Before his image was reengineered by The Apprentice, Trump was widely viewed as the sleaziest real estate developer in NYC. And that’s saying something.
Indeed. People think NYers hate him for his politics but NYers have reviled him for many many decades for just being a huge piece of shit all the time to everyone.
If you told people in like 2009 that Donald Trump had lost a civil suit because he forced himself on a woman in a dressing room of a department store, most people - I think even many who'd go on to be members of his cult! - would be like "yeah that tracks"
I never got over the USFL debacle he engineered. And then it seemed like for years every time I looked up he had bankrupted another casino, failed at another vanity business with his name on it, or ripped off a charity. I have never understood how anybody could think he was ever a success.
I thought the title of Master of New York was retired when Regis died?
Two *different* popular daily newspaper cartoonists decided to use him as the most obvious gaudy ludicrous famous idiot their audience would enjoy seeking skewered.
Yep. I learned that within weeks of moving to NYC in the late 80s.
I still remember being a little kid in Idaho and my mom being furious at his cameo in Home Alone 2 because of him being a known rapist and domestic abuser even back then. She also touched on his real estate scams on the car ride home.
Speaking as someone in the real estate industry at that time we were not fooled.
EXACTLY. Never having seen even a split second of The Apprentice, I have zero way to understand how ppl gravitated toward such a sh1tb4g of a person. I, and most New Yorkers my age, just always knew him for his sleaze and vulgarity.