Same thing I though of him 3 decades ago– A vile, disgusting, self-absorbed real estate huckster with bad taste to boot. Someone to laugh at, not respect.
Living in NYC, I was aware of Trump starting in the 70s. Even then, I thought of him as the most reprehensible human being on the planet. Nothing since then has changed my opinion of him.
I was barely aware that he existed.
Presidential material.
HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa!
My first knowledge of him was a 1983 episode of This Old House with Bob Vila. They discussed the new Trump tower which ended with Donald Trump giving Bob a tour of the penthouse. The ego was amazing (and frankly, so were the views). It was the best finishes and location and layouts, according to Trump.
A year later we were visiting NYC and stopped by the Trump Tower. We got told to wait at the bottom of the escalator by the security guard before we could go to the mall on the second floor (is that right?), maybe because we were tourist hicks by the way we dressed. We stayed for about 15 minutes and then went saw more interesting things in the city.
To me he was big money, ego, bad hair, and self-promotion. I avoided reading about him and his divorces and business dealings, figuring he’d simply go away…
“Doonesbury” has been lampooning him for decades. I recently saw a cartoon from 1987 which postulated a Trump presidency. That was scary to read or think about, even then.
If someone had told me a decade ago that he’d run AND “WIN”, I’d have said they had to be lying.
This is after the Apprentice aired, but before he went in on birtherism, right? Then he was this business guy with tacky tastes and who played up being an asshole for reality TV.
Before that, he was this vague talk of a rich guy who would occasionally do cameos. I can’t remember if I’d seen any of his stuff to know how tacky his tastes were.
New Yorker here.
For decades, I knew him as a trash-talking egomaniac with daddy issues, a womanizing sexist, someone who was likely mob-connected, a sleazy opportunist with the wannabe taste of a nouveau riche Marie Antoinette, and most of all a racist shithead who hounded the Central Park Five and called for their deaths and insisted they were guilty until proven innocent (HMMMM, his feelings on that tenet certainly change depending on the gender and race of the person, don’t they?)–and even when they were proven innocent, he maintained their guilt.
Also, more specifically ten years ago: ugly as hell and a trashy reality TV star.
Otherwise I didn’t think much about him.
I thought he was an asshole, but never paid attention to him.
I thought he was a rich, entitled asshole who was good at real estate. I knew about him prior to 2003, and actually never saw his Apprentice show, but I admit I didn’t delve into him too deeply. I recall a lot about his various products, like his vodka and board game, but also knew he’d gone through rough patches wrt his business, and that he definitely dicked a lot of his investors.
My opinion of him these days (well, for the last 6 or so years) is much, much worse. I actually don’t think he is even good at real estate, certainly not general business, and I think he’s a puffed up clueless idiot who is also a terrible human being. He’s also like a lemming, leading the Republican party over the cliff. I actually think it’s possible that one of the big two parties could go down thanks to this idiot, and that we might see something we haven’t seen since the rise of the Republican party just before the civil war…a full collapse of a major party and the rise of a new one from it’s ashes.
Hopefully we’ll get another Lincoln without the civil war…
Underground comix artist R. Crumb did a story about how much of an asshole Trump was back in 1989, in the third issue of HUP! You can read the whole thing here:
He was always kind of a punch line, the guy who put his name on his tacky buildings. Like a sentient pinky ring.
:dubious:
Worse than Pol Pot, who was around at the same time? Or were you not aware of the latter? :D;)
Seriously, you have mentioned this before, so I am curious. What did 70’s DJT do to earn your ire? AFAIK, this was before his showman phase.
Go back and look at my post at #34, for starters. These things are why most New Yorkers hated him in the 1980s.
See also: SPY magazine. One of the pranks they pulled was sending increasingly dwindling checks to celebrities to see when they would stop cashing them. Trump held out the longest, eventually banking checks for $.02.
Dave Barry’s column and that absurd board game formed my opinion of Trump from a young age. Nothing since then has altered my opinion for the better.
On occasion as a kid, I’d find myself with some friends in a strange house–say, a beach house that the parents had rented. Being bored, we’d sometimes search every cabinet hoping to find something to do. Invariably, we’d find a stash of lame board games. And Trump: The Game was, for some reason, always among them. I did not know, then, the word narcissism, but I knew what it was to be a narcissistic ass. And I knew that anyone that put their own stupid face on such a stupid game, with tacky gold lettering and an offensive tagline, must be a narcissistic ass.
I remember a vanity photo op of him holding a million dollars in cash from some magazine in the '80s; that and doonesbury pretty much informed my opinion.
I thought he was a rich asshole who liked firing people.
Turns out I was wrong on two of three counts.
I loved “Spy” magazine.
Haven’t seen a Dumpster worshipper here yet! Thank heavens.
Well, Agent Orange DID say recently that he “fell in love” with Kim Jong Zero. :dubious:
Actually, while getting it from Trump happens to be a “broken clock” kind of thing:
- Trump isn’t a complete imbecile, or he wasn’t,
- the one thing he was good at is sales,
- and if you spent as much time browsing through flat ads as I do, you’d know it’s something that, while most people have heard at some time or another, a huge amount of people do not truly know.
One reason my Barcelona flat was relatively cheap compared to others the same size in the exact same neighborhood is that it had been neither painted nor staged. The seller was superhappy when I told him I’d be glad to take any furniture he didn’t want, stopped his agent’s attempts to keep bargaining right there. I ended up giving most of that furniture to a charity, in two stages, and one of the pickup guys was in both teams: when he saw the living room the second time (without that stuffed sofa they’d already taken) he exclaimed “wow, it looks twice as big!”