Dumpster fire

[1] The earliest known use of the term dates back to a 2003 review of a remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, in which The Arizona Republic's Bill Muller said that the film was "the cinematic equivalent of a dumpster fire – stinky but insignificant".

[2] The Daily Beast suggested that it was linked to Republican Party candidate Donald Trump, with Google searches for the word spiking when he announced his presidential run in October 2015.

[4] The president of the vote, sociolinguist Ben Zimmer, reasoned that people used the word to describe the unpleasant year in a "colorful, evocative" way, adding that it was a term suited for "pessimistic times".

Fallon also comments that the phrase is both "too grandiose and too unserious for common parlance", pointing out that one would refer to neither the Middle East nor a colleague as a dumpster fire, but for different reasons.

[6] CNN also commented that the term showed relevance to the present day, highlighting the Stormy Daniels–Donald Trump scandal, explosive cyclogenesis, and the 2018 NFL draft.