.
Niall Ferguson, whose docuseries The Ascent of Money described the 08 housing crash under video of Black guys drinking 40s on the street after exiting bankruptcyt court? Because it was all the fault of deadbeats who never should have been allowed to take out mortgages
