Trump Is Funny? Who Knew?

For years, liberals have obtusely refused to acknowledge that part of Donald Trump’s appeal is his sense of humor. Often they have branded his comments as outrageous, when in truth they were intended as jokes, and understood as such by his audience. Now, for whatever reason, liberals are belatedly conceding the point. As in this Politico piece, which is, in its own unintentional way, funny.

Politico acknowledges that Trump’s sense of humor is an asset, but then goes on to put Trump in the desired company:

“A dollop of humor makes the anti-establishment rage go down,” as the writer Noah Berlatsky wrote in 2020 for Foreign Policy in a piece headlined “Fascists Know How to Turn Mockery Into Power.” “Horseplay is necessary,” believed Joseph Goebbels, one of Adolf Hitler’s closest, most loyal advisers and the Nazis’ top propagandist. “Mussolini,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the author of Strongmen, told me, referring to 20th-century Italian fascist Benito Mussolini, “had the same twisted sense of humor” as Trump. And stenograms of Communist Party and Politburo meetings in the era of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union show no shortage of notations of laughter — from jokes made at the expense of somebody about to be on the outs to a sort of forced or sycophantic fun. “There’s a lot,” Maya Vinokour, a scholar of Stalinism, told me, “and that even ends up being true as the purges start.”

You know who else was funny? Jack Kennedy. His joke about buying votes after he won the West Virginia primary is a classic of political humor, both because it was very funny and because it defused a troubling (for Kennedy) issue. But Kennedy’s humor can’t be sinister; he was a Democrat.

Reporters all play the same tricks. They call on “experts” to deliver the partisan commentary that they, as reporters, are not supposed to indulge in. One of the funny things about this Politico piece is the roster of “experts” who deliver the don’t-be-fooled-by-his-humor-Trump-is-a-fascist message:

“He’s always been funny,” Jen Mercieca, the author of Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump, told me…. “That,” she said, “is how autocrats work.”
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“Because he’s doing something really serious,” Leif Weatherby, a professor at New York University and a co-organizer of the Working Group on the Global New Right, told me, “with humor.”
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“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.

Nothing like objective commentary. But the subject is deadly serious, as Politico reminds us:

[B]y doing it in the context of jokes, Trump diminishes the unprecedented enormity of the accusations against him —

What is unprecedented is actually the Democrats’ use of lawfare against a political opponent. The accusations against Trump are, for the most part, laughable and therefore a fit subject for comedy.

-that he tried to overturn an election…

There is nothing wrong with trying to overturn an election by legal means. Democrats, like Al Gore and Al Franken, to name just two instances, do it all the time.

…fomented a deadly insurrection…

The idea that the January 6 protest was an “insurrection” is idiotic. Moreover, Trump didn’t foment it, and it was deadly only to Ashli Babbitt. Unlike numerous violent riots that the Democrats have fomented, beginning in 2020, which have killed dozens.

…and concealed national security documents…

They are kidding, right?

…while convincing his followers that what’s plainly so serious can’t be serious at all.

I think they just made the case for Trump. The Democrats’ accusations against Trump deserve to be mocked. While in some cases–paying off Stormy Daniels, failing to give White House files back after being asked to do so by the National Archives–they reflect poorly on Trump, it is the Democrats’ attempt to win an election by deluging their opponent with bogus criminal charges that is sinister and unprecedented. And not at all funny.