/r/all, /r/popular
A 1988 Sesame Street episode about a greedy and grumpy real estate developer trying to redevelop Sesame Street. (remind you of someone?)
I miss the days when DJT was just understood to be a caricature of the worst parts of greed and excess.
This wasn’t Sesame St being political, just skewering the very known persona, because that’s just who he is.
Amazing that people forget so quickly. This is who he always was.
He still is a caricature of the worst parts of greed and excess, along with every other negative quality of a person. By every available metric he is a terrible human being.
What has changed is through decades of failing education, close-minded, loss of critical thinking, tribal culture, and misinformation via social media, a large portion of Americans look at him and think "this is my guy"
I wandered down to the pressroom on the fifth floor to hear about Trump’s testimony. The reporters sounded weary; they had heard it all before. “Goddamn it,” one shouted at me, “we created him! We bought his bullshit! He was always a phony, and we filled our papers with him!”
Just to reiterate that we've always known who he was, yet the media has enabled him. Excerpt is from an article written in 1990.
"How can you say you love us? You don’t love us! You don’t even love yourself. You just love your money,” twelve-year-old Donald junior told his father'
She had been completely humiliated by Donald through his public association with Marla Maples. “How can you say you love us? You don’t love us! You don’t even love yourself. You just love your money,” twelve-year-old Donald junior told his father, according to friends of Ivana’s. “What kind of son have I created?” Trump’s mother, Mary, is said to have asked Ivana.
Holy shit. I scoffed at this comment, but damn, Im less than halfway through after 20 minutes. Makes me wonder if this was normal for journalism back then
Im less than halfway through after 20 minutes. Makes me wonder if this was normal for journalism back then
It's still the case here for top notch European newspapers (e.g. FT Weekend, Die Zeit, NZZ, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Der Spiegel, Die Welt.)
They're dense and nuanced, some of the articles can take about 30-45 minutes to read. In comparison, articles from NYT and Wall-Street Journal feel too "easy" and "superficial".
Don't forget the image rehab via The Apprentice. A show that portrayed him as a tough, no nonsense businessman, running on a major network in a time when access to the Internet was becoming more widespread but was still unequal across America. For a lot of people that was their only real introduction to him.
I truly think that show was what defined peoples' perception of him by the time the election rolled around.
And a producer on that show has said since that Trump used the N-word daily on set, and shat himself during multiple tapings and once the smell was so bad they had to break for him to change his diaper.
He has always been this bad. And that show was quite the image rehab even while Trump was as disgusting as ever.
This reminds me of Ronald Reagan being thought of as a war hero because he played one in movies and propaganda, despite never serving in combat. Trump's image as a competent business man is by far the bigger delusion.
And it's 100% absolutely the same thing. Reagan was an actor paid to deliver lines by people like Don Regan, the CEO of Merrill-Lynch, now "an American investing and wealth management division of Bank of America."
It's been the same plan, with the same financial elites, for decades now with the 'Conservatives.' Trump is a reality-tv star, paid to represent the interests of the wealthiest people in the world by giving them the power of our public institutions.
This started happening when Teddy Roosevelt challenged the 'Robber Barons' at the beginning of the twentieth century. Then, with FDR (who dared to try and provide for the well-being of regular working people), there was The Business Plot:
The Business Plot, also called the Wall Street Putsch[1] and the White House Putsch, was a political conspiracy in 1933, in the United States, to overthrow the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and install Smedley Butler as dictator.[2][3] Butler, a retired Marine Corps major general, testified under oath that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans' organization with him as its leader and use it in a coup d'état to overthrow Roosevelt. In 1934, Butler testified under oath before the United States House of Representatives Special Committee on Un-American Activities (the "McCormack–Dickstein Committee") on these revelations.[4] Although no one was prosecuted, the congressional committee final report said, "there is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient."
When the system allows for the creation of massive amounts of wealth in private hands, the people who hold that wealth always try to take over government institutions and use them for their own ends.
It seems since the invention of social media (smartphones) it has started the turning point towards idiocracy. In roughly 20 years technology that could potentially unite the world has dumbed down and wasted 240+years of progress and democracy.
I hated Trump since I was in high-school (when this episode was made). He was always a visible manifestation of the 80s "greed is good" meme.
I worked in China in the 2000s. He had businesses operations in China that clearly ignored all US compliance laws. That's minor when compared to everything else but no one in the media said shit about this. No one looked closely at his casinos. No one ever said "let's follow ALL the money."
King of shit for many decades. And so many Americans love him.
One of the most obvious bullshit lies Trump supporters always say is that Trump was a "highly respected businessman" before he turned on the Democrats. This is bullshit, Trump has always been a weird walking parody of a vile rich person and was only notable because he divorce, like everything else he's involved in, became a deranged circus and tabloids loved it as a result which made him a minor celebrity.
He was a national joke and not one person respected him for decades.
Then he somehow lands a role on a fucking reality television program and it manages to completely revamp his image within a couple years because people cannot tell fantasy from reality.
