‘The Nanny’: The script that made Donald Trump freak out with a single letter
Fun fact: the supposed quote that went around of Donald Trump telling People Magazine that if he ever ran for president, he’d run as a republican because they’re “the dumbest group of voters”, isn’t actually true.
Of course, it isn’t true, and not just because if Donald Trump ever said something accurate, he might melt like the Wicked Witch of the West. He wouldn’t say it because it would require analysis and a basic understanding of modern politics, neither of which he possesses. Whether that’s because he lacks the interest or the ability is beside the point. The fact is, he proudly doesn’t understand politics.
In a way, I think that was part of his original appeal. We all heard our asshole cousins smugly say they liked him because he was an outsider who would “shake up the system”. As if he and his billionaire friends hadn’t already been pulling strings behind the scenes for decades. The kind of people who don’t care when others are threatened could just sit back and laugh at the absurdity of the guy from The Apprentice with the weird hair becoming the most powerful person on Earth. To them, everything is entertainment, so why not the presidency, too?
No, the one thing that Trump can fathom is publicity. The only thing that matters to him is being thought about. That’s it. That’s the long and the short of it. Which kinda makes sense. After all, the Trump Organization didn’t give anyone anything. It didn’t make anything. No lives were improved by it other than the man who gave the company its name. All it did was stick the words Trump on shoddy products because that’s all the man can do.
Make things about him at the expense of others.
How did Donald Trump throw a tantrum on The Nanny?
You can see this in the sheer number of appearances the shameless tart made in various films and TV shows in the 1990s.
Of course, everyone’s Christmas is now shot through with revulsion thanks to Home Alone 2: Lost in New York putting the alleged child molester on screen with a 12-year-old Macaulay Culkin. His truly humiliating appearances in WWE somehow made professional wrestling even more embarrassing and crass, but the appearance that truly shows what a petty, image-obsessed little toddler this man was came in 1996.
Trump was set to make an appearance on an episode of The Nanny, the sitcom that made actor, singer and literal trade union leader Fran Drescher a major star in the 1990s. Decades later, Drescher gave an interview to People about his appearance on the episode. While Drescher was (as far as we know) one of the lucky women of the 1990s who didn’t have Trump slobbering all over her the entire time he was in the room with her, he did throw his toys out of the pram when he didn’t feel like he was being respected enough.
As Drescher said, “I stood in this scene, and I said to the two of them, ‘Oh, all you millionaires are alike,’ and Peter [Marc Jacobson] — now my gay ex-husband — got a note from his assistant, Donald Trump’s assistant, that said, ‘Mr. Trump is not a millionaire. He’s a billionaire, and we’d like you to change the script.’ So we asked them if it would be okay if we wrote ‘zillionaire’ and he said that was fine.”
Easy to laugh about today, but we’ve had a man with skin this thin in charge of the nuclear codes on and off since 2016. How we made it this far in I’ll never know.