After Donald Trump’s barnstorming address to a joint session of Congress last week, it fell to Elissa Slotkin, newly elected senator for Michigan, to deliver the Democratic response.
In US political life, this traditional task is a true hospital pass – as Katie Britt, Republican senator for Alabama, discovered last year when her semi-deranged riposte to Joe Biden’s final State of the Union speech guaranteed her removal from Trump’s longlist of potential running mates.
In contrast, Slotkin, a former CIA and Pentagon official, did not put a foot wrong. “Most Americans,” she said, “share three core beliefs: that the middle class is the engine of our country. That strong national security protects us from harm. And that our democracy, no matter how messy, is unparalleled and worth fighting for.” She was poised, succinct and bipartisan, even sneaking in a tribute to Ronald Reagan.
Her 10-minute rebuttal, in other words, was excellent. It was also completely useless.
Why? Because in our hypermodern era, excellence is no match for showmanship. The gig was already over, and the president had, as comedians say, killed it. Slotkin could have levitated, vanished, reappeared and turned water into wine, and those Americans still watching would have shrugged.
Trump’s 100-minute speech – the longest since records began – was full of falsehoods, irrelevance and lazy prejudice. But it was a performative tour de force.
With immaculate comic timing, he referred to “sedentary migrants… nobody knows what that is”; and “the African nation of Lesotho… which nobody has ever heard of”.
He told Marco Rubio, the secretary of state: “Now we know who to blame if anything goes wrong.”
Did the American people really want another five years of war in Ukraine? He zeroed in on Elizabeth Warren, mocking her Native American ancestry: “Pocahontas says ‘yes’.”
Offensive? Deeply. And not only that: Trump’s jokes were especially tasteless given everything else he and his administration did last week. On Monday, he suspended military aid to Ukraine; two days later, US officials confirmed that the president had ended intelligence-sharing with Kyiv.
Almost 15,000 people – including 1,500 children – are estimated to have died already as a consequence of Elon Musk’s ferocious cuts to USAID.
In a Truth Social post on Wednesday, Trump warned the people of Gaza (as opposed to the terrorist organisation Hamas): “A beautiful Future awaits, but not if you hold Hostages. If you do, you are DEAD!”
Meanwhile, he has filled the senior roles in the justice system and armed services with MAGA loyalists. He is denying access to journalists who insist on telling the truth and is successfully bending media platforms to his will.
All of which he does with the presidential immunity granted to him by the Supreme Court in July.
Last Friday, the New York Times ran a list of words that are being purged from the federal government’s communications (“bias”, “pollution”, “prejudice”, “segregation”, “social justice”). The fundamentals of an authoritarian regime are already in place.
The trouble is that, when many (perhaps most) Americans watch Trump and hear his schtick, they see not Hitler but Rufus T Firefly, the leader of Freedonia played by Groucho Marx in Duck Soup (“Oh, I’m sick of messages from the front. Don’t we ever get a message from the side?”). He plays the tyrant in a vaudevillian style that owes more to Mel Brooks’s The Producers than to Mein Kampf. Last week, it would have been little surprise if Republican representatives had broken into “Springtime for MAGA…”
And the voters lapped it up. According to a CBS poll, 76% approved of the president’s speech, while a CNN survey found that 69% reacted positively.
It is no accident that stand-up comedians have been more astute than most political commentators in their analysis of Trump.
In a Netflix special released four months before the 2016 election, Jim Jefferies said of the Republican candidate: “Now, don’t get me wrong. He’s a lot of fun. And there’s a little bit of me… There’s a little bit of me that thinks… ‘Fuck it – let’s do it! Let’s do it and see how fucking crazy shit can get!’”
But Jefferies went on to say that this would be a bad idea: “He’s like a kid running for class president, who’s just walking around, going: ‘And we’re gonna have two lunches! And there’s gonna be a soda machine in every classroom!’”
In 2021, Shane Gillis – without question, the world’s best Trump impersonator – explained how he had won in the first place: “It was because of the debates. That’s what did it, dude. That’s how we got Trump, these debates. And the first one is the best one. So: it’s a Republican primary, everyone’s up on stage, and they’re all still doing their political shit. So, like, the first couple of guys that talk are, like: ‘I’m from Kentucky, and I love education’. And the crowd’s like: ‘Nice – we didn’t know what was coming.’
“Then the next guy’s like, ‘I’m from Georgia, and I love religion’. The crowd’s like, “Pretty good, this is a good one’…
And then it finally got to Trump’s turn to talk, and he was just like, ‘Rand Paul is ugly!’ And the whole crowd was like, ‘Ooooooohhh! We didn’t know you could do that in this! You can just do that as your thing?’”
In a single bit, Gillis did more to make sense of the surreal rise of Trump than a shelf of books on contemporary populism. Cue the mighty Dave Chappelle, in a 2022 Saturday Night Live monologue, to complete the work of analysis.
