‘The Monster’: The moment Donald Trump endorsed Eminem for president
It’s difficult to tell whether Donald Trump appreciated that period in the 1990s and 2000s when he was bafflingly a hip-hop icon.
It’s hard to envisage that he didn’t appreciate it. After all, it was a whole bunch of people giving him props for being rich and famous, or at least appearing to be rich, anyway. Beyond that, Trump is famously a man who doesn’t really care who’s stroking his ego, just whether someone is stroking it.
Surprisingly, or not, Trump was particularly enamoured when the most famous white rapper, Eminem, came calling, and Trump came running. After all, there does seem to be nothing that Trump appreciates more than charismatic, famous men. Look at how he was when Zohran Mamdani visited the Oval Office.
The year was 2004. Eminem was just about to jump the shark with his fifth album, the execrable Encore and as part of the promotion, he was about to launch a satellite radio station called Shade 45. We really are in the early 2000s here, aren’t we? The hook was that Shade 45, unlike the majority of stations of a similar size, would specialise in uncut hip-hop music played 24/7. To promote the station, Eminem staged a television special at New York’s Roseland Ballroom that has aged like milk.
He announced a mock national convention that was called the Shady National Convention.
Why did Donald Trump endorse Eminem for president?
As if the relevancy-killing lead single for Encore, ‘Just Lose It’, wasn’t enough of a sign that Eminem’s sense of humour was dying a slow and painful death, the entirety of the Shady National Convention was a riff on launching a presidential campaign. A stunt dedicated that took up 20 minutes and filled by an awkward, painfully unfunny set of campaign speeches, the first delivered by Donald Trump and the second delivered by Em himself.
Trump is cringe-inducingly introduced as “the joint chief of cash” before giving a speech that honestly isn’t all that different to the ones he gives today. In fact, it’s only slightly less rambling and incoherent. Considering his brain appears to resemble week-old porridge at this point, that’s saying something. It’s also got just as much pointless self-aggrandising, including the claim, “I know a winner when I see one. And Donald Trump is telling you, right now, Slim Shady is a winner. He’s got brains. He’s got guts. And he’s got Donald Trump’s vote. Ladies and gentlemen, our great candidate, Slim Shady.”
Then Em’s up next, in full pilled to the gills mode. He sleepwalks through a supposedly edgy send-up of political campaign speeches before he gets to the thing the crowd actually came to see, the music. The problem is it’s all tracks from Encore, along with a few D12 cuts, and some hastily pasted in guest spots from a deeply confused Method Man and Busta Rhymes, who just seemed happy to turn up, followed by yet another bit of bad political satire with another speech, then leave.
Yet, despite all that, it’s still got more actual integrity than any Republican National Convention of the past ten years. At least it stands for something.