Generally, I’m a huge fan of irony and hopefully, regular readers are also all too aware of my persistent and maniacal search for humour in the mountain of manure that is recent US history. That it’s possible, however, our democracy has become a worldwide laughing stock thanks to a few good jokes from 2011 is too much, even for me.
On April 30 of that year, at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Donald Trump was a guest of Lally Weymouth, a journalist and, as the daughter of Washington Post publishers Donald and Katharine Graham, a nepo baby of the first order. In this fairly creepy gathering, journalists pretend they’re celebrities by inviting actual celebrities to sit with them in a fancy DC ballroom in fancy clothes and eat fancy food.
Four years earlier, the New York Times decided having its reporters yuck it up in tuxedos and evening gowns with the folks they were hired to investigate didn’t make for great optics, and opted out.
One Correspondents’ Dinner tradition is to have the current president tell some jokes followed by jokes from a well-known stand-up comic. Another equally consistent tradition comes the next day when the journalists complain bitterly about being made fun of after having hired a professional to make fun of them. The whole thing is head-scratching but mostly harmless, except for the 2011 version, during which then-President Barack Obama and then-head writer at Saturday Night Live Seth Meyers made Trump their prime target.
At this point, Trump’s main political posture was as the leading loudmouth of birtherism, a thought-bubble-turned-movement that claimed Obama was not born in the US and was ineligible to be president. Obama had earlier released his birth certificate to pancake the controversy, but at the dinner he said, to fully satisfy The Donald, he’d reveal his birth video, which was the majestic presentation of baby Simba to the multitudes from The Lion King.
Then Meyers drove the knife all the way in. “Donald Trump has been saying he will run for president as a Republican, which is surprising since I just assumed he was running as a joke,” came the first of several stinging blows to the world’s biggest orange ego. It is true that Trump had made some previous noise about running, but I am among those who believe it was at this moment, as he sat there stone-faced and seething, that his political ambitions crystallised. This is a man whose prime motivation in life is revenge – he’s even named those he’s planning to ruin should he win in 2024 – and I’m convinced he first decided to run for one of the most difficult jobs in the world simply to get back at Obama and Meyers for what he deemed his public humiliation.
To extend the irony, Trump and his followers think he’s funny, when in fact he’s about as funny as cancer. His “jokes” would be deemed unimaginative on a middle-school playground, and invariably arrive at the expense of the poor, impaired and/or powerless. He says horrifyingly cruel things, designed to demean his detractors, then somehow thinks he makes it okay by saying he’s only kidding. Or he says something serious but impossibly stupid and later tries to explain the stupid away by saying he was being sarcastic. He’s never once said anything self-deprecating or anything else that might be designed to humanise him and connect with actual people.
For smart politicians, humour is an essential tool. Senator Alan Simpson, in eulogising President George HW Bush, called humour “the universal solvent against the abrasive elements of life”. Trump, unquestionably the most abrasive element of life these days, provided the flip side to that sentiment when, in a speech before the 2015 New Hampshire primary, he said: “A lot of people have laughed at me over the years. Now, they’re not laughing so much.”
In this case, sadly and ironically, it’s not funny because it’s true, and this truly tragic joke is on all of us.
Jonathan Kronstadt is a freelance writer working in Washington, DC.
