Donald Trump, the distended bladder of anger and Chex Mix currently running for the GOP’s presidential nomination, is starting to lose it. His poll numbers are back within Earth’s gravitational pull. His performance at the latest debate was, dare we say, low energy. Maybe that 12 minutes of work he had to put in on Saturday Night Live (we’ll invite a comparison to Betty White’s workhorse outing from 2010) took a lot out of the man who’s recently claimed to only need three or four hours of sleep.
When all this began, Trump basically served as a predictable incursion of reality television into another aspect of our lives: a Kardashian campaign to tide us over until Kanye filed with the FEC. But Trump’s starting to discover what wiser heads have always known: the actual day-to-day load of running for president is no fun at all. Now, he’s overcompensating: this week, Trump stood before a group of Iowa voters and harangued them for a length of time unknown to audiences outside Venezuela. During that time, he made fun of Ben Carson’s belt-stabbing story, pretended to not know Carly Fiorina’s name and worried aloud that Iowa voters were stupid.
This was always the thing that made Trump’s candidacy a stunt: you knew he always had the potential to kick into a comical level of ego overdrive, it was just a matter of how much storm and stress it would take to bring it out -- how long until he, like Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, finally let it slip that he only feels contempt for the people he’d riled up.
It’s getting closer to that moment of implosion. In the meantime, Trump’s looking more and more like the barefaced egomaniacs of yore. On this week’s First To Last, we look down memory lane for the people The Donald is slowly starting to resemble.
| RANK | REASON | |
|---|---|---|
 | FIDEL CASTRO Trump's speeches are getting longer and longer on the campaign trail, approaching banana republic length (and we don't mean the clothing line). | |
 | LANCE ARMSTRONG For a while we thought he was YOOGE. All those medals, all the victories -- all of it based on lies, and he still thinks he should be allowed to skate on it. | |
 | JOE MCCARTHY For Joe, it was Communists under your bed. For The Donald, it's a new definition of "other" -- Chinese, Mexicans, Koreans, Russians, journalists -- the lot. | |
 | ROBERT MOSES Like Donald Trump, another master builder and human bulldozer used to getting his way. And like Trump, openly contemptuous of the voters he purports to want to serve. | |
 | HUEY LONG Proposed programs, but it was more about him in the end. Trump doesn't even bother proposing programs. | |
 | VINCE MCMAHON All the world is a wrestling match without rules where it's all right to hit your enemy over the head with a chair. Donald Trump is a friend of Vince McMahon's. | |
 | SILVIO BERLUSCONI Europe’s short-fingered vulgarian, complete with weird hair and desire to be around beautiful young women -- and always precipitously close to a fall. | |
 | JULIUS CAESAR Invented use of referring to himself in the third person. But The Donald hasn't conquered Iowa, let alone France. |