In addition to the other reasons mentioned, the media platformed him every chance they got. He was great for ratings and a good excuse for ignoring Bernie. He got an obscene amount of free coverage.

He always played the character of a successful real estate mogul in pop culture

I think Hildawg was so incredibly unappealing that people decided to vote for Anyone But Hillary. It made absolutely no sense for her to be the candidate right after the Obama admin. People who loved Obama would hate her for the racism and the weird death threat that her campaign put out when she was running against him, and people who hated Obama saw her more or less as an Obama clone without any of his charisma. She was a candidate made for people who write opinion articles and nobody else.

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.

I think Donald Trump's heyday was the 80s. I knew him in my childhood and adolescence in the 2000s and early 2010s, but he didn't mean that much to me.I think the general cultural perception of him was just as a rich guy. Occasionally you'll hear a line in a rap song and just chuckle a little, like hah that was a different time. The lines are usually about getting money, or calling oneself the "Black Trump" because you have a lot of money. Idk, tbh I can't think of any off the top of my head except for Mac Miller releasing "Donald Trump" in 2011 and Kreayshawn mentioning Ivana Trump in Gucci Gucci also in 2011, but they're definitely out there.

I think he got the hogs on his side by just repeating the shit they had been saying for years, whether in their Tea Party circles during the Obama years, or on messageboards like 4chan. Or you could go back to the talk radio of the 90s and stuff and hear the same stuff being said. He was just speaking the hogs' language, and so of course they ate it up. Plus, he was able to ride the American assumption that wealth=competency. All those kulaks with their car dealerships look up to a guy like Trump just because they want to be him. When he says he makes the best deals, they say of course he does, if you have that much money you must be doing something right.

He was a meme for the "You're fired" shit. Boomers loved the apprentice.

Yooo all the business majors would religiously watch The Apprentice as if they could actually learn anything from it. I assume their brainwormed professors recommended it as edutainment

I think this video answers your question pretty well. During the summer of 2015, liberal media spent a lot of time glazing Donald. This is a montage of MSNBC praising Trump while the Republican party rejected him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cF9WE395KYo

In April 2015, you had the Hillary Clinton campaign sending out an email for the "pied piper strategy". The email said that the candidates Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and Ben Carson should be elevated. The email says that the Democratic Party has previously used this same strategy. The email says that the Democrats believed that promoting candidates with extremist views would hurt the Republican party.

https://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaign-intentionally-created-donald-trump-with-its-pied-piper-strategy/

Conservatives and older people loved the apprentice and they believe that everything accomplished on that show was real so they were very impressed by his abilities. A LOT of people don't know that reality shows are staged they just see guy on tv being successful and think "that guy must be a genius"

I think some of it is the Bizzaro American brand of "anti-elitism". Despite inheriting millions of dollars and never facing consequences, to chuds he's "one of us". All the mockery for his lack of diction, irrational hate, ignorance, failure, lowbrow diet, etc. is perceived as attacks on "us (chuds)". So the more he's attacked the more they feel the need to support him.

Or not, I'm just talking out my ass

I remember thinking he was a clown in 80's and 90's when i was a kid. He was this rich guy in the tabloids and then he went bankrupt and that was funny. I thought he was done then

Then, somehow Trump returned

I remember in either 2014 or 2015 googling "trump" and the hearthstone twitch streamer being the top result lol

It’s because the media backlash came after he made that comment about Mexicans and he didn’t back down. I remember a lot of people saying, “that’s what I love about Trump. He doesn’t take shit from anybody.”

This was during a right-wing backlash to perceived political correctness and people being forced into apologies for “wrong think.” Same reason someone severely lacking charisma like Jordan Peterson gained a following.

Then the media kept going and Trump continued telling them to fuck off. Nothing riles up chuds more than a guy who tells the MSM to fuck off.

Honestly one of the funniest, and personally kinda sad, things is that one of my mentors in HS was fascinated by The Apprentice. He's always been a liberal (very much into public-private partnerships, the idea of opportunity) Not sure if it was sincere or not, but it always felt like he thought it was great that Trump was giving these people an "opportunity".

Of course now he absolutely hates Trump. He's honestly a great person in a vacuum, but completely sold on neoliberalism and a huge Hillary supporter.

I remember the birth certificate stunt he pulled during Obama, then people started questioning if his presidency counts cause Hawaii wasn't a state yet or something. That started giving him a political following.

It is with some displeasure that I used to watch our big wet boy on The Apprentice as a kid. I would say in 2nd grade "I love Donald Trump" and a lot of kids would look at me weird because "my mommy says he hates God."

