On the eve of destruction
Late Wednesday evening it seemed a lock that Donald J. Trump’s crazed, prime-time speech would prove fodder for last night’s “Saturday Night Live” cold open. But then beginning Friday morning (and without congressional approval), Trump had workmen add is name atop President Kennedy’s on the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. That evening, his Department of Justice failed to fully release the Epstein files in compliance with the law Trump signed a mere month earlier. Trump complained on Wednesday, as he has for decades, that the world was laughing at us (him). “But they’re not laughing anymore,” he argued. The world had barely recovered from the shock of his Wednesday night rant before Trump gave the world more reason to laugh at us (him).
SNL shifted its focus.
For a man who fears people laughing at him almost more than jail time or losing the media spotlight (or his money), Trump is working overtime at making himself a world-historic laughingstock, and the United States as well.
Reporter Ashley Parker noted during Friday evening’s “Washington Week with The Atlantic” that the “central irony” that “Donald Trump is actually great at willing his own reality.”
Trump cannot convince people that the price of their groceries and rent has gone down. But he is a magician skilled at misdirection whenever he needs to divert public attention from embarrassing news — like his panned speech or the Epstein files non-release. Adding his name to the Kennedy Center accomplished just that. Even SNL’s writers went for it.
“Putin doesn’t name buildings after himself,” said Franklin Foer. “Orban doesn’t name buildings after himself. This is something — you know, the only leaders in the world who do this are in places like Turkmenistan, in Tajikistan. There’s a tin pot dictator quality to what he’s doing and how he’s inflicting his insecurities on the world.”
But moderator Jeffrey Goldberg summed up the Trump presidency as the laughingstock it’s become. The Trump presidency last week took on “a feeling of Boratness to it.”
Somehow, I don’t think MAGA thought they were voting to make their beloved country a character in a cringe comedy.
Happy Hollandaise, everyone.