‘Parks and Rec’ Fans Point Out That Leslie Knope Did Trump’s Garbage Stunt First

As you’ve probably heard by now, Donald Trump has been spending the final weeks of his campaign cosplaying as people who actually work for a living. First it was a visit to McDonald’s, and then yesterday, he decided to put on a reflective vest and ride around in the passenger’s seat of a garbage truck as it slowly circled an airport tarmac next to Trump’s private plane. You know, typical garbage collector stuff. 

He followed it up by appearing at a rally while still wearing the vest. Why? Because a staff member told him it made him “look thinner.”

The ridiculous stunt was Trump’s way of trolling Joe Biden for referring to his followers as “garbage,” in response to Tony Hinchcliffe’s recent Trump rally stand-up set. If it seemed so goofy that it could have been the plot of a sitcom, that’s possibly because it was literally the plot of a sitcom.

In Season Five of Parks and Recreation, the episode “Women in Garbage” finds Leslie Knope taking the sanitation department to task for their lack of female employees. When they suggest that women aren’t up to the job, Leslie and April volunteer to become waste collectors for the day in order to prove them wrong. Leslie also invites the local media (i.e., Shauna Malwae-Tweep) along in order to get some good press.

As some Parks and Rec fans noted, the key difference between the two political publicity stunts is that Leslie Knope actually did some solid work. And when she faced a significant roadblock (a giant industrial fridge that wouldn’t budge), she used her intellect and problem-solving skills to figure out a way to fix it. 

Trump, on the other hand, just sat perfectly still while someone else drove him around in a garbage truck, looking like a little kid in a coin-operated grocery store ride. But Trump succeeded thanks to his own incredibly low standards. After the ride, he publicly patted himself on the back for merely climbing into the truck at all and not falling on his ass in front of reporters. He claimed that this only happened because he was able to get the “adrenaline going.”

You know, the same adrenaline that we all feel when laboriously climbing into a slightly-elevated vehicle that’s about to go 10 miles an hour along an empty stretch of pavement. What a thrill ride!

He also bragged that he had a “beautiful driver” who “looked like Cary Grant in his prime,” a reference that’s guaranteed to win over young voters in 1952.

So I guess we also have to give Leslie credit for not randomly bringing up how hot Burt Lancaster was. Or the fuckability of Clark Gable.

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