This is where they make Soylent Green.

Boredom has existed ever since the days when the first prehistoric human dipped a brontosaurus bone in some blood and started drawing on the cave walls.  While it may be easy to whip out the old smartphone these days and put your brain into a Candy Crush diabetic coma, that option didn’t exist in the 20th century.  One of the more popular ways for Americans to keep themselves entertained in their down time before social media existed was with the good old fashioned board game.   Bored games often had tumbling dice, fake money, ridiculous rules and enough small parts to choke an entire army of three year old little brothers.  Fun for the whole family!

I hope you have a Get Out Of Jail Free card.

Beyond the more recognizable games like Monopoly, Clue and Chutes & Ladders, there were also a whole slew of novelty games.  Back in the 80’s, you could play your favorite TV game shows on the kitchen table without having to go through the grueling audition process.  Heck, even Hawaiian Punch released a board game centered around its midget mascot’s tendency to randomly clobber innocent tourists.  In the era before handheld device technology, there was such a large demand for board games that seemingly anything and everything was being made into a game that could be played by those ages 8 and up.

Ooooooh, I gotta get myself a little piece of that action!

In 1989, Donald Trump thought Americans would want to play a board game based on the life of Donald Trump.  Because he has more money lost in the seat cushions of his limo than you will ever see in your life, The Donald was able to make that game… and even nationally promote it with this classic retro TV ad…

While greed has always been a part of our capitalistic piggy was of life, for a brief time in the 1980’s, the deadly sin was actually celebrated and glorified.  We looked up to people who would cut their own mother’s throat to make a buck because we wanted to be filthy rich and powerful just like they were.

Welcome to the club, gentlemen!

The commercial for Trump the Game starts off with a slew of business type folks pretending to give a rat’s ass about what Trump the Rich Bastard is about to do that probably isn’t legal under most SEC guidelines.  It’s quite a time travel shock to take notice that these rumors of “Trump’s new game” are being spread via such quaint mechanisms as landline telephones, newspapers, and even (gasp!) word of mouth.  No Facebook postings, no hashtags, no text notification from Possum News.  To think that it used to take HOURS for breaking news to spread back in the ancient days of 1989… how in the hell did we ever stay informed?

What’s that? The Hindenberg crashed? Oh, the humanity.

To show that some things never change, we next see a throng of media members gathered in front of Trump the Tower scratching and clawing at each other in an attempt to get a sound bite or two from Trump the Mouthpiece.  Make no mistake, Donald Trump was a rock star during the 80’s for no other reason than the fact that he was America’s favorite billionaire mover and shake… and because he was something of an attention whore.  Trump the Egomaniac wanted Trump the Name on everything… and that’s clearly apparent once you take one look at this lame excuse for a board game.

Could we make the font on my name just a little bigger please? Thank you.

Trump the Game captured all the dog eat dog first world fun of shady business deals and hostile takeovers in one exceedingly shitty playset.  Trump the Rule Book taught you how to play Trump the Game in slightly fewer pages than Tolstoy the Novelist told us about War and Peace.  To show the humble side of the money mogul, Trump the Face was plastered all over this game from the board itself to the play money to the stupid instruction cards.  At least someone at Milton Bradley thought maybe adding Donald’s mug to the dice and tokens might be going just a bit too far, so those were simply made into block letter T’s like what you’ll find on the monogrammed towels in Trump the Bathroom.  No matter how mind-numbingly awful this game may be… the whole time you’re playing it, your brain will never be allowed to forget just whose corporate venture this shitty waste of time was.

Trump the Marketing Team.

Sure, we may have all liked the property trading fun of Monopoly even if we didn’t understand just how fucking evil the real life concepts were behind it.  But Trump the Game put the cruel, hard world of corporate America right there in front of us without sugarcoating it in little green houses and red roof inns.  “It’s not whether you win or lose, but whether you win!” Trump the Motto told us.  Sure, it was always an adrenaline rush to own both Park Place and Boardwalk… but at the end of the game, when you’ve bankrupted your entire family from high rent charges and put them out on the street, just how well are you going to sleep at night?  Trump the Game was not something pushover parents were encouraged to coddle their kids with by letting them win.

Oh, fuck yeah! I just bought you out, Sally. As my new employee, you can go join fellow losers Junior and Grandma cleaning up the septic tank backup in my basement.

Even someone as successful as Donald Trump can’t win them all, and needless to say, this poorly thought venture into the world of foldable game boards was an utter failure.  Trump the Game sold about as well as Pepsi the Crystal Beverage did, and the few copies that people were tricked into buying were quickly relegated to the bottoms of closets and the back shelves of thrift stores.  Buying up businesses and ruining peoples lives apparently doesn’t translate well into a board game… as opposed to successful concepts like performing amateur surgery on a man with no anesthetic, blindly firing missiles into the ocean, or attending a party with six idiot guests who apparently can’t tell if a man’s been shot, stabbed, bludgeoned or choked to death without peeking at cards.

I said you’re a man, dammit!!!

Here at The Nest, we like to stay out of the shitstorm that is politics and thus politely refuse to voice our opinion either for or against Trump the Presidential Candidate.  But because of our love of all that is cheesy, we have absolutely no qualms about providing a hearty non-endorsement of Trump the Game.  So today, we give a rousing bipartisan NAY to the self-titled box of unfun that attempted to bring the smoked filled dealings of the board room to the Doritos stained arena of the board game.  Evil Squirrel the Blog would also like to take this time to announce its bid to use the spare change in our Cafepress and Redbubble accounts to buy out WordPress and put Evil Squirrel the Gravatar on everyone’s homepage.  You’re fired, everyone.

Time to make a business deal with my new partner…