I saw Donald Trump on TV in 2010 and it changed my life
The origins of my fascination with the world's most dangerous idiot
Anyone who follows me on Instagram is well aware of fascination I have towards Donald Trump. Rest assured that it’s a fascination defined by a gut-level horror towards the man.
Having put out so much content about him, I figured that it was time to reveal how it began.
Or as he would say, the oranges of it all.
It was in 2010 that I first became aware of Donald Trump in a way that went beyond him being a television personality with an uncanny hairdo.
I was on vacation in Bali, and not having a very good time. I’d recently broken up with a girlfriend of mine. This had happened so recently that we were actually supposed to be in Bali together, however the night before our flight departed, I had discovered she had been having an affair for several months with someone and that she was very much in love with him.
I felt very cut up about it all because I had been very much in love with her. I had also told her that I never wanted to see her again, and I meant it.
It was a confusing moment of my life. In those days, I was also unable to cry about such things, which made the situation more confusing.
Bali wasn’t the kind of place I would have chosen to go to at that point in my life. I’d only been living in Asia for two years and felt I had other compelling places to visit. Bali was something I was aware of mostly as a place for Australian yobbos to run wild, and I took myself too seriously in those days to open myself to an experience like that.
So it was that on my first day in Bali, I found myself staying in my hotel room in Legian, unmotivated to explore this holiday destination that I hadn’t really wanted to go to but decided to because of a girlfriend who broken up with less than 24 hours before.
Such were the circumstances that led me to do something I never otherwise did in my life: watching television. I flicked around the channels, watching each of them with the curiousity of someone unacquainted with television for over five years. Nothing grabbed my attention for a few minutes, however, until I ended up on a programme about — of all things — Donald Trump.
It was on E! News. I’d had happened upon the beginning of an hour-long puff piece on Donald Trump. The concept of the show was that Donald Trump would take the viewer through a tour of his life. Of course, the result is him bragging without pause to the camera in his stream of conscious fashion about how great his life was, packaged with the same smug alpha-wolf dominance of which we are all now well-familiar.
The story that the show intended to communicate was exactly what you would expect from a television network whose main product is PR for celebrities: Donald Trump was rich, his wife was sexy, he worked hard, had a great life, and was living the American dream. None of this was particularly interesting to me.
But there was something about the show that had me riveted.
Beyond the surface presentation of what stories Donald Trump was selling about his life, there were all sorts of other things going on in the subtext.
Like how this self-proclaimed business genius seemed to have nothing intelligent to say about business.
Like how obviously uncomfortable all of his four grown children were around him. Each of them spoke of long periods of their life in which they did not talk to their father, or at least harboured great resentment toward him because of how he had treated their mothers. Or them. They’d had to accept the painful realisation that he would never change or apologise for his actions.
Donald was on camera with them as the shared these stories.
You might expect a father would be saddened to hear such things. Instead, Trump seemed proud that each of his children had come back into his life without him needing to have made any amends for behaviour.
I remember at least one of his sons mentioning that their main motivation in reconnecting with his father was so that he could be part of the family business. Trump seemed to take that as proof of his success as a business-man.
His wife of (then) seven years, Melania, was often referenced but completely absent. No friends or colleagues of his appeared on the show either to give testament to Donald’s character. These absences struck me as notable.
Trump gave the show’s presenter a tour of his apartment. I had never seen it before that moment and was not aware it was possible for me to laugh out loud for several minutes at the sight of a person’s home.
Donald Trump’s apartment looks like it was thrown together by the set designer of a porno movie as a low-budget simulation of a Las Vegas casino interior while under the constraints of a drug addiction. Like a television set, the whole place had a sterile vibe, like it was unhabited by humans. Every object had a cheap-looking quality, reminiscent of Walmart knock-offs, and none of their arrangements made any sense.
Every time Trump entered a new room, he theatrically gestured for the viewer to take in the sights. I cackled anew each time.
On the wall of one living room, for example, were two incongruously placed Roman-style columns framing a chandelier that hung at eye level. Think about that for a moment. Have you ever before seen a chandelier hung on a wall? I still find it funny almost 15 years later.
Trump strutted like a peacock through this ungodly mess, oblivious to how unbelievably ugly his own home was, convinced instead that it was a masterpiece.
