What’s so witty about Trump, mockery, and “Birdbrain”?
Michael Kruse examines how Donald “91 Counts” Trump uses humor “to maintain the useful reputation as a politically incorrect outsider despite his obvious insider status as the leader of the GOP.”
“Hilarious, “super funny,” some say. Kruse isn’t joking. He has quotes. Italian fascist Benito Mussolini, “had the same twisted sense of humor,” says Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Strongmen.” It’s a part of Trump’s bonding with his audience.
“It’s such a huge part of his movement,” Alexander Reid Ross, the author of Against the Fascist Creep and a member of the executive committee of the Far Right Analysis Network, told me. “It is a way of inverting and reversing assumptions in a carnivalesque kind of way. It’s a way of upending morality,” he said. “It’s a thing that gives him permission to go on the attack in really hostile ways while saving face as just sort of an old satirist or something.”
Fintan O’Toole posted a New York Review of Books essay Kruse cites:
“This comic-authoritarian politics has some advantages over the older dictatorial style. It allows a threat to democracy to appear as at worst a tasteless prank,” O’Toole wrote. “Trump’s audiences, in other words, are not passive. This comedy is a joint enterprise of performer and listener. It gives those listeners the opportunity for consent and collusion.”
Trump’s lame jokes allow him to “normalize the abnormal, lessen the monstrous and offer audiences a sinister kind of license.”
There’s more praise for Trump “comedy.”
I get what Kruse and others are trying to convey. Trump is setting up an “in-group” and “out-group” dynamic, making it clear who to laugh at. I’m no expert on stand-up. But tasteless, as O’Toole put it, is what best describes Trump’s act, with “no line between entertainment and violence.” What passes for Trump rally humor is juvenile name-calling, fourth-rate pantomime, tall tales, outrageous boasts, and exhortations to mayhem frosted with a kind of Coulteresque “just joking” (for plausible deniability). I guess it’s not for everyone.
Once, after some pizza and beer, a friend and I attended the local Monday night “wrasslin'” just for the hell of it. This was long before the business became a pyrotechnic-fueled, chest-thumping spectacle under Vince McMahon. Remember, Trump was once part of that world too. It’s theater, of a sort, if you like that kind of theater. It’s “The Drunkard” with tights and piledrivers. The only reason Trump doesn’t appear with monster trucks is they require too much arena space that could be filled with adoring supplicants. Trump loves to brag about his crowd size.
“Bloodbath.” Just a metaphor! Ann Coulter would roll her eyes, toss her hair, and sigh, “It was only a joke.” (Trump doesn’t dare toss his hair.)
Right. And if you don’t fight like hell, you won’t have a country anymore? Also a metaphor. Like the insurrection that followed. Hilarious!
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.