It was all right there, right from the beginning. The insults. The exaggerations. The braggadocio. The casual racism. The empty promises.
It was all right there if you care to revisit that moment, 10 years ago, when game show host Donald J. Trump announced his run for president of the United States by descending a dingy Trump Tower escalator under a sign that read “currency exchange.”
“Wow. That is some group of people,” he said surveying the small throng of journalists and paid attendees, his first words to the American people as a candidate for the highest office in the land. “Thousands.”
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There were not thousands—echoes of that first mortifying Sean Spicer press briefing when he falsely claimed Trump had “the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.”
There’s Ivanka, in crisp summer whites, standing to the side, vacuously applauding her father’s entrance. There’s Melania, almost smiling and almost waving as she descends from her penthouse aerie to mingle, for a moment, with the hoi polloi. All of it set to Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.”
Young would go on to file a civil suit against Trump to prevent him from playing his music at rallies.
Like everything Trump, the event was alternately grandiose and rinky-dink. The cheap riser stage was festooned with a gaudy number of American flags, each crowned with an uneven eagle finial, giving them a wobbly, drunken appearance. Affixed to the lectern was a blue cardboard placard that reads “Trump” and, in small letters below, “Make America Great Again.”
These first tentative moments of the campaign that would land him in the White House feel like a college improv show—Trump riffing on his few prepared remarks, extending what should have been a breezy and uplifting appeal to the American people into a long-winded gripe fest. All rip-offs and stupid people and the first glints of the messianic “I alone can fix it” zeal soon to follow.
But what’s also clear, watching the spectacle 10 years after the fact, is that Trump spoke in a way politicians didn’t. He spoke in a way that connected. “How stupid are our leaders?” he asked, regarding the Chinese purchasing American debt. “How stupid are these politicians to allow this to happen?”
Of course, 10 years later, his “big, beautiful bill” adds $3 trillion to that debt, to be purchased, in large measure, by China. This on top of adding more to the debt than any president in history during his first term.
The lies were there from the beginning, too. He lies and lies and lies. He lied about the unemployment rate: “Our real unemployment rate is 18 to 20 percent,” he said. In June of 2015, the unemployment rate was 5.3 percent.
He lied about his “very strong” opposition to the war in Iraq. No examples of him publicly expressing such an opinion were ever found. In fact, a 2002 interview with Howard Stern was the first time he appears to have been publicly asked about the subject. Asked if he supported the invasion, Trump’s response: “Yeah, I guess so.”
It’s amazing watching that speech of 10 years ago, amazing to see the blazing hypocrisy as he decries influence peddling. Amazing to see him declare himself a “free trader” in one breath and then say “free trade is terrible” in the next. Amazing to see the master negotiator outlining how we will bring manufacturing jobs back, the coal mining jobs, and how he will outwit all the countries playing us for fools.
Ten years later, how’s that going?
Nobody thought he was a serious candidate. Probably not even Trump himself, having entered the race as a vanity project to shore up his sagging brand. The Apprentice, once a hit, was by 2015 a ratings afterthought. He needed a way to gin up some Trumpian razzle-dazzle. What better way than the spectacle of running for president? Maybe a campaign could be the launchpad for a Fox News competitor, Trump TV. Maybe it would smooth the road towards more lucrative licensing deals in Azerbaijan or Moscow.
The media’s conundrum was obvious: How to cover a candidate who inflates the truth when he isn’t inventing it out of whole cloth, a candidate who promises salvation but offers no pathway to reach it, a candidate who takes special delight in trolling his opponents rather than engaging with them on substance? “Take him seriously but not literally,” seemed to be the order of the day. Or literally but not seriously. Or sometimes seriously and sometimes literally. Or both. Or neither. Or something.
In other words, it was obvious the media was not up to the task. They didn’t know how to treat a man as fundamentally unserious as Trump as a serious politician. So they didn’t. At first, they sneered. They laughed. And, in doing so, they proved Trump’s point about the “elite.”
Ten years later, how’s that going?
The Trump of a decade ago is noticeably younger and sharper. His spray-on tan evenly distributed, the fallen souffle pompadour a touch more kempt. His eyes are bright and piercing as he surveys the room. He looks hale, if not healthy. The chin juts out aggressively as he unpacks his grievances, of which there are many.
The only thing missing in those early moments is the grotesque menagerie of cloying hangers-on, obsequious jerks, and sweaty-eyed yes-men who will soon populate what will be come to be known as “Trumpworld.”
“We want Trump!” yelled a few voices from the balcony. The crowd of Trump T-shirt-wearing extras, paid to be there, do not join in.
He came across as indignant, this old Trump, that he is being forced to tear himself away from his “great life” to save the nation. He seemed angry about all the right things, and his proposed solutions had a common-sense appeal to them. But if the solution sounded too simple to be true, it’s because it was. It was a joke. A farce masquerading as serious political theater.
And yet it worked. Looking back on it, one can puzzle out the hows and whys: The appeal to the forgotten man. The auto worker whose job was offshored to Mexico. Or the coal miner being left behind by out-of-control environmental wackos. The Sarah Palin crowd still smarting over the “Hopey changy thing.” Those worried about what that newfangled commie health-care plan was going to do—death panels, anyone? The energy of the smoldering Tea Party seeking a new champion to defend them against all things “socialist.”
Perhaps, we think, this brash New Yorker knows what he’s talking about. Maybe it’s true what they say—if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. Maybe even Washington D.C.
Maybe the establishment needs somebody like this to shake things up, to stand up for the little guy. Maybe the power players in our nation’s capital need a different kind of hustler to set them straight. If one squints one’s eyes, it’s almost possible to fall for the bulls--t. Almost.
Ten years later, how’s that going?
Looking back now, after two impeachments, a bungled pandemic response, an insurrection; looking back now after a re-election following a disastrous Biden/Harris campaign with a country in chaos, its institutions denuded, its people mistrustful and hurting; looking back now with an executive branch flagrantly violating the law and enriching itself at every turn, with our alliances in tatters, with the wars he promised to end still raging, the question isn’t: How did it start?
The question—the only question—is: How does it end?
