Some of my friends don’t like it when I say Donald Trump is ridiculous.
A pie in the face is ridiculous, they say. Trump is dangerous.
I agree he’s dangerous. Just look at that blizzard of Day One executive orders. But it’s better for my mental health if, like an editorial cartoonist or a late-night comedian, I focus on his clownishness.
Our satirists may be grieving for our country, but they must also be licking their chops. An inexhaustible trove of material has been dumped in their laps.
Take Inauguration Day. Among America’s most pressing problems, per Trump’s formal address, are that the body of water between Mexico and Florida has the wrong name; people are being forced to buy electric cars (!); and kids are being taught to hate their country.
After that speech, King Donald dropped in on his adoring subjects in Emancipation Hall, where we got to see un-teleprompted Donnie, babbling for a half-hour about the “J6 hostages,” his beloved border wall, the “enemies” whom Biden had pre-emptively pardoned, and of course, the “rigged” election of 2020.
The world’s most powerful person sounded like a barstool sad sack. I felt sorry for everyone trapped in that space, including Madame Zorro and the Hillbilly Elegist, and it takes a lot for me to feel sorry for those people.
Of course, all presidents provide fodder for humorists because no one can dominate the mediaverse the way they can. But Trump’s gift for spewing outrageous pronouncements puts him in a class by himself.
By now I’ve read hundreds of explanations for how a self-dealing scoundrel could be the choice of 49.9% of the electorate (some mandate, huh?). The two best came from people in the entertainment business.
In an essay in the New York Times, Michael Hirschorn, once head of programming at VH1, reminded us that Trump is a creature of the reality TV world that brought us “love-to-hate personalities who let their id run wild, saying and doing things that many viewers wished they could.”
Then there’s the comedian Roy Wood Jr., who, in an interview with The Times, offered the simplest reason for Trump’s popularity:
“We all know a guy like Trump — talk crazy, say whatever. You know he’s full of it. But man, he’s fun to be around…Jokes used to be a form of throwing a rock at the establishment. But now Trump catches your rock and goes, thank you, and then adds it to his bag of rocks and then shows it to all of his followers and goes, look at all these rocks they threw at me…I’m taking these rocks for you.”
You wouldn’t think a desire to be entertained would be a primary qualification for the presidency. But that’s where we are in the roaring ‘20s of the 21st century.
A year ago, in a New York Times guest essay, a writer named David Kamp noted that Trump has withstood 40 years of ridicule, from Spy Magazine naming him one of the “Ten Most Embarrassing New Yorkers” in the 1980s, to James Austin Johnson’s dead-on impressions on “Saturday Night Live” in the 2020s.
None of it, Kamp wrote, has derailed the Trump train. So Kamp called for a halt. Trump, he said, is too much of a threat to treat as a joke.
But the jokes continue. They must. If nothing else, mockery makes the mocker feel better.
When things get bad during Trump 2.0 – and they’re pretty bad already – I’ve got a handful of go-to’s that never fail to make me laugh. Here is my break-glass-in-emergency cabinet of Trump follies:
- “The World Accordion to Trump” — This places an accordion between Trump’s synchronized palms and adds music. Highlight: “We’re going to build a wall.”
- “They’re Eating the Dogs” – The Kiffness – that’s the (stage)name of a South African musician named David Scott – heard the music in Trump’s scurrilous rant about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and responded accordingly.
- Speaking of rants, it’s hard to get much more bizarre than the thought experiment Trump devised that weighed the relative dangers of being electrocuted by the electric motor in a sinking boat and being eaten by a shark…
- …unless we turn to the time Trump regaled an audience in Arnold Palmer’s hometown of Latrobe with tales of the golf great’s out-sized “putter.”
- And if you get tired of looking at Trump, you can always pivot to Sarah Cooper, who lip synchs some of his nuttier ramblings. Here’s a compilation.
I could go on: his 40-minute dance recital in Oaks, Pa., his microphone hijinks in Milwaukee, his flag hugging in Maryland, his Hannibal Lecter fixation…
Old news, I know. But Bugs Bunny, the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers are old news, too, yet I still go to them when I need a laugh. This year, and probably for the next four years, I’m going to need a lot of laughs.