I Signed Up for Trump Dating and Here's What Happened

There are already hordes of extremely specific dating sites, in addition to the popular ones used by millions of hopeful romantics. A site for farmers? Howdy. A site for clowns? No joke. There's even an Amish dating site, which is somewhat baffling since most Amish don't own a computer and casual Internet use is generally frowned upon in the community. In a time where our country is so politically divided, it makes sense that there are a few dating sites for Trump supporters. I signed up for two of them -- Trump.Dating and TrumpSingles -- to see what they're all about. The results were even more surprising than I expected.

What I was struck by most of all, was the fact that -- regardless of being a dating site for Trump supporters -- none of these sites are good dating sites. The quality is incredibly poor on both sides. Both are far from user friendly, and pretty difficult to navigate. You could argue that we're spoiled by simplicity in the age of Tinder and Bumble, but I may or may not have signed up for OKCupid (which, in retrospect, is an extremely strange name for a dating service) back in the day, and everything clicked right away. It was extremely intuitive to use OKCupid, but these Trump Sites seem like they were built by first-time web designers. You could say the same about the marketing as well, as they apparently were running ads featuring a convicted child sex offender. Which is just… come on y'all, do your research.

Trump.Dating is significantly worse than TrumpSingles for a few reasons. The biggest issue is that it does not allow any same-sex matchmaking. What about LGBTQ Trump supporters? They exist. I guess they're out of luck when it comes to love, in this case.

Trump.Dating has a few other tricks, as well. Besides just the poor user interface, even creating a usable profile is a chore. It took almost two weeks for my account took to get approved after I initially filled in my profile, and to this day -- after another two weeks -- I have not been able to upload a photo. The whole experience is like somebody tricked you into using a fake website in order to distract you from something. Which, come to think of it, isn't the craziest theory...

One of the biggest issues across both sites is that neither are location-based. When you get matches, they're not necessarily anywhere near you. Mine, for example, were mostly in Alabama -- which is a bit of a drive from where I live in Southern California. I played around for a while and found virtually no matches in my area, nor did I find a way to even filter them by distance. Perhaps finding love in the age of Trump is so difficult that they figured, "Anybody in the world will do just fine!" Or, perhaps they assume that the people using these sites have Trumpian amounts of money and can just hop on private jets at moment's notice to go visit their loved one across the country. Or perhaps -- and this is my most popular theory -- somebody made these websites in about about two hours and figured they were good to go without testing to see if they were any good.

Another obvious problem I encountered is that upon registering, I was instantly matched up with a TON of people. As in, over 1000. Simply too many to even sort through, which begs the question: are these even really matches? Nothing about them is actually a match. It's really just other users on the site. To me, the whole point of a dating site is to foster communication between people with at least some common interests -- beyond just their political affiliation in this case -- but when you throw an insane amount of users at somebody all at once, it's overwhelming and completely useless. And if you're a straight woman on Trump.Dating, you may even see Donald Trump Jr.

Neither one of these services are free, at least not if you want to send and receive messages (which, why wouldn't you? Isn't that the point?). Trump.Dating will run you $25 a month, and TrumpSingles will run you $20 a month. That doesn't seem too bad at first. Match.com, for example, also charges $20 a month. That one, however, makes a lot more sense to me-- Match is offering an actual service. Their whole thing is that they use an algorithm to match you up to somebody compatible. With these guys, you're basically paying them a monthly fee to throw a bunch of people scattered across the country at you, with no actual reason why. Yet another tick in the box for this whole thing feeling like a scam.

Another major issue that jumps out right away is that both sites seem to be full of spam accounts. Granted, I'm also on the site for work and not love, but, uh, whatever. Shout out to Cedric, who -- judging by his strange profile photo -- either met some sort of unfortunate fate while attempting to fuse his DNA with that of a dog, or is a spam account. It's also safe to say that the "TEXTME" girl isn't just giving out her real phone number and is a spam account. I'm not sure why spam even exists on a site that requires you to pay to contact other users since they wouldn't even really be able to interact with anybody, but I'll let their spam overlords figure that one out.

Interestingly enough there were lots of profiles with Obama's photo, which led me to believe that in addition to the spam accounts, there are probably a good amount of troll accounts. Tons of profiles had a picture of Obama, for example, which if we had to guess are probably not there looking for a love connection with a Trump supporter. Looks like I'm not the only one making an account out of sheer curiosity.

Did you think Tinder was full of people that can't spell? Just take one look at, say, anybody's profile. The results aren't great. If they're not redirecting you to a questionable chatroom link or giving you a spam phone number to call, they're spelling most things wrong and using looney run-on sentences. Not that we're the grammar police, but really not a good indicator for quality communication with your potential mate.

After over a week of receiving no responses to messages I sent my matches, my suspicions grew. Let's be clear: I'm well aware that people often don't respond on dating sites, and that the problem could very well be the insanely stupid photo I chose (a photo taken of me after one or eight beers where I'm kneeling in a Hawaiian shirt and raising a drink) on TrumpSingles, but I think there's more to it.

I got a lot of spammy sounding messages (or in TrumpSingles' case, "winks" -- basically the equivalent of a Facebook "poke") that gave way to absolutely no follow-up response. Is it me? Is it because Trump.Dating wouldn't let me upload a photo? Is it the fact that none of these profiles are even real? Is it that a majority of people might have been turned off after realizing there's a monthly fee required to interact with anybody? Is it that they're afraid all the information they send out through these sites will be sent to Russia and used against them at some point? It's probably me.

"Make some noise"? "Do some damage"? That's for sure not the best way to phrase the idea of talking to women. One might even call it the worst way. "In here" is strange also makes it seem like a creepy Matrix-esque waiting room, waiting for some sort of simulation to appear. And what's with that cat? Could that possibly a reference to… no. No way. No way.

I've been pondering "The Hot List" on TrumpSingles for weeks and I'm still no closer to understanding it. It's right there on your dashboard when you login, and when you click on it, it gives you the option to add yourself to said Hot List, but, big surprise, that costs extra money. Once inside, it pretty much just shows you other users that have voted themselves hot. It's not much different than looking at your regular match list. The whole thing is a spooky mystery to me.

There's no way around it, these sites are bad. Both are insanely difficult to navigate, the matches are far from tailored, and worst of all, full of spam. There's no question it's hard to find a good match these days, and dating sites have become not only accepted, but embraced. As a result, there are just so many options out there, so why would you put yourself through the hassle of these sites? If you're a Trump supporter looking for love...maybe just try getting offline and meeting people at restaurants where Trump himself might eat.