Donald Trump: a pop culture icon
Donald Trump: child of privilege, draft dodger, billionaire businessman, New York socialite, reality TV star, Democrat fundraiser, Republican fundraiser, right-wing demagogue, 45th President of the United States.
Trump has worn a lot of hats in the last 72 years, not all of them blazoned with Make America Great Again. When you’re born the son of a real estate baron whose buildings speckle the Manhattan skyline, life’s opportunities have a way of flowering for you. It’s 2018 and a playboy billionaire who became an A-lister off the back of crushing suckers’ dreams with a simple ‘You’re fired!’ is President. And with him the American dream has changed — it is no longer the striving white-picket-fence, apple pie Americana, a piece of something from a slice of nothing. The American century has given way to the age of Hollywood, of mass marketing and the super rich. And the cherry on top of that cake is Donald Trump, President and pop culture icon.
Donald Trump has always been famous, because the Trumps have always been rich. My father was a contemporary of Trump at the University of Pennsylvania in the ’60s, and recalls Trump’s almost mythical status on campus. He was a big-shot New Yorker already, rarely seen around Philly, mostly submitting his assignments from his home city, just a limo ride away. The 60s were a time to be young and rich and irresponsible, to avoid serving in Vietnam, and to wade into the real estate business, both in NYC and in Cincinnati, where he let the controversial redevelopment of the Swifton Village complex. The 70s were a time for consolidating as a tycoon, taking over, in 1971, his father’s business — E.Trump & Sons — and rebranding it as The Trump Organisation, a self-projection-first approach that became his signature.
It was not until the 80s that Trump really began to use pop culture as a marketing tool. Sporadic talk show appearances, focusing primarily on his wealth, were paired with cameos in shows like I’ll Take Manhattan (starring Julianne Moore and Valerie Bertinelli) that showcased him as a celebrity-adjacent property developer. It was also the first in a long line of roles that blurred the line between the reality and fiction of Donald Trump’s self-image.
This is typical Trump, using pop culture as a tool for self-promotion and self-realisation. Just look at his IMDB credits, where he has appeared in everything from Zoolander to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, always in the starring role of Donald J. Trump.
Sex and the City is a particularly interesting one. There is perhaps no show that better epitomises pre-politics Trump than Sex and the City: meretricious, gossipy, high society, and quintessentially New York. The show is about real estate, resorts and restaurants, and exclusivity. In the very first episode, Samantha introduces Carrie to Mr Big — her endgame romance, who she has already men but in a contextless vacuum — as ‘the next Donald Trump, only he’s younger and much better looking’.
Curiously, in the same sequence, Carrie’s narration describes Samantha’s attempt to hit on ‘the next Donald Trump’ as having ‘the same deluded self-confidence that causes men like Ross Perot to run for President’. Ross Perot was, of course, the billionaire businessman who ran as an independent in ’92 and ’96, and who was, in many ways, the ur-Trump, politically speaking.
Trump himself made a cameo appearance on Sex and the City in the show’s second season episode ‘The Man, the Myth, the Viagra’. Tellingly, Carrie refers to the combination of Samantha, a cocktail and Trump as ‘you don’t get more New York than that’. But this was, of course, 1999, prior even to The Apprentice, and Trump was still projecting himself as an urban, bar-room sophisticate.
The commencement of The Apprentice in 2005 changed how Trump was viewed by the outside world, as was his intention. Like most men with significant business interests, he had made donations to both the Democrats and Republicans — too much can be read into that flip-flopping, he had been a conservative for a while — but by the time The Apprentice launched, Trump had begun his tentative political career, running an abortive presidential campaign in 2000. So when The Apprentice launched, it became a manifesto of sorts for Trump’s business approach; a single-man rule with a gilded seat of government in Trump Tower, surveying Manhattan, his empire, below.
‘New York, my city,’ Trump announces in the opening titles to the first season of The Apprentice, ‘where the wheels of the global economy never stop turning.’ Strikingly, that same opening sequence features a shot of the US national debt clock, spun into the narrative of Trump bouncing back from his personal debt, that would become a symbol of his political campaigns in later years.
Since his 10-year run on The Apprentice (which, we shouldn’t forget (or forgive) also made Piers Morgan a thing in the US) Trump has largely steered clear of ‘as himself’ cameo appearances. His personal grip on pop culture has come more in the form of producing two very different but somehow extremely similar entertainment events: pro-wrestling and the Miss USA/Universe contests. In the former, Trump is a Hall of Famer, having hosted Wrestlemanias IV and V, whilst he served as an executive producer on the latter from 2001 to 2014, when his aspirations led him away from the objectification of women and towards the commodification of politics.
But pop culture has not been a simple one-way street for Trump. For all the times that he has barged his way into the discourse, there have been times when he has slipped in, referentially, outside of his control. One of the most commonly cited examples is The Simpsons, and whilst claims that they eerily predicted the Trump presidency are, it turns out, internet tomfoolery, the 2000 episode ‘Bart to the Future’ does include President Simpson making reference to a Trump presidency. This episode appeared shortly after Trump’s failed flirtation with the nomination, acknowledging his aspirations whilst lampooning their seriousness. It also pokes fun at his business acumen in the process, not a joke that the Trump camp would sanction (‘we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch…’).
