How Howard Stern gave us Donald Trump
The critics thought he’d ended his career when it had just barely started – thanks to one outrageous and offensive comment.
It was 1982, a year when the phrase “political correctness” was familiar to only a handful of people, and Donald Trump was barely known beyond Manhattan real-estate insiders. And the hottest up-and-coming morning disc jockey in the Washington market was a young man with a long face, even longer hair and an acid tongue.
Stern was known as over the top, but even his fans gasped that January morning when the DJ pretended to call a representative of Air Florida, just one day after its jet had crashed into D.C.’s 14th Street Bridge, killing 78 people. Could he buy a one-way ticket to the bridge? he asked in a mocking tone. Would the 14th Street crossing become a permanent stop?
Its target would be traditional politicians, and it would be led by one of Stern’s frequent guests: Donald Trump.
This summer, after tapping into the very same zeitgeist that launched Stern to prominence three decades ago, Trump stunned the world by claiming the Republican presidential nomination at the party’s convention in Cleveland.
At July’s GOP confab, attentive viewers heard echoes of a Stern-Trump “bromance” forged in New York in the 1980s and ’90s – from the flow of B-list celebrities like Scott Baio to the over-the-top taunting of Hillary Clinton, punctuated by frequent chants of “lock her up.” Trump’s unapologetic slam of a Muslim couple whose soldier son was killed in Iraq is the most recent demonstration of his willingness to push into the territory of taboo and tastelessness.
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