Do you think Zuckerberg's celebrity status could be compared with Trump's status in the '80s?
Facebook is far more ubiquitous than Trump, but...Zuckerberg himself isn't. Mark Zuckerberg is a very boring person, and Trump never was.
80s Trump was followed by 90s Trump, featuring a very, very messy and public and painful divorce with his wife Ivana, a celebrity in her own right, and was a tabloid magnet. Then Trump married a model named Marla Marples, then divorced her only a little while later to marry a different model, Melania. In the mean time, he went broke so badly that Ivanka tells a story of walking by a homeless man with her father and her father says "that man has 50 million more dollars than I have."
90s Trump, a washed-up has-been, is replaced by 00s Trump, a host of a reality TV show where he basically plays 80s Trump as a character: he plays a brutally competent and savvy deal-maker who revels in firing dead weight. He's honestly a brilliant actor in a way: he has this amazing gut sense of what his audience wants to see. He's perfectly willing to play the fool and humiliate himself and make himself a joke, and does so regularly, because at the end of the day, Donald Trump's identity is based on the idea of "I'm richer than you because I'm better than you." One of my favorite Trump moments is the old roast of Trump in which Trump's joke about himself was "what's the difference between Donald Trump's hair and a dead animal? 4 billion dollars."
In a way, right back to the 80s, Trump was the embodiment of a certain type of New York City person: the brash, vulgar, outer-borough outsider who wants to conquer Manhattan. If there's ever a Trump biopic worth a s**t, it will constantly refer back to an establishing shot of Trump looking longingly out a window in Queens towards Manhattan with his father Fred saying something along the lines of "we stay in our borough." In a lot of ways, Trump's entire life goal was to become a Manhattan socialite, but instead he became a Manhattan laughingstock and punchline, so he decided to play that role to the hilt instead. Trump's entire early social circle (including Roy Cohn!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) were fellow bitter, slighted outcasts who were thwarted in their route into Manhattan society.