He proudly presented a gold-colored toilet that had been installed in a guest bathroom. The man clearly saw himself as a king of glamour, but nothing about him had even a modicum of style. The clothes he wore did not fit him at all, giving the impression that he was a child who had let himself into his parents’ bedroom and was cosplaying in his father’s work clothes.
Neither did anything about the man’s lifestyle seem appealing. Trump talked enthusiastically about how his plan was to keep working for the rest of his life so that he could make more money. The show obviously intended this to convey aspirational virtue. However, coupled with the clearly dysfunctional relationships his reality seemed to be populated with, the impression was more one of a lonely and pitiable man-child.
As strange as it is to say, this E! News puff piece about Donald Trump that I had accidentally stumbled upon during my holidays in Bali ended up having a transformative effect on my life.
I was in a turbulent period of my life then, when the future my career was impossible for me to envisage. I was facing a dilemma common to young people: I did not know whether I wanted to pursue a professional life in which I felt miserable but earned a high salary—as I had been doing before—or whether I should make do with less in a job I found nourishing on a deeper level.
This dilemma had weighed on me for a while. Money is an attractive thing to a young person starting out in life. Money can bring a lot to a person’s life, beyond material pleasures. I’d experienced that money gives a person options in life, security from the unexpected, and, sadly, respect from many people who would not otherwise give you the time of day. By 2012, I no longer had any of the money I once did, and I felt its absence in ways that made me question my current direction in life.
During this E! News profile on Donald Trump while he was bragging about how much he loved to work, a question came to my mind: why doesn’t he take all of his money and sit on a beach?
The absurd contrast of our two lives hit me. Him in his ugly apartment with his loveless family. Me: young, free and poor in Bali.
“I’m am so glad that I am not like this idiot,” I thought to myself.
These were not words of scorn, but gratitude for what I did have in my life.
Gratitude had been missing from my life for a long moment. I’d spent the better part of a year feeling financially insecure with no plan forward. The hopelessness I had accumulated in that time made it hard for me to feel appreciative for what I had. Donald Trump’s pitiable life was a timely reminder of how much worse my life could be.
After the show finished, I turned the TV off and went to watch the sunset at a beach. I felt as if a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders.
I thought about how, after my holiday in Bali, I’d be going back to Singapore. That very morning, the same thought would have caused me dread.
In addition to all the emotional mess of my break up, my work had been causing me stress. I liked many things about the job I had then, but I was not yet very good at it. The work was difficult, and there was a lack of support from management that meant improving my skills would be a matter of putting the work in myself for free. Since the job barely paid the bills, it had been hard for me to find the motivation to give myself an extra load of work in training myself.
But all of a sudden, I’d found the motivation I had been lacking. Donald Trump’s ridiculous life had impressed upon me how silly it was to consider money and happiness as too much the same thing.
I realized that while I didn’t have much in my life, I nurtured healthy relationships with the people I knew and a general sense of well-being. This was more than I could say of Donald Trump, a (supposed) billionaire.
I had unexpectedly found the career direction I had been searching for. Thank you, Donald Trump.
From that point, I mostly never thought about Donald Trump again, aside from revisiting, from time to time, the fun memory I had of the surreal experience of watching him profiled by a show that seemed unable to communicate a single likeable aspect of the man despite its best efforts.
His name would come into my awareness now and again in relation to the racist birther conspiracy theories about Barack Obama. Each time, I would think “that idiot again,” and not much more.
He seemed an insignificant man, not one worthy of further thought. That all changed in 2015, however.
That, I will touch on in a future post.
For now, this story has a happy ending.
My efforts to take my work more seriously than I had been paid off. After several months I started to really enjoy my work, and success led to more opportunities and five and half years later, I start my own business as an English teacher.
Bali itself didn’t win me over, but it did grow on me enough that I returned there a handful of times over the years with friends.
And the girlfriend that I had broken up with, we ended up burying the hatchet soon after. I spent an appropriate amount of time feeling wronged by her actions, but it wasn’t too long before I was able to see things in a more holistic way that included the problems of our relationship and of her perspective on things as well. That is to say, I spent a few weeks thinking about her as a monster, which helped me get over the initial sting but which I also never felt comfortable doing, before deciding that it was all a lot more complex than that — which made me feel comfortable. We never properly talked about what had happened, but we were able to each other’s presence when we did run into each other in Singapore.
She ended having many happy years with the guy she had been cheating on me with, which was something I found comforting, and she is living her dream life.