How President Trump Ruined Political Comedy

Even if you don’t find Trump funny at all, you must admit that you are resisting a lot of attempts. In terms of volume, Trump may be the jokiest president in American history. His impression of Michael Bloomberg, in which he crouches behind the lectern so that only his head is visible, is a genuinely funny sight gag — partly because of its economy and partly because of its audacity. What other president would stoop to it? Even Ronald Reagan, who once starred opposite a chimp, would never resort to pantomime. In his love of insults, his penchant for hyperbole and his commitment to shtick — that knowing performance of himself that blurs the line between personality and persona — Trump is unprecedented among American presidents.

The most striking feature of his rhetorical style is how much it resembles that of a nightclub comic. He is known to work out material on the road, presenting rally audiences with variations on the same bits until he develops something that works. The idea of a border wall with Mexico is rumored to have emerged from this process. His unhurried delivery — which eschews setup/punch rhythms in favor of a meandering conversation with the audience, punctuated by audacious remarks — calls to mind a late-career Don Rickles. Unlike Rickles, though, Trump rarely laughs. He delivers his jokes in the same tone he delivers serious remarks. The insult comedian always ends by telling his victim he’s a good sport, but Trump doesn’t offer such signals.

In October 2019, for example, he tweeted a photograph of himself giving the Medal of Honor to a dog. This event did not happen. The conservative website The Daily Wire created the image by photoshopping Conan, the U.S. Army dog that helped kill Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, into an existing picture of Trump awarding the medal to the Vietnam combat medic James C. McCloughan. On the Louder With Crowder website, the writer John Brodigan ridiculed The Times and the CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta for reporting that the image was doctored, writing, “You’d have to be an idiot to think this actually happened in real life.” But the president gave no indication that the photo was a joke; he simply tweeted “AMERICAN HERO!” and the picture. A close acquaintance of mine, who is not an idiot, saw the photo on Facebook and assumed Trump had in fact given the medal to a dog. She thought it was absurd, but she did not assume it was ironic, because what previous American president has disseminated fake pictures of himself performing official functions?

Such applications of ambiguous irony allow President Trump to embarrass conventional media in ways that exhilarate his supporters. Organizations like The Times and CNN have to take the president seriously. When he says something that isn’t true, they must soberly point out that it isn’t, even when the intent of the untruth is not to deceive but to achieve some rhetorical effect. As a result, news organizations unequipped to cover an ironic president get lumped in with partisans who misconstrue his irony in bad faith. Both groups are cast as humorless scolds, solidifying the loyalty of MAGA types who think of themselves as in on a joke the media does not understand.

Ambiguous irony also lets the president hedge his bets. Trump is constantly saying things he doesn’t mean (Jim Acosta is “a real beauty”), or things he kind of means but goes on to retract (his authority is “total”), or things he didn’t mean at first but later does (“build the wall”), or things nobody thought he meant that he apparently did (“lock her up”), as well as things he seemingly did mean before he retroactively declared them sarcasm — like his televised claim that injecting bleach might stop the coronavirus. Ambiguous irony opens up space for Trump to revise the meaning of his statements later, when he knows how they have played.

This miasma of ill-defined but ever-present irony makes Trump virtually impossible to mock, because that job is taken. The real Donald Trump acts as if he’s doing an impression of some normal-looking, occasionally self-aggrandizing president we don’t know about. His supporters know this impression is fake. They don’t think Trump is the guy he pretends to be; they know he is the guy who pretends to be that guy, which is a hilarious thing for the president to do. Trump has effectively neutralized political comedy by shifting the place where jokes happen from the soundstage to the White House. The unsettling thing about this approach is that it works — not just as a way to defang satirists but also as a way to wield power.

Trump doesn’t seem willing to abandon the bit, no matter how dire things get. At the beginning of April, in response to a question about statistical models forecasting coronavirus mortality rates, he said: “The professionals did the models. I was never involved in a model — at least this kind of model.” Mr. President, you dog. Without missing a beat, he went on: “But you know what? Hundreds of thousands of people, they say, are going to die.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/07/magazine/trump-liberal-comedy-tv.html