Remember Donald Trump's 2000 presidential campaign?

[DetlefK]

http://www.cracked.com/blog/trump-2000-vs-trump-2016-side-by-side-comparison/

2000: Trump is running for President and promoting his best-selling book.
2016: Trump is running for President and promoting his new best-selling-book.

Oh, and the books have the exact same premise. America is broken, and only Donald Trump, with his no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it-is attitude, can fix it. He's an outsider, not a career politician, and he's a loose cannon who plays by his own rules.

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In 1999, The New York Post pointed out that Trump's book (and his entire campaign) had been dismissed by the political world as irrelevant. USA Today also expressed skepticism about his motives. The LA Times and Newsweek ran articles pointing out that Trump was more interested in being a salesman than a statesman. I could go on and on, because Trump's presidential ambitions were met with more doubt than claims of a time machine that also gives blowjobs. And sure enough, Trump eventually dropped out, but only after boosting his public profile. A few years later he launched The Apprentice, and he's been in the spotlight ever since.

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"Lots of presidential candidates write books to promote their campaigns, but Trump may be the only man ever to run for president in order to promote a book."

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But that's really no different than his views in 2000, when he wanted to overthrow Castro, invade North Korea if they ignored an ultimatum to disarm, throw even more Americans into an overcrowded prison system, and perform public executions.

Oh, but he had a tax policy straight out of a Rush Limbaugh fan's nightmare of socialist America -- a one-time 14.25 percent tax on anyone with more than 10 million dollars to pay off the national debt in one fell swoop.

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He wanted to privatize social security but introduce public healthcare. Yeah, Donald Trump, arch-conservative, proposed a government program more liberal than Obamacare. But now he wants to abolish Obamacare (but keep social security public). He used to support longer background checks on guns and a ban on whatever "assault weapons" were defined as the week he was asked about them, and now he wants guns everywhere so citizens can play hero.

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Regardless of what you think of his opinions, the man is entertaining. He knows how to get attention and rile people up, and that's valuable in a country in which elections are grim multi-year death marches. And at this point, polls are completely meaningless.

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But the media needs content, and we want to be entertained by that content. So we hype up the Republican debates like they're the Super Bowl, then break down the best "zingers" instead of looking at substantive policy issues,

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In 1999, Trump quit the Republican Party after denouncing it as "too crazy right," a claim that looks laughable today. But he really quit because they wouldn't make room for someone who was only interested in hawking his brand.

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Now consider this: The fact that Trump's supporters are loud and angry and petulant isn't a sign that America's getting more extreme. It's a sign that the country's progressed to where their once-common views are now extreme. Looking at Trump and saying that America is getting more radical is like looking at Alabama in 1963, when peaceful black people were attacked with fire hoses and police dogs and blocked from entering a university by their own governor, and thinking "wow, black Americans have never had it worse!" They were finally starting to get it better, and some people didn't like that.








This is a hippopotamus flinging his shit around as a sign of dominance to claim this territory. Somehow this image has relevance when talking about Trump.

[AndreaCG]

1. This should have gotten more responses

Just as with the Daily Show, sometimes the best political observations come from a comedy website.