Home TV

‘Even Sesame Street knew’: Yearly reminder that decades before he was president, ‘Sesame Street’ was onto ‘Donald Grump’

'Whose name equals trash, to you and to me?'

Donald Grump
Image via Sesame Street

For more than a decade now, the vast majority of America — and much of the rest of the world — has been onto Donald Trump’s game.

Recommended Videos

He thrives on controversy, hateful attacks, and fabricated issues, and years of petulant pushback have proven that he’d rather break the board in half than play a fair game. As a result, most of us are entirely disillusioned when it comes to the former president, but it took us far too long to realize the threat he posed to the United States of America.

You know who wasn’t surprised to discover Trump’s true colors? Sesame Street. Apparently thriving in its Simpsons era, the children’s television show established — a good two decades before the presidency was a glimmer in his eye — that “Donald Grump” was the worst kind of human.

A clip from the treasured educational program has been recirculating as the Trump campaign trades blows with Kamala Harris, re-establishing that this man has been a crook, a liar, and a braggart for longer than some of us have been alive. Exposed for the world to see by TikToker @savvy_from_maine, the series dedicated an entire song to the one and only “Donald Grump,” the man with “the most trash of any grouch in the world.”

Every line from the glorious little segment is comedy gold, particularly now that Trump’s shady business dealings and outright criminal behavior have been exposed. He does, in fact, plaster his name “on every piece of trash in town,” offers up the “best rubbish and scuzz” via products like Trump Steaks, and as his orange-haired caricature petulantly notes, he boasts “more trash” than the rest of us combined.

The fact that this blatant, harsh criticism of Trump came from Sesame Street makes the video all the better, particularly considering how long ago the episode aired. Sesame Street has been poking fun at the overtly villainous and trash-hoarding “Grump” for decades now, and he’s far from the only high-profile figure the program has targeted. Trump himself has come under fire numerous times, but he joins hundreds of others in getting a dressing-down from the children’s show.

It’s kind of inevitable, given Sesame Street’s tenure; the show has been on the air since 1969 and in 2023, it celebrated its 54th season. Over the years, it has put out more than 4,500 episodes in total, educating youths on any range of vital early development topics and taking shots at the controlling, heartless jerks of the world in the process.