“A lot of you don’t understand why Trump was so popular,” he said. “But I get it, ’cause I hear it every day. He’s very loved. And the reason he’s loved is because people in Ohio have never seen somebody like him. He’s what I call ‘an honest liar’… he said [to Hillary Clinton], ‘If you want me to pay my taxes, then change the tax code. But I know you won’t, because your friends and your donors enjoy the same tax breaks that I do’. And with that, my friends, a star was born.”
These comedians were on target because they grasped that Trump was deploying their own professional toolkit: the riffs, cadences and stagecraft of stand-up. In this sense, Trumpism is one big category error. Statesmanship and comedy, after all, are not the same thing at all.
But the Big Orange has never cared about that, and the trick has propelled him to a new form of stardom. The engine of his humour – still roaring, though he is 78 – is the heart of his claim to power.
The most appalling thing Trump has said about Volodymyr Zelensky was to denounce him as “a dictator”. But the much more personal accusation was to call him “a modestly successful comedian”. That was really below the belt.
In November, I wrote in the New European about Trump’s greedy colonisation of American popular culture, from celebrity “roasts” and long-form podcasts to WWE wrestling, UFC mixed martial arts and, of course, reality TV (he hosted The Apprentice for 14 seasons).
His intuitive genius was to grasp the speed with which trust was draining from traditional institutions and mainstream media, as the public’s attention migrated to the world of entertainment.
All this was foreseen with uncanny accuracy by the late cultural theorist Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). Assessing the seismic shift caused by television, he wrote that it “has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience” and transformed culture into a “burlesque”.
Four years after the publication of this classic book, the launch of the World Wide Web would make Postman’s thesis a thousand times more compelling.
Humour is generally assumed to be a force of dissidence, a “magical transformative tool of resistance”, as the Turkish campaigner and commentator Ece Temelkuran has put it. Milan Kundera’s reward for describing this phenomenon in his 1967 novel The Joke was to be vilified by the Czech communist regime and driven into exile.
But it is a mistake to assume that humour is intrinsically progressive. It can also disarm and disable resistance by giving an audience permission not to care; permission to forget; permission to abdicate responsibility. It can give a green light to the nastiest sentiments. Which is less dangerous in the very specific setting of a comedy club than it is when deployed in the Capitol by the most powerful man on the planet, addressing the nation he leads.
In this respect, Trump has been greatly assisted by the era of earnestness; of speech codes, cancel culture and defanged “woke” humour (usually an oxymoron).
To take the three comedians previously mentioned: for many years, there were routine calls for Jefferies to be banned – in spite of his argument that “there is a big fucking difference between things that I think and things that I think are funny to say”. Gillis was sacked from Saturday Night Live before he had even joined the cast (over supposedly offensive language on his long-running podcast with Matt McCusker); in 2021, Netflix employees walked out in protest at Chappelle’s jokes about trans people.
As progressives took the disastrous step of trying to police humour, the right stepped in – in many cases, the hard right.
Extraordinarily, the right wing group the Proud Boys, one of the main militias responsible for the January 6 insurrection, began life as an absurdist joke dreamt up by the co-founder of Vice magazine, Gavin McInnes: a multi-racial, low-rent fraternity of overweight men in polo shirts, singing songs from Aladdin (no, really), downing Budweiser and, as an initiation ceremony, being punched while naming at least five kinds of breakfast cereals.
In time, of course, the joke turned very sour indeed. Last year, the Proud Boys were among the far right gangs menacing the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, over the viral lie that immigrants were eating cats and dogs.
In 2017, HuffPost published a leaked playbook produced by the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website on comedy as a vector for bigotry: “Packing our message inside of… humour can be viewed as a delivery method. Something like adding cherry flavour to children’s medicine.” According to the guide: “When using racial slurs, it should come across as half-joking – like a racist joke that everyone laughs at…”
Jokes, for example, about Lesotho, “sedentary migrants”, and “Pocahontas”. In his speech last week, Trump turned Congress into a Catskills comedy club, debasing his office, the republic and the constitution to which he swore an oath, even as his audience cheered him to the rafters.
Evolutionary scientists and anthropologists have long debated the significance of laughter. Do we bare our teeth to communicate friendliness, or as a sign of tribal scorn and hatred for “the Other”? Is laughter a genial release, or a primal warning? This duality is the heart of the matter.
In Temelkuran’s nuanced account, humour can sometimes be “an error message” on the social dashboard – one that “can only emerge as laughter… when you run out of anger, and when your supplies of despair and disgust are exhausted too”. As she puts it: “when the insanity arrives, it feels like relief, a wicked sort of fun”.
What the US president is telling us with his comedy is that only a fool believes in the pieties of democracy, in the notion that the state can make life better, in the dream of progress. He is winking at the crowd, letting us know that, of course, he is in on the prank.
Like Heath Ledger’s Joker, he just wants to watch the world burn. Like Emcee in Cabaret, he invites us to make light of the collapse of it all (“Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome!”).
And – needless to say – there is no better form of plausible deniability than a well delivered gag. Lately, the president has taken to quipping that he might, after all, and in direct contravention of the 22nd Amendment, seek a third term. Ridiculous, no? You’d have to be an idiot to take that seriously. Unless of course… he couldn’t, could he?
Look: let’s not pretend we weren’t warned.
