re: #18 Anymouse 🌹

I knew very little about Mr. Trump when he announced his campaign. (That said, his “Mexican rapists” comment was enough for me to put him in the Steve King column of bigots.) I suspect that’s the same with a lot of people around here: No one was really familiar with Donald Trump’s past, and had no way of researching it. (FOX, Christian hate radio, and Sinclair sure weren’t talking about it, neither was the newspaper. The kitten-grabbing comment got no coverage here, nor his stiffing of contractors, or the allegations of hiring undocumented Polish workers, &c &c &c).

Trump’s been in the tabloid press since at least the 1970’s, when he was a regular at Studio 54. Granted, that was largely limited to local NYC tabloid media, but by the late ’80s, he was certainly known on a national level. “The Art of the Deal” was a bestselling book (about 1 million copies) and he was an almost constant fixture on a lot of the TV talk shows of the era.