How Trump’s Birthdays Went From Golden Ticket to Fool’s Gold

There was a before.

Before the 34 felony convictions. Before those other three pesky ongoing criminal cases. Before he watched an insurrection in his name unfold live on Fox News. Before even the golden escalator ride and the time that Barack Obama made those mean jokes about him. Donald Trump was just a boy. And on one special day of every year, he was something even better—the birthday boy.

A Trump birthday party used to mean something. It meant a night of glitz and glamor, gaudiness and gold. It was a veritable who’s-who of the rich and famous schmoozing it up with the bright young things as the has-beens and also-rans loitered anxiously at the edges, wallflowers waiting to be asked to dance. Regis Philbin used to be there, man.

Those days are long gone. The fleet of town cars that belched celebrities out next to titans of industry is no more. Everybody’s mad at him for some reason, and his fans keep passing out from heat stroke at his rallies. Even Philbin has passed on to the great talk show set in the sky. “Some birthday,” Trump grumbled last year, nursing still-fresh legal wounds.

This year’s celebration promises to be more of the same.

House Republicans gathered to grovel at his feet on Capitol Hill on Thursday, pulling their tongues back into their mouths long enough to present him with an American flag cake and caterwaul out the words to “Happy Birthday.” The cake, reportedly chocolate, was topped with “45” candles, as well as “47,” in a toadyish prayer for the future.

On Friday evening, Trump will whoop it up with hundreds of his closest fans at the Palm Beach Country Club, a short armored Suburban ride from Mar-a-Lago. The former president is slated to give a 7 p.m. speech in a city where the U.S. Census Bureau estimates the average age to be a polite distance north of 70.

All in all, it promises to be a piddling display compared to his birthday celebrations of yesteryear.

In order to remind the septuagenarian of all he’s left behind to become a second-rate authoritarian laughingstock, we’ve taken a stroll down memory lane, calling back to some of the ritziest shindigs ever thrown in Trump’s name. Call it a birthday gift.