God Help Me, I'm Voting For Donald Trump, But Only For the Laughs!
I have a bit of an embarrassing confession to make. My wife and I recently voted via absentee ballot and while I have written unkind things about the current inhabitant of the White House in anywhere from 60 to 100 blog posts, as well as the novella Kanye & Trump and the Kindle e-book 7 Days in Ohio and any number of other articles for this site and others, I ended up voting for Donald Trump all the same.
Why? One word: laughter. I love to laugh and have fun, and experience something other than crushing, almost unimaginable pain. Nothing has brought me more joy and laughter than laughing at President Trump.
During the 2016 election, very intelligent people with a sophisticated understanding of how the world works pondered the dilemma faced by comedians and other public wits. On one hand, the danger even a one-term Trump presidency posed to our nation and its most vulnerable members was almost incalculable, even without a deadly global pandemic and devastating recession thrown into the mix. On the other, Donald Trump has a dumb hair style, a weird, unnaturally orange complexion and says and does a lot of things that are easy to make fun of.
Trump has turned out to be just as bad as Progressives like myself feared when he shocked the world by beating Hillary Clinton in 2016. It’s no exaggeration to say that Trump makes my life worse every day that he’s in office, that his presence at the very epicenter of our democracy has a toxic, deleterious effect not just on our country but the entire world.
Thankfully, the comedy gleaned from Trump’s presidency has followed suit, being funnier and fresher than I ever imagined possible. Trump’s presidency has turned everyone online into Lenny Bruce, only funny: incendiary satirists speaking truth to power about how Donald Trump tweets a lot and seems to have the hots for his daughter but not for his wife.
Orange man bad? I dunno, but I do know orange man hilarious!
Or should I call him tRUMP?!?After all, he is the BUTT of a lot of outrageous and universally hilarious jokes!
Trump’s presidency has ushered in a new golden age at Capitol Steps. In a recent NPR broadcast, these sophisticates dubbed the president’s plane “Hair Farce One.”
Hair Farce One!
Can you imagine anyone making an equally funny joke about Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden? Of course not, because just like every president before Trump, there’s nothing remotely funny about them, which has resulted in the field of presidential comedy lying barren until a crass Queens real estate mogul, sham university proprietor and reality television competition host with a “yuge” personality entered the arena and gave us a president we could finally laugh at and crack jokes about.
To satirists and garden variety online funnymen, Trump represented something as dazzlingly new and unprecedented as it was irresistible: a head of state whose personal foibles made him a juicy target for mockery and jokes.
Do I love Trump’s endless string of gaffes and blunders? Uh, I think my “Don’t Even THINK about talking to me before I’ve had my Morning Covfefe!” mug should answer that question.
Yes, it’s sad that hundreds of thousands of people have died due to Trump’s mismanagement of COVID-19 but I think I speak for everyone when I say it was worth it to give a wonderful human being like Alec Baldwin the role of a lifetime playing Trump on Saturday Night Live.
What’s happening to those children in cages is terrible but what’s happening to TikTok favorite Sarah Cooper is wonderful. Her career is blowing up! And it wouldn’t have happened if the American people hadn’t elected a dangerous demagogue who appeals to our worst instincts and has spread division and unrest as well as COVID-19.
Trump is a horrible, horrible human being and a terrible president but you can’t get through a world harmed immeasurably by Trump’s presidency without laughing, which, perversely enough, is why I am voting for Trump in the first place.
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