Is Trump funny again?
please read the damn article before you comment this time
I haven’t always been right about everything; for example, in the summer before the 2016 election, I thought there was something funny about Donald Trump the candidate. I assumed, like most people, that he would never become Donald Trump the president. And obviously the nationalism that he re-legitimized in American politics is poisonous, and has damaged the country he led probably beyond repair. But as a candidate, Trump was so stupid and funny that you just assumed, this guy can’t win and it’s funny that this shitshow-of-a-campaign is forever a footnote of American history.
But then, of course, he did win and Trump was very much not funny. He was tear-gassing protesters and using the presidency to pump money into his own gauche hotel chain and putting children in cages, oh yeah, he tried to overthrow American democracy. But before he went and broke just about everything, Trump was doing stuff like tweeting a photo of himself eating a taco salad on Cinco De Mayo with the caption “I love hispanics!” And he rode into national politics on a golden escalator, cheered on by $50-a-day actors posing as supporters. He gave out Lindsey Graham’s cell phone number. He went on a presidential debate stage and made innuendos about the reliability of his penis.
But even during his presidency, there were some funny moments — and I don’t mean funny like we’re laughing with him, I mean funny like we’re laughing at him. Most of the humor of the Trump presidency arose from instances of Trump insisting upon his own infallibility. This is a president who went out on the White House balcony and stared at the sun. He used a Sharpie to re-draw a hurricane map1 and then showed it to the press. In a fawning interview structured to make him palatable to voters, Trump proudly recited a series of nouns — Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV — as supposed proof that he was all-there upstairs. I mean, you laughed at him. Regularly.
Even the behavior of Trump administration officials was occasionally hilarious. Kellyanne Conway citing “alternative facts” or inventing the Bowling Green Massacre2 or White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer storming into the briefing room and bellowing lies at the press about the size of the president’s inauguration crowd. Stephen Miller spraying on his hair for a Face the Nation interview. Rudy Giuliani’s hair dye dripping down his booze-bloated cheeks in the during an outdoor press conference. These were funny footnotes in national politics. They made us laugh.
And now that Trump is running again, I feel that same little urge to laugh at his stupidity. I don’t know if you read the federal indictment against him but it’s hilarious. The feds claim that at one point, Trump pulled out a classified map, showed it to an aide at his New Jersey golf course then said something like “I can’t show you this because it’s top-secret. So don’t stand too close to it.” And then there’s the photo of where Trump was hoarding his classified documents — in a trashy-resort bathroom furnished with a gaudy chandelier and a plastic shower curtain.
And furthermore, it’s funny what Trump has done to the Grand Old Party. Every single Republican presidential candidate knows that — if they want to win — they can’t publicly admit that Donald Trump legitimately lost the 2020 election. So they’re forced to found their entire campaigns on the false premise that the last election was illegitimate. That’s funny. And it’s funny how Republicans congressmen have now contorted themselves into the position where they have to defend a club bathroom as a suitable storage space for classified documents.
Yes, in a certain light, Donald Trump is funny again. It was funny when he went on Fox News, angry-pouting to Brett Baier and said nobody watches Fox anymore. But then again, isn’t it played out? This teenager-esque nobody likes me complex that Trump has developed during the 2024 cycle, isn’t even worth tuning for anymore.
During the 2016 cycle, the press treated Trump’s stunts as serious behavior. It was national news when Trump dropped a new nickname on one of his political opponents. Morning Joe and CNN covered him like they used to date him — that was the joke that Michelle Wolf made at the 2018 White House Correspondents Dinner where she, very accurately, told the press
you pretend like you hate [Trump], but I think you love him. I think what no one in this room wants to admit is that Trump has helped all of you. He couldn’t sell steaks or vodka or water or college or ties or Eric, but he has helped you. He’s helped you sell your papers and your books and your TV. You helped create this monster, and now you’re profiting off of him.
But again, that fascination with Trump has mostly worn off. Or, at least, it has entered a different stage. The attitude toward covering Trump used to go something like let’s stick a microphone near this idiot and see what happens. But that doesn’t seem to sell anymore. That’s why everybody gave up on CNN after Trump steamrolled the network in his town hall. Because covering Trump like that isn’t interesting or even newsworthy in the 2024 cycle.
The other dominant attitude toward covering Trump — a sort of commercialized outrage — is also played out. Trump is going to say and do funny, stupid and sometimes reprehensible things because that’s just who he is. And, all in all, no, it’s not funny anymore.
So, no, I guess is the answer that I’m going for. No, Donald Trump isn’t funny again. Not only because he’s too reprehensible to be funny but because his grumpy old man show is played out.
I’ll never forget Sharpiegate, particularly because that happened at the time that I was writing about politics for Playboy and I was doing a lot of television hits (which it turned out I am not very good at). And so I was on MSNBC one Saturday morning, feeling quite smart about my suit and my jawline and about my ability to disentangle the complex political machinations of Washington when the host asked me to make sense of Sharpiegate and I sort of froze up. Because how in the actual fuck do you make sense of something that stupid? I probably should have said something witty but that was during the brief period of my life when I believed federal politics and cable news television were serious professions for serious people.
The Bowling Green Massacre comment isn’t actually funny though because Conway made it up was to justify Trump’s Muslim ban, which was obviously one of his more vile and un-American policies.