Donald Trump Is in Danger of Becoming Drake
Photo by Prince Williams/Wireimage![Donald Trump Is in Danger of Becoming Drake](https://img.pastemagazine.com/wp-content/suploads/2024/08/Trump-Drake-Comp-e1723580669734.jpg)
Credit goes to my friend Jason for identifying the clear correlations between Donald Trump and Drake long before the evidence mounted to make them completely obvious. After last night’s debacle with Elon Musk and Trump trying to host a space, I’m calling it and writing his take. Trump isn’t condemned to the same fate yet as Drake is–being a ghost roaming the land searching for his lost mojo–but he is currently losing to the same demons that Drake failed to conquer.
For those unaware of the pop culture reference being made here, you can read my column about world peace being possible through Kendrick Lamar’s unadulterated hatred of Drake, but the “too long, didn’t read” summary is that no one living has ever lost a rap beef as badly as Drake has. He called Kendrick Lamar mid and then Kendrick wrote a song addressed to his parents telling them he had proof their son is a pedophile, all while proving he had a guy on the inside of Drake’s crew. Just a total annihilation in front of the entire world.
Ever since Kendrick Lamar released the hit of the summer inviting everyone to dance on top of Drake’s reputational grave, Drake has laid low, save for his passive aggressive social media venting. But over the weekend, Drake released a data dump.
100 GIGS is a bunch of clips of Drake’s crew messing around in the studio, some artwork, and three songs that are meh. It’s Up has a lot of different sounds for different people and some very mediocre rapping, Blue Green Red has a crap beat that’s fun to dance to while Drake whines about how horny he is, and Housekeeping Knows is even hornier as they literally just scream “ride” for most of the first forty-five seconds of the song—in other words, all classic Drake.
We know this shtick by now. Say what you will about Kendrick flip flopping between improvisational jazz and trying to carry Tupac’s legacy as Compton’s rhetorical defender, but at least he’s trying different things and looks like he’s having fun out there.
The website for 100 GIGS is all black. It’s morose. It feels less like a data dump and more like a graveyard for nostalgia. Songs and beats that aren’t quite there yet which in years past may have been spruced up by Future’s crew now get leaked on a Saturday night to mild fanfare at best. Drake has slipped, and this data dump is him reaching out into the ether, trying to clutch on to some part of his reputation that Kendrick left in tatters.
Which brings me to Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s supposed “DDOS attacked” spaces last night. This also had all the vibes of a funeral.
Trump has come crawling back to Elon Musk, eschewing the core petty humor that made @realDonaldTrump a phenomenon in favor of pushing boring campaign pablum we have all heard ten bajillion times over by now. Trump’s Twitter feed today is something to behold, as he has not posted since 2021 up until yesterday (save for his mugshot last year), and you can see him losing his mojo with just a few flicks of your mouse.
When both Drake and Trump emerged out of their bubbles and came into contact with reality, they believed themselves to be bulletproof, saying and doing whatever they pleased, right up until the Future nearly blew their minds. For Drake, it was, well…just listen to Not Like Us if you’re still uncertain of the details here. For Trump, his future came in the form of Kamala Harris making him run a real campaign he so far has proven wholly incapable of running.
Like Drake, Trump’s only real retort anymore is “look at how fake those people are” and their opponents both respond with “sir you are a pedophile,” and they have no retort because deep down they know it’s true and one of them is literally using Jeffrey Epstein’s fucking plane.
Trump is Drake!
Sure, Drake dropped some bars in Push Ups, enough to get Kenny off his couch and into the lab. Trump thought he won the debate too, but all he did was start a fight he is struggling to even conceive of a way to win. Both Drake and Trump are the dog who caught the car they were chasing and now don’t know what to do with it. One already got run over in traffic with the whole world backing up in reverse to hit one more dance move on their corpse, while the other is currently dodging traffic and screaming nonsense like “Kamabla” as a demonstration for everyone how he has lost his fastball.
Trump used to at least be able to land some good zingers in between his racist and sexist rants, and this humor was how he was able to expand his coalition outside the revanchist MAGA lunatics because eventually he would come for someone that everyone wants to see humiliated. In the last two elections, he was like a pitcher who sat in the high 90s and could throw fastballs by hitters, but now he’s in the low 90s and getting hit every time he comes into the zone as he watches polls breaking hard for Kamala Harris. He’s washed up and everyone can see it.
Drake and Trump are both creatures of American media and they embody the superficial values in popular culture. They didn’t ascend to these peaks few men have ever summited because they don’t appeal to the core American character. It’s horrifying how both of these men who have spent a lifetime abusing and degrading women each caught a rocket ship to superstardom even as that all took place out in the open, but we can never fully address the uniquely American ills that created them without first looking them in the eye.
And they’re fucking pathetic now. Something has changed. The ground has shifted beneath their feet, and everyone can see them realizing it.
Trump is rambling to the most credulous idiot any species on this planet has ever produced on a broken platform circling the drain while Drake is dropping crappy free music and studio bullshiting sessions to try to reclaim some artistic license he lost when Kendrick Lamar revealed his soul to the whole world. Trump’s rotten soul has been well-known for much longer, but Joe Biden’s mounting problems this year began to obscure it. He became the story of the race, not Trump’s desperation and increasing incoherence, and after dodging a bullet, Trump figured he could cakewalk to the presidency against a doddering old man.
Enter Kamala Harris: generic Democrat. Some may interpret this as an insult, but every good politician knows that is the platonic ideal everyone should strive to achieve in a campaign. Generic Democrat polls ahead of every single real Democrat in history because once people know things about politicians, they like them less. Running successfully as a generic Democrat, as Kamala Harris has done so far, is the political equivalent to “Why you trollin’ like a bitch? Ain’t you tired? Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A minorrrrrrrrr.”
Trump has no comeback for this yet. Generic Democrat could be God-King of America based on most polling this century. He must change the narrative dramatically if he is to reclaim his mojo, and his latest failed attempt is a sad and confusing data dump on a weird website that no one’s going to listen to. Just like Drake.