The Simpsons’ adversarial relationship with Trump as a figure somewhat mirrors that of another long-running American televisual establishment: Saturday Night Live. Despite Trump hosting the show twice, in 2004 and 2015, he has also been parodied consistently by the show since 1988, first as a real estate tycoon, then for his iconic role in The Apprentice, and finally, with Alec Baldwin taking the wig, as President. In a way, his pre-politics representations on the show are more interesting — Phil Hartman’s Trump foregoes the slow-speaking rhetorical bluster of 2018 Trump in favour of a man who is essentially a bastard, part yokel, part savvy businessman.
It’s the latter impression that permeated the mainstream media. Despite criticism of Art of the Deal and his role on The Apprentice, the world needed a celebrity byword for business acumen. Bill Gates was too nebbish, Steve Jobs too weird, Warren Buffett too invisible. The question of how rich Donald Trump actually was didn’t really matter — he lived like a rich person and wanted to be seen as a rich person. He opened his business up for the world so that ‘Trump’ would become a synonym, not merely for ostentatious wealth but for success. Take, for example, the episode of Quantum Leap from 1992, where Scott Bakula’s time-travelling offers an explanation for Trump’s real estate instincts, but, in doing so, inadvertently mythologises his abilities.
The conflation of wealth and success is particularly problematic because the dream that Trump sold America in 2016 — Make America Great Again — is not a dream of wealth, of gold framed oil paintings or resort memberships. It is a dream of success. And the word ‘Trump’ has been allowed to mean ‘success’, whether it’s shining from the side of a building, from the stitching on a cap, or from the thick sans-serif typography of a placard. The late rapper Mac Miller released a 2011 song titled ‘Donald Trump’ which featured a hypothesised rags to riches narrative: ‘For now, I’m at my house on the couch, watching cartoons… We gonna take over the world while these haters gettin’ mad/That’s why all my bitches bad,/They see this crazy life I have and they in awe’.
Trump and Miller got into an acrimonious legal dispute about his supposed entitlement to royalties for the song, a rather crass example of so-called ‘Donald Trump shit’. But the application of the Trump brand remains the same: despite being born into a multi-millionaire family, Trump is a path-to-success metaphor.
At the same time, Trump’s essential frivolousness remained fairly constant. I was reading Jonathan Ames’ 1996 novel The Extra Man recently, which includes a passage in which the snobby title character relates his experiences in Palm Beach: “Trump tried to break in again. He threw a big party at Mar-a-Lago the night of the Red Cross Ball. Said he was going to have beautiful models. They were nothing but prostitutes, and then at the end of the party they did the inevitable — jumped into the pool. So he’s finished for another year. Too vulgar.” Too vulgar for what? American high society? Seriousness? The presidency?
Perhaps the most frequently cited appearance of Trump in popular culture is his cameo in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. The 1992 movie features a scene where Kevin McCallister asks a stranger for directions to the lobby of a swanky Manhattan hotel. The stranger answers him kindly and it turns out to be Donald Trump, though his name is never referenced. But who else would be touring the swish hotels of New York City? Who else would have the strawberry blonde shock of hair and long black coat? Who else understands both the geography of hotels and human kindness enough to give a lost child directions to the lobby? Even in 1992, before The Apprentice created his public perception as a tough negotiator, capable of beating the Chinese in a trade war, he was an icon. As Kevin McCallister walks away Trump lingers for a second. It’s not clear whether this is an editing error or whether the Trump character is watching Macaulay Culkin go thinking “does he not know who I am?”. It is, presumably, the latter — the audience knows who Donald Trump is, of course, but Kevin doesn’t. The joke isn’t on Kevin, our hero, but the joke also isn’t on Trump. The joke must be on us, the audience, who are neither rich enough to be Donald Trump nor detached enough to not know him.
It is uncomfortable to see Donald Trump as a pop culture icon because it exposes the ways in which we collectively allowed ourselves to normalise his presence. He became an A-lister when he was little more than a real estate developer, and the fact that American television of the 90s and 00s regurgitated The Trump Organisation’s press releases and called it original programming is partly to blame. In a way this normalisation continues to the present day — the 2018 film Crazy Rich Asians features a throwaway remark that the gaudy home of a Singaporean millionaire is based on ‘Donald Trump’s bathroom’. If this is a critique of Trump, it does little more than remind the viewer of Trump’s enormous wealth.
And that’s the American dream now. It’s the dream of the contestants on The Apprentice. It’s the dream of aspirant stand-ups on SNL. It’s the dream of Matt Groening and Darren Star and Andy Borowitz. It’s the dream of musicians who overdose in their twenties.
Wealth does not mean wealth. It means success in a society where it is the only quantifiable metric of achievement. And no man typifies pop culture’s complicity in this development more than Donald Trump.
