Donald Trump in 1990, not long after he was first discussed as a potential Presidential candidate. PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK LENNIHAN / AP

To be fair, it’s not hard to understand why it took the G.O.P. and much of the press so long, too long, to take Donald Trump’s candidacy seriously. Many times before, he flirted with running, and, each time, he quit. His bids were stunts. Still, he learned something from those stunts, and the distance between his earlier bids and this one suggests that, while much in American politics has changed, Trump has not.

“A Trump Presidential Bid?” the New York Times wondered, in July of 1987. At the time, Trump was forty-one, and “believed to be a Republican,” according to Abe Hirschfeld, a Florida businessman who led the effort to draft him into the race in which George H. W. Bush, as Reagan’s Vice-President, was the presumptive G.O.P. nominee. “There is absolutely no plan to run for mayor, governor, or United States senator,” a Trump spokesman said, coyly. “He will not comment about the Presidency.” Meanwhile, Trump had taken out a full-page ad in the Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe, ahead of the New Hampshire primary. “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Policy that a little backbone can’t cure,” the headline read, above a letter in which Trump complained that Americans were being ripped off by foreign powers.

The real-estate magnate, as the Times delicately noted at the time, had “no particular background in foreign policy.” All things considered, that was a generous, if not entirely accurate, assessment. Three years before, Trump had offered his services as the United States’ chief negotiator with the Soviet Union on nuclear disarmament. “Some people have an ability to negotiate,” Trump told the Washington Post, in 1984. “It’s an art you’re basically born with. You either have it, or you don’t.” Did it matter that he didn’t know anything about nuclear warheads or the capacities of missiles? No, because he could learn so fast you wouldn’t believe it. “It would take an hour-and-a-half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles,” he said. “I think I know most of it anyway.”

Trump never did become a negotiator during the nuclear-arms-limitation talks under the Reagan Administration. But in October, 1987, eyeing the election of 1988, he went so far as to give a stump speech before the Rotary Club of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He arrived by helicopter and was greeted by “Trump for President” placards. “He’s very exciting,” Judy Taylor, the wife of a former club president, said. “Money is power and power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” “I’m not here because I’m running for President,” Trump said. “I’m here because I’m tired of our country being kicked around.” He promised to eliminate the budget deficit. He had a plan. He said he’d make countries like Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait pay it off: “There is a way you can ask them and they will give it, if you have the right person asking.”

The next month, Jim Wright, the Democratic Speaker of the House, asked Trump to serve as the host of the Democratic congressional dinner. Trump declined the invitation but, courted and flattered by Democrats, he put off his (presumptively Republican) Presidential bid, having sold a great many copies of the book he published that year, “The Art of the Deal.”

Twelve years later, in 1999, Trump, fifty-three, was about to publish a new book, “The America We Deserve.” That summer, rumors began to spread about a possible Trump candidacy. “Mr. Trump is trying to determine whether there is a place in American political life for a rogue,” Adam Nagourney reported slyly, in the Times.

“The polls have been unbelievable,” Trump said, citing his lead in a poll conducted by the National Enquirer. (The Enquirer polled a hundred people.) Vice-President Al Gore was the presumptive Democratic nominee; the Republican nomination was wide open, after Bill Clinton’s two terms, although the second George Bush drew well ahead of the pack early on. Then as now, Trump liked some polls but hated others. A CNN-Time poll gave Trump seven per cent of the vote in a race against against either Bush or Gore. Trump was unfazed. He told Larry King he wanted Oprah for his running mate, though he hadn’t mentioned this to her. “The only thing that could interest me is if I could win,” Trump said. “I’m not talking about the nomination. I’m talking about the whole megillah.”

Trump learned that his best shot was to run as a populist. He said, “I think the kind of people who support me are the workers, the construction workers, the taxicab driver. Rich people don’t like me.” Readers of the Enquirer, Trump said, were his natural followers. “Those are the real people,” he said. “That is the Trump constituency.”

He damned the Republicans. “The Republican Party has just moved too far to the extreme right,” he said. He reserved his greatest ire for Pat Buchanan. “He’s a Hitler lover,” Trump said, on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “He doesn’t like the blacks; he doesn’t like the gays.” Citing parties he’d been invited to by Puff Daddy, Trump said, “I am just very popular with the black populace.”

He looked, instead, to the Reform Party, founded by Ross Perot, in 1995, and headed, in 1999, by Jesse Ventura, who’d met Trump in 1988, at Wrestlemania IV, in Atlantic City. In the summer of 1999, Trump supporters launched a Web site, www.thedonald2000.org, to raise money for the Reform Party. That fall, Trump officially abandoned the Republican Party and registered to vote as a member of the Reform Party. The themes of the Donald 2000 campaign were more or less the same as the themes of this year’s Make America Great Again juggernaut. His new plan to eliminate the deficit was to make the rich pay for it. He proposed raising $5.7 trillion by levying a one-time 14.25-per-cent tax on the net worth of people and trusts worth ten million dollars or more. As for the rest of his economic plan, he had this to say: “All different taxes across the board. That would be determined and worked out.” His foreign-policy plans included insulting France (“a terrible partner”), Germany (“they failed militarily”), Japan (“ripping us big-league”), and Saudi Arabia (“I mean, the money they make”). He said that, as President, he would serve as the U.S. trade representative. “Our trading partners would have to negotiate across the table with Donald Trump,” he said on Fox News, “and I guarantee you, the rip-off of the United States would end.” He said, “I do a deal a minute.”

His relationship with women came up. “I love women,” he said. He also said that he’d have had more respect for Bill Clinton if he’d had sex with a supermodel instead of Monica Lewinsky. Often referred to by reporters in the eighties as a “hustler,” Trump had become, by the end of the nineties, “a twice-divorced, doll-chasing socialite.” His ex-wife Marla Maples warned that, should Trump run, she would tell all: “I will feel it is my duty as an American citizen to tell the American people what he is really like.” Trump was untroubled. Maureen Dowd interviewed him on the Trump plane. (“We could save money on Air Force One,” he said.) “I think the only difference between me and the other candidates,” he told her, “is that I’m more honest and my women are more beautiful.” Still, by November, it was clear that Trump had failed to gain much traction.