He ran for president in 2000 actually and there's an alternate universe where he won the Reform Party nomination instead of Pat Buchanan. Then liberals would have blamed Trump for Gore losing Miami-Dade county, because the ballots were weird and a bunch of Gore voters marked in Buchanan by accident apparently. Also Trump's main platform back then was universal healthcare, and he apparently wanted Oprah as his running mate. Times were weird.

I was dimly aware of Trump in the 90s because he was on an episode of Fresh Prince. He had a reputation as a smug weird New York rich guy and that's really it. He'd go on talk shows to fight with Larry Flynt or say unhinged things. He started getting political clout after he became the face of the whole birther movement, the one claiming Obama was born in Kenya. In my head the brirthers have always been the first maga movement. Conservatives before Trump and social media were different and more pearl-clutchy, like how liberals are now. It's like liberals and conservatives traded aesthics and rhetoric over the past 20 years.