In a presidential election filled with unprecedented shit, there's one novel aspect flying under the radar: we've known these two people for a long time. 

Think about it: 20 years ago, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would likely be recognized by a vast majority of Americans. Sure, not by everybody, but far more than most presidential candidates 20 years before their election run. 

How many times has that happened?

Ronald Reagan was a movie star (and Democrat) twenty years before his run. Quincy Adams, FDR, and Bush had family in the president business. Grant and Eisenhower had war-time name recognition. Grover Cleveland had relevant job experience (he'd been president once before).

But 20 years before Barack Obama took the oath, he was a student at Harvard Law. Ditto for Teddy Roosevelt (at 42, our youngest prez). Slick Willy (Bill Clinton) was at Yale, Jimmy Carter was on a submarine, and Honest Abe was in a courtroom in Springfield, Illinois. 

In most cases, when the candidates aren't incumbents or VPs, there's a process of familiarization they have to go through. They're in Congress or state government, they're known in their state, they're known in their party, but they're nobodies on the national scale.

And that's a plus. When you're (relatively) unknown, you get to write your own bio. You get a head-start on the media telling your story. You're relegated to a few bullet points and key stances; you're a blank slate. Previously unknown candidates can re-write their identity, stress the parts of their history that work and shush the parts that don’t.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump don't have that advantage. 

Surely the proliferation of mass media since (and before) 1996 plays a role in our familiarity with Clinton and Trump, but that doesn't change the fact that we've never really known our two candidates this well before. We've never had this much on record before. We've never had so much information to go through, hence the weird weightlessness that seems to apply when either candidate has some bygone quote or stance brought up. 

Trump said he'd run as a Republican because Republican voters are stupid? 

Clinton said she hates women who bake cookies?

Meh, there's always more where that came from, and it'll probably contradict what we've heard. 

So since Pittsburgh City Paper is the paper of record — well, our record anyway — we thought it’d be interesting to see how these two have fared in our pages over the years. After some tireless research (Googling their names), this is what I've found.

It's a partial list; our online archives tap out around 2003, and a lot of the results were just passing mentions. But these mentions underline just how long Clinton has seemed destined for this nomination and just how unlikely Trump's ascent to the seat has been. 

Let's go: 

June 12, 2003: Chris Potter on the Patriot Act

January 17, 2008: Savage Love
In response to a question about the subject’s father paying a younger woman for sex …

December 26, 2012: Trump's charm

—

Now you're all caught up!