Bethenny Frankel, a fellow New York Housewife and frequent sparring partner of Ramona Singer’s, recently offered a good assessment of her character. “Ramona is always scared of being rejected, so she comes to you and cozies up, and when you don’t give her exactly the response she wants she becomes a bitch. Then she goes from being a bitch to then kissing your ass,” Bethenny explained. “There’s no real Ramona.”


Who does that sound like?

It is an unavoidably obvious fact that Ramona Singer reminds me of the President of the United States, and vice versa. It may not shock you that a reality TV star reminds me of another reality TV star, but I will pass out if I hold it in any longer, because the similarities really are remarkable. Ramona hates apologizing, behaves like a toddler, has strange physical tics, is drawn to questionable business ventures, frequently turns on her friends, has a daughter who is much better-behaved, and is a truly awful dancer. This isn’t even counting the fact that she talks like Trump, says she knows him “from Mar-a-Lago,” and, like Sonja Morgan (who shares some of these qualities and also has a history with Trump), was suspiciously coy about who she voted for.


“The thing is, [with] information, two people can look at [it differently],” she said this season, when the cast was talking about the upcoming 2016 election. “Everyone has their own interpretation.”

In her nine years as a cast member of the Real Housewives of New York City, Ramona Singer has gotten herself a pinot grigio line, a divorce, and a pair of new boobs, but she, like our Dear Leader, has not changed very much. She is a walking, talking, relentlessly horny id. She has no filter, a quality that—though prized by her audience—frequently gets her a verbal lashing, and yet she retains a maniacal level of self-confidence; Ramona Singer does not care, both literally and figuratively, if her dog shits on your carpet. In Season 9 of RHONY, which ended on Wednesday, Ramona, age 60, drunkenly ripped a light fixture out of the wall of another cast member’s house and later refused to apologize for it, which feels like an apt metaphor for the current state of affairs in the West Wing.



This wild, bumbling lack of decency—along with a few other undefinable qualities—is a key to Ramona’s longevity on the show, because that’s what these qualities are good for: television, not the presidency. And as we continue to forcibly binge-watch Ramona’s far less pleasant emotional doppelgänger, I’ve gotta hope that he’ll be less successful.