What Trump craves most is respect, but he knows he cannot earn it. Hence the huge importance he attaches to things that connote respect - crowd size, television ratings, opinion polls, elections. He awards himself golf trophies. He has Time magazine covers made and hangs them in his hideous house. Fake things telling the fake story of his own excellence that his ego needs to hear.
When the world doesn’t tell his fake story, he simply re-invents the world. He has no choice. His ego demands it. So, when Kamala Harris pulls bigger crowds than he does, he declares that the photos of her crowds are artificially generated. It’s an absurd lie, instantly disproved. But he has to tell it because he is the prisoner of his own horrific psyche.
As a result, Trump has no thoughts and no principles. He’ll say and do anything if it promises to bring him the stuff he craves. Putin won him over by calling him a genius. Kim Il Jong played him like a cheap banjo.
Because Trump has no actual views or principles, because everything he says is designed in that moment to make him look as good as possible and bears no reference to reality, Trump is actually a difficult opponent. There’s nothing to come to grips with. Opposing him is like playing tennis with no net and no lines - a game without rules, impossible to win.
Any other candidate for office who had been caught paying off a porn star, or heard boasting about grabbing women by the crotch, or banned from running a charity, or convicted of falsifying tax returns or charged with stealing classified documents, or seen by the whole world inciting an insurrection, would have shrunk from view forever. Not Trump. He is incapable of shame or guilt. Call him the most slime-drenched fraudster ever to crawl from the sewer and the only word he’ll hear is most.
There is no point in being offended by Trump - though he is limitlessly offensive - or outraged by Trump - though he is limitlessly outrageous - because both those reactions cede power to him. Both take him seriously. Both promote him as an enemy to be feared. Trump is delighted to be feared. It gratifies that endlessly rapacious ego.
Label him weird, however, as Governor Walz has done, and something different happens. First, it pierces the heart of things. Most people try to tell the truth, but Trump doesn’t. Most people have some sort of conscience, but Trump doesn’t. Most people are capable of feeling shame, but Trump doesn’t. Trump is weird.
Better still, however, calling him weird diminishes him. Rather than a monster to be feared he becomes a freak to be laughed at. And if there is one thing that breaks Trump it is being laughed at. He literally cannot stand it. Because anyone who laughs at him has seen through him.
Laughter is a uniquely human quality. What prompts it is insight. A joke is funny because it tells a truth that otherwise goes unsaid.
Laughter sees through the fake Time covers, the fake golf trophies, the gold-plated toilet, the branded jet, the endless boasting, it strips all that away and exposes the talentless, greedy ignoramus within, the talentless, greedy ignoramus that it is Trump’s sole mission on earth to conceal.
To take Trump seriously is to play into his hands, to give him a form of what he craves. But to call him weird and to laugh at him, as Governor Walz has done, is like salting a slug. It makes Trump shrivel into a fizzing little ball of rage. If they keep it up, it will drive him mad. Literally. Go, Tim, go.
