In this clip from 2005, when “The Apprentice” was arguably at its height, “Sesame Street” created a parody of garbage mogul, Donald Trump. The show named their new, garbage hoarding grouch, Donald Grump, and had various “Sesame Street” residents, including Oscar the Grouch and Elmo, vie for a job as his garbage-counting apprentice.
Donald Grump’s trademark — along with “Scram! You’re fired!” — is “I have more trash than you, so na, na, na, na, na! Na, na, na, na, na!” His fellow grouch garbage people love getting made fun of in this way, and then repeatedly join in with the refrain “na, naing” at their own garbage scarcity.
The clip is over 10 minutes long and essentially spends the entire time insinuating Donald Trump is a literal garbage person and his followers are garbage people.
The one exception is Elmo’s role in the clip as someone who doesn’t succumb to Grump’s encouragement of greed. Elmo wins all of Grump’s competitions to find an apprentice, simply because he likes to help. When Grump decides Elmo’s skills will wreck his garbage reputation, he tells Elmo, “Scram! You’re fired!”
Elmo is obviously on a different plain of enlightenment and doesn’t even care.
Grump doesn’t know what to do. He is powerless over someone who is not garbage and doesn’t care about the endlessly greedy pursuit of obtaining more garbage. Scrambling to restore order, he tells Elmo there must be something he still wants.
The camera zooms in on the orange hair and Elmo rips it right off. Grump, dejected, just tells Elmo to keep it — everyone knows he has plenty more orange wigs.
In the end, the other grouches don’t end up wanting to be Grump’s apprentice, because then they’d have to do actual work. They also don’t really want his trash, because it has his name all over it.
“We can get our own trash,” Oscar the Grouch tells Grump.
“Scram, you’re fired,” the grouches yell at the orange wigged garbage man.
The Grump turns away.
The way to strip the garbage man of his power, is to simply recycle.
H/T Uproxx
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