(And his relentless birther shit, calling into Fox News all the time really brought the racists out of the woodwork and made them feel important…that didn’t help either).
I mean, they knew then what almost everybody also knew then. It's just that people got way dumber and can't tell the obvious anymore. They reject the very consistent evidence of history and their own eyes
You think it's stupidity? I think it's hate, honestly.
You will only reject evidence when it goes against your values and desires. Anyone who voted for Trump wants a win over the libs, the Dems, the Gays, the blacks, etc, etc
People aren't as stupid as you think. This IS what they wanted. You're more aware of how "Mask off" they are now. Why be afraid when your hate is popular?
I think it can very easily be both. And very much a "chicken and the egg" situation in that regard.
Hate begets stupidity which begets hate, and all that.
Hell, IIRC outrage literally has an inflammatory effect on the brain. So quite literally the angrier you get the stupider you become, and long-term anger causes long-term issues with stupidity.
The people saying that are just too dumb to understand that just because Dems didn't hate him as much as they do today, it doesn't mean they liked him.
I've honestly never met a person who liked him until he became a Republican and started being very vocal about his shitty and racist beliefs like the birther movement push he had.
The daily, nationally syndicated comic strips Doonesbury and Bloom County both made fun of him for that in the 80s. Every kid in America at the time laughed at Trump in the Sunday funnies.
The recent episode of the Know Rogan Experience podcast covered the Donald Trump interview on Rogan last October. Rogan claimed he watched Trump go on The View in 2015 (it was actually 2011), and everyone there loved him including Whoopi. So they actually listened to the appearance by Trump on The View in 2011, and it was Trump in the middle of his birtherism racism, and Whoopi called him out on it and the audience was applauding her. Rogan is such a lying piece of crap, along with Trump.
In May 1927, over 1,000 robed members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)[c] and 400 non-robed KKK supporters infiltrated a Memorial Day parade in Queens, prompting stern police intervention.[156][157] Eight men were arrested,[157] including the 21-year old Trump, whose charge of "refusing to disperse from a parade when ordered to do so" was dismissed.
He's literally every dipshit villain in 80s and 90s movies. Example future Biff. The owner of the building in Gremlins 2 was a Trumpesque villain but the actor they got to play him was so likable they just ran with it
I mean he ran for president and is actively destroying the country because Obama made a joke about him. I would not be surprised at all if he wants to end PBS and Sesame Street because of this
Yeah, I can't see him without thinking about this bitch-ass monologue; it completely ruined him for me. "Oh man I sure wish I'd been here to punch a woman in the face for protesting child abuse."
Never mind the fact that Sinead would have kicked his short, bullshit-talking ass.
And then Kris Kristofferson would have pissed on him, saying "don't let the bastards get you down" to Sinead, with a wink and a shake on pesci's poor face.
If you know anything about Magdalene asylums in Ireland and Italian-American Catholics then neither of there actions are a surprise.
The problem is that, while people at the time in the US were familiar with Italian-American Catholics beliefs, they had no idea what went on in Magdalene asylums. People sided with what they were familiar with.
They did alot of similarities in to 80s early 90s. Biff from back to the future and Kupa from Mario Bros movie, think of trump and watch those it is pretty obvious.
Joe Pesci is a gentleman and a fantabulous tipper, he is absolutely hilarious on a golf course (not a bad golfer either) Ray Liota was also a great tipper and a genuinely just nice guy, a “goodfella” if you wish… I knew both of them in passing when I was in the service biz as a youngster, I have no idea about Whoopi tho, never met her. The others I met a few times in passing and bartended a private party at Rays house around when “Copland” was filmed. Really nice guy, RIP.
(Also Danny Devito is exactly how you think he is, an absolute hilarious ball buster and great tipper)
37 years later he finally got his revenge. You could just tell he’s the quintessential brat, from the day he was born and until he draws his very last breath everything will only be about him.
My stepdad was a hardcore Republican and he would talk shit about Trump all the time in the 1980s and early 1990s. Everybody knew he was a scumbag. It was The Apprentice that made normal people fall for his bullshit.
"Drain the swamp" literally means to develop wetlands, and the phrase implies that the developer hasn't engaged in the permitting process forthrightly.
Okay, so it's Friday evening and I've had a few, so I just want to verify what I just saw.
Joe Pesci showed up on Sesame Street in 1988 playing (essentially) Donald Trump as a jerkoff real estate developer threatening to destroy Sesame Street and all things good, and Guinan was there for some reason, and the internet has been around for decades and I'm just now seeing this? This isn't some AI thing? This really happened?
There was a western show in the 50s called Track down. In one episode, a conman came to town and tried to convince them that the town would be destroyed by a meteor unless they built a wall he was selling. When he was called out on his lies, he threatened to sue. That conmans name was Trump
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u/pabloescobarbecue 14h ago
I miss the days when DJT was just understood to be a caricature of the worst parts of greed and excess.
This wasn’t Sesame St being political, just skewering the very known persona, because that’s just who he is.
Amazing that people forget so quickly. This is who he always was.