Wealthy, successful white men vying for even more money and power; shockingly old-fashioned beliefs about women, minorities and equality; a consequence-free environment in which no topic is taboo and no insult is career-ending …
The world portrayed on Matthew Weiner’s brilliant AMC drama Mad Men and the life of Donald Trump have a lot in common – but we don’t think anyone imagined they’d ever intersect like this.
As you may have heard, the Trump campaign is in dire financial straits, which has led to several media outlets going through the candidate’s latest expense report with a fine-tooth comb.
What they found is the the usual Trump profligacy – and several expenditures that absolutely no one saw coming.
For example, it seems the Trump campaign made four payments totaling $ 35,000 to New Hampshire-based ad agency Draper Sterling.
If the company sounds familiar it’s because those are the names of two of the partners at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce – a Manhattan firm that, while very successful, is also entirely fictional.
On Mad Men, Don Draper was the name of Jon Hamm’s boozy ad man, and Roger Sterling was his lusty partner in crime played by John Slattery.
ThinkProgress editor Josh Legum was the first to break the news that Trump appears to have forked over more than the average American makes in a year to an ad agency that doesn’t seem to exist outside of an imagined version of the 1960s.
“Trump spent $ 35,000 on web advertising in May to Draper Sterling, which must be a huge surprise to that fictional agency in 1964,” Legum tweeted last night.
Some digging revealed that there is a structure standing at 18 Crosby Ln in Londonderry, NH – it just happens to be a small residential home.
Draper Sterling is a registered LLC – but it was founded in March by two guys whose LinkedIn pages say they work in “medical devices.”
Sadly, neither of them is named Dick Whitman.
At this point, it seems no one has any idea what the hell is going on here, but we do know that the whole thing is shadier than the Donald’s claim that Trump Tower has the world’s best taco bowls.
