Back before the election—when something being funny was a real possibility, instead of just a lingering, bitter taste in the backs of our mouths—people had a lot of fun with TrumpSingles.com, the dating site with the goal of “Making Dating Great Again!”. The site’s premise was simple: since a number of Trump-supporting online daters were reportedly blowing promising dates when they hit the always-fraught “Wait, you’re voting for WHO?!” moment, why not remove the sticky wicket by joining a self-selecting group of conservative singles on the move?
Of course, not even the site’s founder, Dave Goss, thought the site would have a lot of life left to it after November 8. “We never expected him to win—at least I didn’t,” Goss told The Hollywood Reporter recently, noting that he’d been racking his brains for how to keep TrumpSingles going after a Trump defeat. But luckily, this plucky underdog story had a happy ending: Donald Trump is the President-Elect of The United States Of America, and business at TrumpSingles.com is booming. “After he won, we’ve consistently had people sign up every single day,” Goss said, noting that the site now has 12,000 active users, many of whom pay a $5 fee to unlock unlimited messaging of the best, greatest, most romantic words in the world.
Of course, this couldn’t be a Trump-adjacent story without someone lobbing insults at their competitors, so Goss was quick to rise to the bait when THR asked him about Maple Match, a site that fixes up Americans and Canadians for love, romance, and potential marriages of desperate, terrified convenience. “I’m OK with them leaving,” Goss said of people hoping to flee the country in the wake of Trump’s election. “Good for Maple Match for doing that, but I see these people as cowards for wanting to leave.”