April Fool’s Day featuring Trump snags Chicago paper

Time Out Chicago, an entertainmnet and lifestyle magazine based, not surprisingly, in Chicago, doesn’t seem to be the kind of real estate that would interest Donald Trump.

Yet, there was the lastest issue of the magazine proudly featuring a grinning Trump on its cover and declaring that, yes, the real estate mogul had purchased the publication and was its new owner.

Problem was, the issue was on the newstands today. And today is April 1.

Yes, it was an April’s Fools Day prank. Newspapers and magazines love doing this kind of thing. I remember back when I worked on my college’s student newspaper. The staff put together an entire April Fool’s Day issue declaring that the United States had declared war on Iraq. This was before the first Gulf War, and back when the United States declaring war on some tiny Middle Eastern country seemed ludicrous. The readers were outraged when the learned of the joke, deservedly so.

The problem with April Fool’s Day issues is that they’re usually only truly funny to the editors who put them together. I mean, is Trump buying a Chicago entertainment magazine worthy of a guffaw? It didn’t make me laugh.

What was kind of funny, was that Crain’s Chicago Business, a respected source of business news in Chicago, bit on the story. A writer for the magazine reported that Trump had bought Time Out Chicago. You can imagine that Crain’s editors weren’t overly pleased when they discovered they’d been tricked.