It got so bad my dad actually pulled me aside and tried to tell me how much of a joke Donald Trump is. As it goes, he's a Queens boy that's pissed at Manhattan because they saw him as a filthy poor, and now he sort of allies himself with other kulaks because he wants to stick it to the Bloombergs of the world. It's pork on pork violence.

I know libs say “he’s a stupid person’s idea of what a smart person is”, but this is one instance of them being right. The only people I knew who had any respect for him pre-2015 were the types of people who think it’s business people who make the world go round, but have no idea what “business” actually involves. I watched some of The Apprentice, and it was painfully obvious Trump doesn’t have the slightest clue what he’s doing even back then.

He wasn’t really all that political up until a few years before he ran, but I remember even in like the mid 2000s Trump was an embodiment of everything I hated in the business world.

It's a hard one to figure. I get the 4chan maga people cause they're irony poisoned and it adds up easily. But boater kulaks were more normal prior and it was pretty well understood he was a long standing guy to laugh at. Why this particular guy with his reputation somehow appealed to the crowd he appealed to is weird as hell and even in retrospect it doesn't make sense. It's like a body snatcher thing, suddenly people had trust in a dude who'd been a punchline for decades. Orange man bad etc, but it is really strange that such a wide swath of people voluntarily gave up their potential to ever be taken seriously to sincerely believe a dude who was always a hairpiece farce is the second coming.

His show was a huge success, regardless of its merit. It kept his brand alive and became a rest stop for celebrities whose stars were waning to get a boost in their own visibility. Also, perhaps ironically, it was one of the most racially diverse TV shows on the air at the time, which helped it reach multiple demographics in a way that its competition couldn't.

I would say that the show is solely responsible for rehabilitating Trump's image in the pop culture, since by the nineties he was completely discredited by his long string of failures. The show let them edit out all of his rambling nonsense and just show the parts where he was acting like a stern boss, which became his new identity in the 2000s when enough people had forgotten just what a joke he had been in previous years.

I remember working in a grocery store in 2012 and we were all walking around after closing time fixing the shelves. This one tatted up white boy said he wished Trump would run for president because he's a self made man and not a politician. I'm not making this up. The same kinda bullshit arguments you heard a few years later. I immediately was like "He isn't a self made man, he inherited a huge real estate dynasty from his dad Fred."

Trump had already run for president a few times by that point. I think he was a third party candidate in the early 2000s. Reform Party or something.

The perception of him I remember back then was that he was a tacky, corny character but a genuinely rich person from his real estate business, which made him a good candidate to boaters who wanted America to be "run like a business" (I don't know or care whether he is actually rich)

My mom tells me about how she remembers, back in the 80s, he was on every magazine. And she also says about how none of his supporters seem to remember, because she brings up basic information about him to her relatives, and they have no idea what she's talking about, such as who Kushner is.

Genuinely, by shitposting about stupid shit he says, we know more about Trump than most of his supporters.

Only knew him as the "youre fired" guy, i watched home alone and couldnt recognize him

I really didn't know much about him before 2016. The only point I remember him before that was seeing him on TV in high school. My liberal self back then thought he was the ideal of a successful businessman, mostly because of his gold-plated billionaire aesthetic. Many at the time thought the same and I'm sure that's what convinced some substantial portion of the electorate to choose him in 2016.

In pop culture at the time, my image of him from 2010-2015 was shaped by a show on TV Land called How'd You Get So Rich?. The premise of the show was the host Joan Rivers would interview some rich person, where they'd give some bullshit story on how they got all their money. I don't remember the Trump episode clearly but, that and the ambient background influence The Apprentice had at the time were the pop culture references that put Trump in my head as some rich person archetype.

Edit: Also, remembering that Joan Rivers show has got the theme song stuck in my head again. It's amazing what sounds I fixate on and carry with me for the rest of my life.

you're fired!

I remember him being very proud of himself for not getting fooled by Ali G. He thought he was a genius for not investing in an ice cream glove

Gosh, nobody's weighed in on ancient history yet. I think I first learned his name when it would appear alongside Marla Maples and Ivana in tabloid headlines I'd read in supermarkets. A couple years later, his board game came out and my aunt got it for my me and my brother. My dad was upset because he didn't want a guy who cheats on his wife glorified but let us keep the game, which we played a good bit. At some point, the "You're the King" jingle for the Trump Castle casino in Atlantic City got lodged in my head, where it remains to this day and is unfortunately playing right now.

Before 2012 I was vaguely aware of some superficial guy with gaudy riches who had a beef with Rosie O'Donnell.

I needed a light blue tie for an event one day and I bought a discounted Trump tie at Ross. Haha

most people are media illiterates

“Balding Donald Trump taking dollars from yall”

My parents used to watch every episode of the apprentice and celebrity apprentice so I don't know. But they hate Trump now so.